About the Book
What are the barriers and obstacles to adults learning? What makes the process of adult learning so fragile? And what exactly do we mean by Fragile Learning? This book addresses these questions in two ways. In Part One, it looks at challenges to learning, examining issues such as language invention in a maximum security prison, geography and bad technology, and pedagogic fragility in Higher Education. Through a psychoanalytic lens, Fragile Learning examines authorial illness and the process of slow recovery as a tool for reflective learning, and explores ethical issues in problem-based learning. The second part of the book deals specifically with the problem of online anxiety. From cyberbullying to Internet boredom, the book asks what the implications for educational design in our contemporary world might be. It compares education programmes that insist on the Internet and those that completely ban it, while exploring conflict, virtual weapons and the role of the online personal tutor. The book also examines the issue of time as a barrier to learning and its links to unconscious thinking, as well as defining fragility in a summative essay.
Table of Contents:
Introduction , Challenges to Learning , Prison language , Disease and distance: an anxious diptych , The Stable group , Ethical issues in problem-based learning , On empty spaces: an afterword , Steps forward, steps back , Ghosting , Online Anxiety , Introduction to Part II , Cyberbullying: a workplace virus , From fatigue to anxiety , The absence of E , Cyber tools and virtual weapons , E-learning, time, and unconscious thinking , The role of the online learning personal tutor , Conflict in online learning , The Internet is unwell . . . and will not be at school today
About the Author :
David Mathew works at the University of Bedfordshire, UK, and as an independent researcher and writer. His wide areas of interest include psychoanalysis, linguistics, distance learning, prisons and online anxiety. With approximately 600 published pieces to his name, including a novel based on his time working in the education department of a maximum security prison ('O My Days'), he has published widely in academic, journalistic and fiction outlets. In addition to his writing, he edits the 'Journal of Pedagogic Development', teaches academic writing, and he particularly enjoys lecturing in foreign countries.
Review :
'This fascinating collection of essays makes important links between the fields of higher education studies and psychoanalysis. At the heart of the book is a compassionate engagement with the fragile learner - someone who is "close to giving up at any point, close to breaking". This book makes a very helpful contribution to the way we understand such learners, and indeed our own fragility, in the face of a fast and fragmented digital learning environment.'- Elizabeth Chapman Hoult, Birkbeck, University of London, author of Adult Learning and la Recherche Feminine'Fragile Learning is a fascinating exploration from a psychoanalytic viewpoint of the nature of both learner and educator anxiety, in the context of a variety of higher education, education management, and community workplaces. The author considers problems of projective identification, retreat or claustrum situations, basic assumption and work groups, the impact of physical illness, and how to engage in productive conflict whilst acknowledging the anxieties of all parties. The book gains insights from original research into these matters, not only as applied to traditional educational environments, but also in relation to the particular forms they may take in distance and e-learning, where both students and teachers are often equally fragile learners, seeking to adapt humanistically to the new technological tools they are acquiring.'- Meg Harris Williams, writer and artist
