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Editorial

Volume 37, Number 2, Autumn 2005

Don’t play that song
Miriam Zukas, University of Leeds, UK (m.zukas@leeds.ac.uk)

The last Board meeting coincided with the first bombings of public transport in London. Although the meeting had taken place at SCUTREA’s (Standing Conference on University Teaching and Research in the Education of Adults) annual conference held, this year, in Brighton, members of the Board were all affected personally in one way or other, with concerns about family and friends living in or visiting the city, and disrupted journeys back to our homes (most journeys from Brighton require the traveller to go through London). The discovery of a bomb factory close to the University of Leeds, together with the extensive media coverage and debate, brought it even closer to home. The University has had a long history of community adult education in the areas in which several of those involved lived; but what contribution can the study of the education of adults make in these troubled times? Budd Hall, from the University of Victoria in Canada, has already suggested a way forward in a recent email concerning next year’s international SCUTREA conference which will take place in Leeds (details are available at www.scutrea.ac.uk): ‘Does the location of our event at the University of Leeds present an opportunity for the global adult education research community to create a special focus on something like “Adult education and the world we want”? I am convinced that we need to turn to discourse from protection, counter-terrorism, economic globalisa-tion as the religion of choice of the “free” world, etc. to one of exploration of the kind of world that we do want.’ The conference organisers will pursue this idea separately, but there is space, too, in the journal for research which pertains to these issues.

In the last editorial, I suggested that the contributors to that edition were pushing at the outer edges of what ‘counts’ as the study of the education of adults and I invited comments on the divergent array of topics. If I take silence as assent, together with our download figures, which we receive each month, most readers seemed to accept these as legitimate aspects for discussion within the journal. However, one reader made clear their view that the paper by Christine Jarvis, ‘Real stakeholder education? Lifelong Learning in the Buffyverse’ was a step too far, inviting those in the wider world of policy makers to ridicule lifelong learning. At its last meeting, the Editorial Board considered carefully this question about the relationships between popular culture and the study of the education of adults, particularly with respect to the way in which the area is viewed by others. We reminded ourselves of the continuing significance of the particularly British tradition of researching popular culture, with influential adult education scholars such as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams making their mark well outside the field. We also considered Studies’ role in encouraging debate about how learning is reflected in popular culture and concluded that we wished to pursue this.

As a result of our call for symposia this time last year, we are publishing details about how to contribute to our first symposium on ‘Learning through the lifecourse: Connect-ing identity, agency and structure’, coordinated by one of our Board members, Kathryn Ecclestone from the University of Exeter. This has been an ongoing theme in a well-resourced series of educational research projects in the UK, and we welcome all contributions, in line with the timetable spelled out in our call.

In this edition, the contributing authors return to a number of familiar themes in the education of adults: learning at work, class, gender and experiential learning to name three. David Livingstone and Peter Sawchuk draw on their extensive study of five Canad-ian organisations to theorise working-class people’s learning. Relying on a cultural-histor-ical approach to adult learning, they suggest that working-class informal learning and tacit knowledge are heavily relied on to run workplaces, whilst at the same time being dismissed within the context of the ‘knowledge-based economy’. Ninetta Santoro also considers working-class people’s learning at work, but she pursues these issues from the perspective of the trainer, rather than the learner. Drawing on a post-structuralist frame-work, Santoro looks at the intersecting relations of class, ethnicity and gender through two case studies of trainers teaching vocational programmes to working-class learners, examining particularly the trainers’ investments in particular identities. She argues that trainers need to consider critically how their particular classed identity investments shape their views about training and the strategies and practices which they privilege.

