This chapter provides an overview of the literature on the theme of this study. The author begins by giving some information about immigrant women participating the vocational training as well as a short introduction of the vocational training programs, especially for immigrant women. The second part is the literature on the difficulties which immigrant women faced and their training needs. Research, specific to the expectations and experiences of immigrant women who participated the vocational training does not exist within the available literature. Therefore, this next part of this chapter reviews other scholarly bodies of literature that are relevant to the adult development and adult learning theories which would sustain the design of interview questions.
The Vocational Training of Immigrant Women in Taiwan
According to the Taiwan Interior Ministry, in 2017, 21,097 immigrant women in Taiwan made up more than 4% of total Taiwanese populace. Most of them from Mainland China, Indonesia, Vietnam. The vast majority of the Taiwanese husbands of these women are socio-monetarily burdened (Ministry of the Interior, 2017, p.5). Fostering vocational training among immigrant women has been viewed as a conceivable solution to the financial issues of these families (Ministry of the interior, 2017, p.51). The Taiwanese government gives pre-employment vocational training programs especially for immigrant women; these projects are offered by certain public and private vocational training institutions with financing from the government. The objectives of the vocational training program are to furnish immigrant women with fundamental work skills, to help them to be always available with the labor market’s requirement, to expand their income and to help them maintain their family life (Ministry of the interior, 2004, p.93).
Based on employment market demands, the vocational training centers affiliated with the Council and local governments hold various types of vocational training, including cosmetics, hairdressing, mosaic textiles and apparel production, wedding planning, baking, health maintenance and stress relief, culinary arts, and nurse aide; everyone can choose their interests to work in, and they are counseled for employment after completion. The duration of the vocational training course is typically between 560 and 720 hours. Each course was designed focusing on three aspects: working knowledge, working skills and preparing for the professional certification exams
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Many benefits are provided to the immigrant women in order to encourage they participate the vocational training program. They do not have to pay the tuition fees. Moreover, when they participate in full-time vocational training sponsored or arranged by government agencies, they can apply to receive a living allowance during vocational training at 60% of the basic wages for a maximum of six months and supports for taking professional certification examinations after their training is complete. In order to be allowed to enroll in the training program, immigrant women have to take two exams: the first exam is that evaluating the ability to read and write Chinese, the second one is the interview assessing their inspirations for receiving vocational training program. However, to immigrant women with poor Chinese language ability, the Chinese proficiency exam is not an easy barrier which they have to overcome. (Shan, 2009).
Why Do Immigrant Women Need for Training?
Many previous studies and reports have identified the importance of immigrant women in the labor market and their contributions to their family income. A number of authors have discussed the disadvantaged position of female immigrant workers in terms of job status and income (Boyd, 1992; Lee, 1999; Ng & Estable, 1987). According to Boyd, immigrant women, particularly those from Southeast Asian, are characterized by lower education, concentration in the lower echelons of service and processing occupations, and lower incomes. Furthermore, Lee emphasized the particular disadvantages of "racialized" immigrant women both when they are of working age and perhaps even more so when they are elderly and lack sufficient pension and other benefits. In addition, many immigrant women work a "double day" as they bear primary responsibility for household work and child care, and many do shift or night work so that they can juggle household and childcare duties.
Other authors have focused on the difficulties faced by immigrant women in the workplace and their lack of opportunities for upward mobility in the labor market; this situation may be further reinforced by conservative social and cultural pressures from both outside and within immigrant communities that assume in-group solidarity, conformity, and loyalty, and that militates against moving out and up to higher levels of responsibility and authority (Goldstein, 1997). The literature, therefore, identifies the need for training to improve the long-term socioeconomic position of immigrant women and not just to equip them for short-long-term work that fulfills the immediate "requirements of industry" and little else (Jackson, 1991).
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Second, in recent years a number of studies have focused on the issue of immigrant women's access to language occupational programs (Cumming & Gill, 1992; Rockhill &
Tomic, 1994; Tisza, 1997). Various types of barriers to accessing training programs have been identified such as eligibility barriers, organizational barriers, and social and personal barriers.
