You
say ‘attendee’, I say ‘participant’
Rachel
Burnham writes: I recently read an interesting article all
about how you could make use of exciting new technology to make your L&D
sessions more interactive. It was full
of examples of how this could be done.
What struck me the most though, was the way the author
referred to the learners in these sessions.
The term used was ‘attendees’.
And that got me thinking about the language we use to refer to learners
and what this says about our mindset as L&D practitioners.
There are lots of different terms that we can use to
refer to learners: participants, delegates, audience and so on. Each term comes with a slightly different
connotation. Each suggests a differing
level of involvement and responsibility for what happens. Each suggests a different relationship with the
learning and with those organising the learning. Each might even suggest different ideas of
what success for this L&D activity looks like.
You can put these terms onto a sliding scale.
Attendee
Audience Participant Collaborator/
Fellow Learner
|
Consider what each of these terms means to you. With ‘attendee’ I’m immediately focused on
physical presence, issues of attendance and crudely ‘bums on seats’. There is no emphasis on the learner doing
anything but turning up!
With ‘audience’ it’s a little different – I’m immediately
thinking about listening, being an appreciative or good audience and responding
to the ‘lecturer’ or ‘presenter’ and their humour, stories and information. I suspect that for many of us the picture
includes an effective presentation, with ‘Powerpoint’ or lets be radical
perhaps even ‘Prezi’. The role of the
learner is still fairly passive and based on receiving from someone who’s
considered to be ‘an expert’ or at least an expert speaker. And in this situation, the role of the
L&D professional can sometimes feel more akin to being an entertainer, than
a facilitator of learning.
Moving along, ‘participant’ feels a lot more comfortable
to me. This is probably the term I use
most readily. It brings to mind learners
actively engaged in the learning process, discussing, sharing ideas, asking
questions, moving around the room, doing lots of activities in many different
formats. And identifying their own
learning from these activities.
I found it a lot more challenging to identify a term for
the fourth point on this scale. Two came
to mind – ‘Collaborator’ and ‘Fellow Learner’ both of which pick up on the
shared responsibility and ownership of the learning process and content. At this end of the scale, it is harder to
pick out who has the expertise and this may be much more fluid within a single
L&D activity. The learning here may
be much more exploratory and open ended than with the previous points on the
scale. As a facilitator of learning this feels both exciting and can also feel
a little scary!
If we genuinely want to make our L&D sessions and in
fact all our L&D activities, as effective as possible in terms of impacting
on performance in the workplace, then we need to make them more interactive and
learner-centred. So a good starting point is to change is the way we think and
speak of learners. This is our key
technology, though perhaps not the easiest to change!
I thought I would share some of my thoughts around this
subject with you. They are very much
first thoughts and I’d be very interested in your responses to these
points. Please do add your comments to
this blog.
Rachel
Burnham
1
August 2013
Burnham L & D
Consultancy specialises in the development of L&D professionals, blended
learning and evaluation
Follow me on Twitter @BurnhamLandD