The theme of work and learning continues in relation to gender with Leona English’s study of feminist organisers. She also uses a post-structuralist analysis, this time drawing on Foucault to examine issues of power, discourse, policy and learning in grassroots feminist organisations. Her study examines the ‘pastoral’ power exercised by both funders (the government) and feminist organisations, attending to the ways in which power relation-ships are played out by each. For anyone who has been on the board of a feminist not-for-profit organisation, the descriptions of the micro-technologies of power, such as the circle as confessional and the practice of consensus, make somewhat uncomfortable reading.
Mary Thorpe and Chris Kubiak further expand the theme of work and learning by looking at a recent British initiative within schools, the setting up of networked learn-ing communities. They consider critically the community of practice model implicit within the initiative, demonstrating that an emphasis on group participation tends to underplay the significance of individual agency. Furthermore, successful activists tend to make use of their existing power relationships, contacts and peers to make things happen. In other words, they draw on their experience of leadership and networks of power to facilitate learning.
The relations between experience and learning are re-conceptualised by Alison Le Cornu in her contribution to this edition, in which she critiques and then expands on a model first developed by Peter Jarvis (1987). She argues that one problem with Jarvis’s model is that it fails to deal adequately with time, with the process of internalisation and with the notion of non-learning. In trying to resolve these issues, she repositions the model within a framework that links time and existential growth.

Kathryn Ecclestone, Dennis Hayes and Frank Furedi also offer a critique, this time of what they call ‘therapeutic professionalism’ in the education of adults. They see the rise of interest in fostering learners’ emotional intelligence, self-esteem and self-awareness as part of a broader therapeutic ethos on the part of the State, blurring the divisions between public and private domains. They suggest that therapeutic professionalism undermines the development of meaningful knowledge and skills and, instead, encour-ages an understanding of learning as rooted in introspection, feelings of vulnerability and the avoidance of risk, with learners as ‘diminished selves’. For them, the develop-ment of a therapeutic ethos enables the State to justify new forms of emotional manage-ment, and should be rejected if we are to pursue social and educational change.

Our final paper takes the form of a lecture, rather than the more traditional academ-ic paper. Of course, this format has excellent antecedents – Freud’s Introductory and New Introductory Lectures were never intended to be given lectures, but provided a rather more explicit pedagogic genre for the explanation of his ideas. Peter Alheit’s essay is, as he says, drawn from a keynote speech and is written to try to convey the notion of a work in progress. The journal invites work in progress, but we rarely receive contributions in this category, perhaps because few authors are prepared to expose their ideas and/or findings to peer scrutiny before they are well and truly honed.

Here, Peter Alheit returns to an earlier theme of the relationship between auto-biographical accounts and structures. He asks how our ‘stories’ – our narrative construc-tions – relate to the ‘real’ world. He examines this question empirically through an interpretive comparison of over 300 personal autobiographies, published between the eighteenth century and the present day, and argues first that we can see four patterns of narrative emerging at different historical periods and stages of societal development. Second, he makes a claim that this analysis demonstrates that individual actors shape structures, as well as structures shaping individual lives, and suggests that we can under-stand this theoretically through the project of biographicisation in adult education.

Our final contributions, also on the theme of history, are a critical comment and a reply. This form of contribution to Studies was pioneered last year, and the Board would like to encourage others to make use of it. Here, Chris Duke responds to Gordon Dadswell’s article, ‘The killing of history and the making of myth? The WEA and the CAE in Victoria’ by challenging Dadswell’s interpretation of the motives of the main protagon-ist in the article, Colin Badger (the Director of Extension at the University of Melbourne). In return, Gordon Dadswell offers further background and justification for his thesis.
Two final issues about the journal. First, Studies’ International Advisory Group (IAG) helps the journal to fulfil its claim to be an international refereed journal, through the ‘ambassadorial’ role played by members of the group, through refereeing and through constructive feedback and critique of the journal. The IAG has repeatedly drawn our attention to the ways in which authors tend to choose references. One member suggests that ‘the general impression is depressing: most authors seldom refer to texts that are not from the UK or US or their own country. It gives the impression of a limited outlook.’ We should therefore like to emphasise once more two of our review criteria: if you are submitting a paper for the journal, you should ensure that you draw sufficiently from existing literature in the field, and that you contextualise the paper for an international audience.

Second, the Board would like to thank Roger Harrison for his contribution over the last three years as the SCUTREA representative on the Board, and to welcome Pam Coare, the new SCUTREA representative, to the Board.