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The differences between basic and advanced continuing education is an issue that appears to be important because surveys continue to show that archivists crave advanced continuing education, even while they acknowledge that basic training is important. For this paper, I have drawn on the background research I did for my Ph.D. dissertation in the late 1980s and my experience teaching workshops and seminars for professionals during the past ten years. I'll briefly review the thrust of some interesting literature on continuing professional education from the past couple of decades. Then I'll provide some definitions of the concepts of "basic" and "advanced" that may be of use to the Task Force. Ultimately, I think that we need to move away from a simple idea of "advanced" to a multi-faceted definition of "challenging" that emphasizes the respective role of the learner, the teacher, the content, and the format. I have listed a small number of relevant references and attached some definitions of educational formats from one of my all-time favorite articles on workshops.
Background
The decades of the 1970s and 1980s were the heyday of continuing education. Drawing on significant research funded in large measure by the federal government, theorists developed models of adult education and extended them to the realm of the professions. Practitioners developed formal programs and assessment theories and then forged partnerships between universities and professional associations across nearly all the major professions. By 1990 or so, the book had basically been written on continuing professional education, just in time for information technologies to shift the landscape under the rubric of distance learning. Today, very little new literature is emerging on traditional forms of continuing education (e.g., workshops, institutes, seminars, etc.). A cursory review of databases of education and library/archival literature shows a very strong focus on ways to use live video and Internet technology to reach professionals outside the academy. These articles do not necessarily focus on the content of continuing education and they tend to avoid altogether pedagogical questions, which is the principal issue underlying the problem of basic versus advanced education.
In 1980, Cyril Houle wrote the classic text in the field of continuing professional education. He married the basic idea of "life-long learning" from the adult education movement to the concept of professionalization and laid out a comprehensive argument on the responsibility of professionals to develop themselves. Houle lays out fourteen goals for continuing education and groups them into three categories: conceptual; individual performance; and collective identity. In the performance area, he distinguishes among mastery of theoretical knowledge, capacity to solve problems, and use of practical knowledge. For purposes of our deliberations, Houle feels strongly that it is the role of the graduate program in a university to provide basic competency. Continuing professional education builds and expands upon the basic foundation acquired prior to entry to the profession.
Writing five years later, Craig Scanlan also focused on the goals of professional continuing education. He suggested that the roles of the learner, the teacher, the content, and the process of education each depend on the orientation of the program in one of three different ways: acquiring content, problem solving, or self-actualization. He then developed an interesting three-by-three table to categorize professional continuing education offerings in terms of the impact of the program (on the individual, the organization, the profession), on one dimension, and the goals of the program (remediating deficiencies, fostering growth, facilitating change), on the other dimension. The net result is a too-complex scheme that any single professional organization like SAA would find hard to tackle. I do like the role differentiation idea, however.
A big issue is whether a professional continuing education program should attempt to have its biggest impact on individuals or organizations (or even "the profession"). In my work evaluating SAA's conservation workshops, partly summarized in my article in JELIS, I suggested strongly that organizational effectiveness should be the goal and that individual fulfillment was but a nice side benefit. Having now taught dozens of workshops, I am not so sure about the viability of seeking organizational development, perhaps at the expense of individual growth. Although the choice of content and the design of the program format may attempt to reach beyond the individual learner, the dynamic between teacher and learner is all-important in the long run.
Another piece of background literature is the work of Thomas Sork on the workshop format. Sork goes to great lengths to carve out special meaning for the workshop in terms of purpose and structure. He distinguishes a workshop from other types of continuing education offerings. He provides a very useful set of definitions, which I have excerpted in an appendix to this report. I do believe we would do well to keep definitions of format clear in our minds as we attempt to distinguish basic from advanced programs.
The final element is evaluation — a goal mostly honored in the breach. The theoretical literature on educational evaluation is deep and compelling. A taste of the quality of the thinking is summarized in Worthen and Sanders. There are two key points to remember about evaluating advanced educational offerings. First, it is important to conceive of an evaluation strategy in tandem with the design of an educational program. Second, evaluation must be built around the comparison and contrasts of participant expectations across a number of dimensions, including prior experience, familiarity with the topic, technological savvy, institutional affiliation, etc.
