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Becker, Kenneth M.

College of Education and Social Services

2007

Ed. D.

Adult education theory and practice and research about women's learning and community of practice are used to assess what participants learn and how they learn it as collaborative group members in the Women's Agricultural Network's (WAgN) training programs. This study explores WAgN class participants' epistemological preferences employed in their work with WAgN programs. The communities of practice framework is employed to evaluate how these adult women entrepreneurs interacted and made meaning with one another through group collaboration. Data collection techniques included observations, focus group interviews, and review of archival documents to produce a case study of WAgN's training programs. The data was coded using analytic induction in a two-stage process that first imposed a deductive perspective on the data by looking for themes connected to existing theory and research. Second, the data was looked at anew from an inductive perspective to reveal emerging insights within and across participants' data about what participants themselves identify as the most useful and important aspects of training. Findings illuminate learners' preferences for connected procedures of learning, and the extent to which participants collaborate along a continuum of communities of practice to share a common purpose and use the cycle of inquiry (dialogue, decision-making, action, and evaluation) to inform their practice as nonforrnal learners. This study was designed to examine epistemological preferences among self-employed, agricultural women entrepreneurs and to gauge their development as collaborative learners in communities of practice. Connected procedures are commonly associated with the ways that women learn in relationship with others.
Consistencies and discrepancies between past theory and the study's findings suggest that the extent of connected procedures and the vigor of collaborative learning apparently depend on participants' prior level of experience with group learning, their stage in business development, the number of men present, the family relationships between participants and their individual affinity toward relational learning. A preliminary identification and inventory of WAgN group processes and their various stages of development along a continuum of communities of practices situates WAgN cohorts as networking groups of learners. Cohort and collaborative teaching methods hold promise for explicitly embracing connected learning procedures among women learners and advancing WAgN groups' collaborative learning further along this continuum. Results of this study inform adult training programs similar to those offered by the WAgN. It suggests that teaching cohorts of connected knowers evolves from the particular context of learners' situations and embraces students' experiences and collaborative dialogue in course content. The study offers suggestions for future practice in the ways that adult women's learning processes might be incorporated into curriculum design. The study offers suggestions for future research to identify if and to what extent there are relationships between the processes of learning and desired program outcomes.