The issue of access is especially crucial given the relationship between participation in training programs and immigrants' enhanced social and economic wellbeing. Some specific examples of access barriers include eligibility requirements that exclude many women who are classified as dependants, long waiting lists, lack of program supports (e.g., child care), funding sources for training, and personal barriers such as low self-confidence.
Since immigration has traditionally been linked with Taiwanese economic and demographic needs, federal and provincial bodies designed educational programs for immigrants within the context of the objectives of immigration in Taiwan and the competing demands of an ever-changing economy. Educational programs for immigrant women were required to be instrumental, integrative, or both. For instance, acquiring the skills, usually language, to enter the job market or to go for further training in order to enhance performance in the labor market is instrumental. Integrative refers to the acquisition of Chinese for the purpose of functioning in Taiwanese society. Education and labor policies were linked with the aim of improving the quality of the labor resource of the country. In other words, the goals of education were not merely productive work but also the highly qualified workers that a modem industrialized state requires. Such education should benefit individuals and society.
Education and training were symbiotically structured, designed to benefit trainer and trainee, without necessarily differentiating between native-born and immigrant workers.
However, the education offered to immigrant women went beyond human resource development. It was also informed by theories of adjustment. Immigrants did not only need an education that would place them in jobs; they also needed to be equipped with the tools to effectively interact in society. Educational programs emphasized language skills as crucial for both economic and social adjustment. Consequently, school boards and community organizations, in conjunction with federal and provincial government agencies, initiated and/or supported language and other educational programs as a means of helping immigrants adjust and integrate into Taiwanese society.
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Adult Development
One of the foremost thinkers concerning adult development was Erikson. Erickson significantly influenced understandings of adult development by postulating that individuals develop into adults through eight life stages (Erikson, 1950). Each life stage includes its own virtues or favorable outcomes. Erikson puts forth eight stages of development across the span of life: infancy, toddler, preschool, childhood, teenage, young adult, middle adult, and senior (Gross, 1987). The stages applicable to adult development such as young adult, middle adult, and senior provide a framework for understanding identity development of adults. During the young adult stage, generally ages twenty to forty, individuals seek to assimilate but also find their own individuality. The virtue associated with this stage is love as young adults seek intimate relationships. The stage that follows, middle adulthood, from about forty to sixty-five years old, is a time of work and family. For adult learners, this may mean a difficult balancing act between the commitments of home life and school life, and for dislocated workers, it can also mean a real disconnect generated by unemployment. The senior stage begins at sixty-five and involves a time of reflection and coming to terms with life and death (Gross, 1987).
Cognitive Theories of Adult Development
From a cognitive standpoint, Jean Piaget provided additional knowledge about how adults develop with his theory of cognitive development. This theory posits four stages of mental development: sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational (Piaget, 1983). Children experience these stages in route to adulthood, and there are three principles that are maintained during each stage: organization, adaptation, and equilibration.
According to Piaget, learners develop schemes as they progressively organize new information.
When information is gathered, learners adapt it through two models, assimilation, and accommodation. Assimilation is the taking-in of new information, while accommodation involves change prior knowledge to account for new information. Finally, equilibration involves the learner finding a balance between assimilated and accommodated knowledge and between their individuality and society (Flavell, 1996).
In the pattern of Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg envisaged adult development as cognitive.
Kohlberg ‘s model describes the moral development and asserts that moral development is the premise of adult development (Kohlberg, 1971). The first stage in his model is Obedience and Punishment in which learners based ethical decisions on external consequences or ideologies of what is right and wrong. The model includes three levels of moral development with two
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stages in each level. The first level is pre-conventional morality in which individuals make decisions based on consequences to individuals. During the second level, conventional morality, individuals begin to view morality as doing good acts and involving others. By the third level, post-conventional morality, adults base morality on human rights and universal principles (Crain, 1985). However, Kohlberg also assumed that stages unfolded the same regardless of culture or context and that development, although it may be influenced by social activity, is a cognitive process.