Definitions
Basic: The OED defines "basic" as "Of, or pertaining to, or forming a base; fundamental, essential; applied to a limited Íessential' vocabulary in any language." This is fairly unambiguous. SAA's fundamental workshop series, supported by the publication of the manuals (which, we understand, continue to be best-sellers), seems to fit nicely into the concept of basic continuing education. We may want grapple with how much emphasis SAA should put on basic programming. Nevertheless, we could agree that SAA basic continuing education consists of programs that provide essential information on the fundamental principles and practices of the archival profession. Basic continuing education seeks to compensate for gaps or random weaknesses in pre-professional education obtained in a university setting. Basic continuing education is light on theory and does not attempt to substitute for or compete with formal educational programs covered under the MAS guidelines. This is not to say that SAA cannot or should not work hand in glove to offer continuing education programs in an academic setting.
Advanced: The OED is less helpful on the idea of "advanced," defining the concept as "Of study: on a higher level than the elementary." In other words, advanced is not basic. The OED also defines advanced in terms of position: "Moved forward, standing or being to the front." This may give us a clue about how to consider the relevance of "advanced" to SAA's future continuing education program.
Given what research in education has told us about role differentiation and about the particular value of obtaining organizational change by focusing on individual achievement, I suggest that we begin talking about continuing education programs that are personally "challenging" rather than "advanced." We can consider "challenging" to be a dynamic concept rather than an end-goal (such as "at the front"). We can also see the idea of challenging as constituting a continuum, say, from less to more. As a group, we may be able to come up with a better term than "challenge," but I suggest we abandon "basic" for "fundamental" and "advanced" for a term that suggests stretching one's horizons. We might even consider pulling together entire programs under the banner "Challenging Horizons" or something equally corny.
That being said, I return to the continuing professional education literature and offer a way of defining "challenging" that may help us establish program development criteria. Four separate elements play different roles in the continuing education process: learners, teachers, content, and format. We might view professional education offerings as a set of continuums. I derived the set by re-reading the rather extensive educational evaluation literature and pulling out some of the more interesting individual (as opposed to institutional) factors. My set is a start, designed to demonstrate that a definition of challenging continuing education needs to consider multiple facets.
Less Challenging to More Challenging
Learner
Teacher
Content
Format
Recommendations
If the task force is in general agreement with the thrust of the above definition, then here are some specific recommendations. SAA might need to target its offerings to members new to a given topic and assemble a group that is homogeneous in terms of its familiarity with the topic. SAA will probably need to recruit experienced teachers or train them in teaching methodologies and equip them with techniques for generalizing from the particular. SAA should identify cutting edge content and strive for deep coverage of the subject matter, even if this means risking criticism for favoring the trendy over the tried-and-true. SAA needs to develop specific educational formats that encourage active participation, are relatively small in size, and engage participants in the use of appropriate technologies.
References
Conway, Paul. "Effective Continuing Education for Training the Archivist." Journal of Education for Library and Information Science 34 (Winter 1993): 38-47.
Houle, Cyril O. Continuing Learning in the Professions. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1984.
Scanlan, Craig L. "Practicing with Purpose: Goals of Continuing Professional Education." In Ronald Cervero and Craig L. Scanlan, eds. Problems and Prospects in Continuing Professional Education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1985.
Sork, Thomas J. "The Workshop as a Unique Instructional Format." In Designing and Implementing Effective Workshops, edited by Thomas J. Sork, pp. 3-10. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1984.
Worthen, Blaine R. and James R. Sanders. Educational Evaluation: Alternative Approaches and Practical Guidelines. New York: Longman, 1987.
Respectfully submitted,
Paul Conway
Yale University Library
October 12, 1999
Appendix: Continuing Education Formats (from Sork)
"The term workshop refers to a relatively short-term, intensive, problem-focused learning experience that actively involves participants in the identification and analysis of problems and in the development and evaluation of solutions."
"The seminar is a session or series of sessions in which a group of experienced people meet with on or more knowledgeable resource persons to discuss a given content area."
"An institute is a short-term, often residential program that fosters intensive learning on a well-defined topic. New material is presented to add to the knowledge which the participants already have on the subject."
"The clinic is a short-term program that emphasized diagnosis and treatment of problems that participants bring to the session. Experts available at the clinic, rather than participants themselves, have primary responsibility for diagnosing problems and prescribing treatment."
"The short course is an abbreviated, more focused version of the class typically found in colleges and universities. Designed to update or deepen the knowledge of those in a particular field, the expert dominates the sessions because it focuses on communication and on acquisition of information within a short time."
Advantages of the Workshop Format
Limitations of the Workshop Format
Criteria for Selecting the Workshop Format