Connected Learning: How Adults with Limited Formal Education Learn

A variety of resources exist for cross-cultural educators, providing how-to tips addressing attitudes and methodologies for the teaching process. The focus of L Lynn Thigpen’s unique and valuable book, Connected Learning: How Adults with Limited Formal Education Learn, asks the deeper and more significant questions that concern the learning process of the cross-cultural learner. The author points out a disturbing “grave inequity in the learning realm” (p. xvii) for a majority of the world who are “adults with limited formal education” (ALFE) (p. 6). As a result, Thigpen considers Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy, 2002) and the growing literature on orality, challenging the adoption of oral methods of teaching as a strategy for communicating information to learners who are not functionally literate. By pushing orality into a broader scope of “general learning strategy” (p. 7) or “learning format” (p. 144), the author ties orality to a learning process that has relational significance for the communicators of information—a value which emerges as her central theme of “connected learning” (p. 100). As a long-term worker in Cambodia with the International Mission Board, Thigpen uses her field experience as the ethnographic basis for researching how Cambodian Khmer ALFE, as oral learners, learn best. The author collects and analyzes data discovered through observation and interviews with numerous Khmer contacts to develop grounded theories on how her ALFE “learn or acquire new knowledge, beliefs/values, or skills” (p. 78). Thigpen’s personal investment in and concern for her learners is apparent, and research helps her to recognize her own need for “empathy” (p. 150) in order to connect to and better understand her learners. Thigpen’s findings provide a fascinating introduction into Khmer culture and history as she gathers quotations and knowledge from interviews with her study participants. My personal overseas experience has been primarily in Africa, and I found myself wanting to know more background on Cambodian culture and the Khmer people, partly from curiosity but more importantly to be International Journal of Christianity & Education