Adult development has been portrayed in phases also. Stages imply a step-wise, sequential configuration of development, whereas phases indicate that an individual may be at different levels of maturity or understanding in different areas of life. Phases also allow for the influences of emotions, culture, status, power, and society. “To be able to reason - that is, to assess evidence, make predictions, judge arguments, recognize causality, and decide on actions where no choice is evident - is often presumed to be a mark of adulthood” (Brookfield, 1991, p. 56).
In phase-based adulthood, individuals may demonstrate adult qualities in some areas but not others. For example, one might be an “adult” as a supervisor who leads within the workplace and yet be child-like in their interactions at home. The view of development in phases supports the idea of development as influenced by social interactions.
Social Theories of Adult Development
Gould (1978) described adulthood as dismantling illusions from childhood. In this way, adults learn new ways of thinking and construct new knowledge as they have new experiences, but social structures play a key role in this development. According to Dewey (1963), these experiences manifest by interactions between external conditions and an individual's needs and capacities. Development, therefore, occurs in a social context. However, how adults experience this interaction is influenced by how they make sense of the events that comprise the experiences. Culture, gender, class, and other contextual factors can shape how and what people know and thus their course of development. Dewey understood education to be life-long and mediated by context and identity.
Levinson, on the other hand, focused attention on the social nature of and influences on development. Levinson’s life structure model emphasizes the impact of family, work, personal, and social commitments on adult development (Levinson, 1986). While Levinson outlined six stages of adulthood from adulthood transition to late adulthood, the significance of his research relates to his ideas of stable periods and transition periods. During the stable period an adult
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makes life choices; during a transition period, an adult undergoes change. One may go through stability and transition during different phases of adulthood (Sugarman, 2001). Erikson, Piaget, and Kohlberg viewed development as cognitively-based while Levinson’s model examines the external influences on development. The theory of adult development which formulated by Kegan in 1982, went further to incorporate feeling, impulses, the idea of transformation, and examines internal influences on learning. The theory developed by Kegan in 1982 placed a higher value on the person as knowledge constructor. Individuals become more open to the myriad of ideas as they mature through the five phases of incorporative, impulsive, imperial, interpersonal, institutional learning, and interindividual. During adulthood one may demonstrate institutionalized values such as universal principles, and if an adult reaches the inter-individual phase, the individual understands one’s own thinking as well as that there are many other perspectives (Merriam, Caferella, & Baumgartner, 2007).
Adult Learning
Within the field of adult education, learning is viewed as a catalyst for development, and an individual that is continuing to learn is continuing to develop. Adult education emerged with influences from philosophers and educators such as Dewey. Dewey (1916) defined education as “reconstruction or reorganization of experience which adds to the meaning of experience and which increases one’s ability to direct the course of subsequent experience” (p.74). His comments uphold that learning, and therefore knowledge, is empirical - gained from experience, and is instrumental in providing an opportunity for change in one’s life. Dewey further asserted that learning is optimized when “pursued under conditions where the realization of the activity rather than merely the external product is the aim” (p. 297). Thus, adult education is viewed as centered on the unique needs of adults and on a dialectic educational relationship.
Merriam (2010) suggested that “adult learning is a phenomenon at once deceptively simple, yet enormously complex” (p. 12). She went on to describe the knowledge base of adult learning as a mosaic of theories, models, and principles that identify and differentiate adult learning from that of learning in childhood. Distinguishing between education and learning, Jarvis (2014) suggested that a shift from the institutional phenomenon of education to the individual phenomenon of learning or acquiring knowledge and skills meant that the environment for learning went far beyond an educational institution setting. Merriam et al.
(2007) described three types of settings where learning may occur for adults; formal within institutional settings, nonformal which is most often structured and community-based, and
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information which is embedded in daily life. But what is it that distinguishes adult learning from learning in childhood?
