The Adult Learning Hub by Mauro Escalante Plascencia

📊 Our Learner Community Profile

maep1212 — 2025-09-01 05:50:39 UTC

Welcome to our classroom! We are a vibrant mix of adult learners who balance significant work and family responsibilities. Our primary goals are to achieve career advancement and apply practical skills.

To succeed, we must stay motivated as we face real barriers like time constraints, fatigue, and hesitancy toward formal academic environments. Your learning preferences lean heavily towards collaborative, hands-on activities that connect directly to your professional and personal lives.

Therefore, our class is designed to be flexible, respectful of your time, and clearly linked to tangible outcomes.

🧩 First-Night Engagement Activities

maep1212 — 2025-09-01 05:50:39 UTC

Welcome, everyone! To start us off, I want you to take a moment to think about two things: how confident you feel right now about the topic we’re going to explore, and how clear you are about your own learning goals in this course. Use a video, comment, image, etc. to indicate your confidence level. This activity helps us see that everyone comes in with different experiences and goals, and that’s completely okay. It also helps me understand how best to support you as we go along. If you want, add a word or symbol next to your mark to share what motivates you or a goal you have. Remember, there’s no right or wrong place to be; this is about recognizing where you are now and where you want to go. Let’s take a moment to do this, and then we’ll talk about what we see together.

Belonging: The Bedrock of Adult Learning

maep1212 — 2025-09-01 05:50:39 UTC

Student Chart

maep1212 — 2025-09-01 05:50:39 UTC

Activity 1: The importance of inclusion in the classroom.

maep1212 — 2025-09-01 06:07:57 UTC

Watch this video and record your voice, upload a video, or write a paragraph, etc., about your past experiences in school.

Activity 2: Building connections

maep1212 — 2025-09-01 06:09:43 UTC

Watch this video. When the teacher instructs you, using a piece of paper and a pencil, go around the classroom and talk to three of your classmates, say hello, ask them their name, what their major is, and answer the same questions from them. Come back and share this information in a comment here.

Activity 3: Dream Job elevator Pitch

maep1212 — 2025-09-01 06:15:02 UTC

After watching this video, when your teacher instructs you, give a quick 30-second pitch to the class about your dream job or passion and why it matters to you.

Watch these three videos and add a comment on each video stating what you learned.

maep1212 — 2025-09-02 00:18:12 UTC

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs:

maep1212 — 2025-09-02 00:19:54 UTC

Belonging is the psychological foundation upon which adult learning is built. Before we can challenge a learner's assumptions (Transformative Learning) or appeal to their self-direction (Andragogy), we must first make them feel safe, seen, and valued.

A learner who feels isolated, judged, or invisible is operating from a deficit and cannot engage fully in the learning process. Our classroom must be an environment where these basic psychological needs are met first.

Transformative Learning (Mezirow):

maep1212 — 2025-09-02 00:22:19 UTC

A critical dimension of this learning theory is to consider the reflexive process as a way of becoming independent or autonomous from the context of learning and access higher levels of thinking, and to become autonomous from the social context and access higher levels of emancipation, thus being able to participate freely in discussions and validate one’s personal judgment.

Andragogy (Knowles): The principle of an adult's Self-Concept.

maep1212 — 2025-09-02 00:25:00 UTC

Andragogy (Knowles): The principle of an adult's Self-Concept is that we see ourselves as responsible for our own decisions. Being forced into a passive, dependent "student" role can feel demeaning. When we foster belonging by honoring their experiences and giving them choice, we validate their identity as capable, self-directed learners.