Convergence: Volume 37 Number 1

Adult educators face a shifting world of work and expanded understandings of how workers learn. In this issue, we have drawn together some snapshots of the complex interactions between work and learning, both in theory and practice.

As worker educators ourselves, we are struck by the scale and speed of changes in labour markets. This issue is prepared in the wake of an international boom in high-technology development, with attendant optimism around creation of a ‘knowledge economy’. Many adult educators were caught up in theory, policy and practice which assumed a steady expansion of such work. While the subsequent crash of this sector is no doubt temporary, it draws attention to the volatility of the economic environment in which discussion of learning and work takes place.

If work is volatile, it is also profoundly diverse. While the word ‘solidarity’ comes easily to mind as a response, this may gloss over widening gaps between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ jobs, between the formal and informal workforce, between dominant and subordinate racial identities, between north and south. For some, these divisions are a natural consequence of globalisation, while for others they are consciously engineered to put an end to the fortress of workers’ solidarity. Either way, caution is in order when any of us is tempted to make generalisations about learning and work.

If work is volatile and diverse, the experience of workers is also unequal. Clearly, the proportion of stable, healthy and well-paying jobs has been shrinking within and among nations. A majority of workers on a global basis are now engaged in ‘non-standard’ situations, whether in subsistence, the informal sector, migrant work, temporary, contract or part-time contingent work, often in Export Processing Zones and maquiladoras. Corporate-led globalisation offers a work world of monotony, stress, autocracy and poverty, while the global justice movements have yet to clarify how ‘another world is possible’ in regard to learning and work. Those of us in the relative privilege of an adult education profession, able to write and read an international journal such as this one, are thus confronted with increasingly stark choices around our values and commitments. Pressures are great to confine workers learning to skills training or package it as a means for accreditation, rather than to affirm it as a critical tool for individual and collective emancipation.

These choices around values are posed amongst employers in terms of competencies and skill shortages. They are posed within governments in terms of funding priorities and educational delivery. However, the primary source of energy and insight for the International Council for Adult Education (ICAE) has been the civil society, that network of voluntary, community and worker organisations whose driving force is neither the market nor the state. It is in the civil society that most of the articles in this issue are situated. Collectively, they explore what kind of learning is happening to enrich the experience of work in a world of war, of poverty, of famine and disease.

For us, this pluralism is not only between neoliberal and transformative ideological stances, but is a recognition of the multiple sources of knowledge now available to us, through the differences in race, culture and gender that often separate workers from one another and their educators. These differences

are often exploited consciously, or simply operate to keep people on the margins of the workplace, the organisation, the union and the community. Different social locations in terms of race, culture and gender must be fully integrated into thinking about the learning process in workplaces and a means to transcend the cultural and gender divides within the labour movement. The rapid growth of the informal sector also calls for innovative means to address the issues of credential for informal learning, and the double-edge nature of accreditation of prior learning.

In this issue, we open with four articles on frameworks for grasping this somewhat bewildering array of issues. We then have three articles on current practice in East Asia, and conclude with two based in North America. A few brief ‘pauses’ are also included, as counter-point from other contexts on the

Undoubtedly, fresh thinking is required for worker educators. We must be acquainted with theories of formal and informal learning, able to distinguish ways that coercion and persuasion operate in different production locations. We need to reflect across time and space, so that experience in the past and sensitivity to the global changes at the present can provide impetus for vision for building a better and more equal work world for future generations. This issue is a modest contribution to such reflection.