Merriam (2008) acknowledged that “adult learning is a complex phenomenon that can never be reduced to a single, simple explanation” (p. 94). She went on to suggest that theories of adult learning are ever-evolving with a current focus on the contexts where learning occurs and the multidimensionality of the phenomenon. One of other scholars who is Jarvis also have echoed the complexity of adult learning: “Learning, then, is a much more profound phenomenon …. It is about the way that human beings are in the world and the world in them – it occurs at the intersection of humanity and society – it is more than experiential, more than physiological, psychological and so on. Understanding it more fully is a momentous integrated multi-disciplinary project” (Jarvis, 2006, p.6).
Formerly, theories of learning largely focused on a cognitive psychological approach with Piaget’s cognitive development theory, albeit focused on childhood development, serving as the foundation for adult learning work (Merriam et al., 2007). Other early scholars were behaviorists including Watson, Skinner, and Pavlov, who believed that learning is simply a matter of changing external behaviors in response to factors or stimuli within the environment.
Other traditional theories of adult learning include humanism, social learning theory, and constructivism.
Often described as the founding father of adult learning, Knowles (1970) acknowledged the difference between learning in adults and children. He introduced the European concept of andragogy, “based on the Greek word anēr (with the stem and-), meaning ‘man, not boy’ or adult” (p. 42) to reflect the art and science of helping adults learn. He identified that in learning, adults are self-directed, using the experience as a resource for learning, are driven to learn by practical needs, and have a performance-centered orientation to learning versus subject-centered (Knowles, 1970). In later works, Knowles (1990) further added that adults learn based on the need to know, and they demonstrate an internal responsibility for their learning.
According to this model, adult learners choose to engage in learning activities under their own volition to improve themselves for practical purposes such as employment or advancement.
Adult learning is not, however, limited to these purposes, as adults engage in learning for pleasure, interest, practical purposes and leisure and learning in adults is significantly more complex than this individualistic representation.
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There have been many critiques of model developed by Knowles over the years, related to the assumptions of individualism and intrinsic motivation and largely related to the North American bias that is entrenched within it. Notably, Lee (2003) presented a critical analysis of andragogy in relation to the specific context in which Knowles based his assumptions in 1970 and 1990, ignoring learning in populations other than white, middle-class, males. She suggested that for adult immigrant learners whose socialization occurred in different contexts, their views of learning may not align with views that andragogy portrays. She demonstrated, through a number of research examples, that particularly for immigrant adults, their learning and learning behaviors depended on the historical, cultural and sociopolitical contexts in which they were socialized and could not be encompassed within the universality of andragogy (Lee, 2003). Furthermore, she asserted that Knowles’ attribution of adult learner characteristics, as represented by the dominant culture, effectually marginalizes learners from other cultures.
The concepts of socialization and culture are now maintained by scholars to weigh more heavily into the adult learning experience. Jarvis (2004) suggested that each society transmits its own culture, or combined knowledge, beliefs and values, through social interaction and education. Jarvis (1987) emphasized the importance of the social dimension of learning in adults and claimed that “all learning begins with experience” (p.16). While culture represents a collective belief system, the development of self, based on the integration of current experiences in the socio-cultural environment with past memories which are framed through a cultural lens, support meaning making and learning (Jarvis, 2010). Hansman (2001) suggested that the social context is central to learning in adulthood, considering interactions and intersections among people, tools, and context and in relation to the developmental needs, ideas and cultural context of the learning experience.
This sociocultural context is a key consideration for this research as immigrant adult learners, and their values, identities and past experiences, may not align with the learning environment in Taiwan. As described by Merriam et al. (2007) “the sociocultural context, the accumulated life experiences, developmental concerns, and presumably the nature of ensuing learning experiences converge” (p. 434) and, in turn, impact the adult immigrant learning experience. Alfred (2002) suggested that “learning cannot be considered to be content-free or context-free, for it is always filtered through one’s culture and cultural identity” (p.5).
Furthermore, she asserted that learning occurs within a particular context that extends beyond
Furthermore, she asserted that learning occurs within a particular context that extends beyond