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Editorial

Volume 33, Number 2, October 2001

Changing knowledge? Knowledge production in the education of adults
Richard Edwards, University of Stirling

This edition of Studies has evolved over the last few months to, at least in part, take on the characteristics of a special edition. This is unusual for this journal. In 1999, John Field and Tom Schuller co-edited a special edition on The Learning Society. However, in general, the Board has felt that, with only two editions per year, Studies does not have the scope to engage in special issues.

A number of factors have resulted in this edition. First, there is the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the UK. On a regular basis, this exercise makes judgements about the quality of research in the different subject areas within the numerous university departments. It is a peer review process and the outcome of the assessment affects funding for future years and therefore is the focus of much attention and concern. Submissions to the current RAE had to be submitted this Spring. This has impacted on Studies as many Board members are involved in the RAE process in one way or another. This has resulted in a range of informal discussions about the state of research in the field of the education of adults and the quality of research as demonstrated in journals and conferences.

This is the general background for this edition. More specifically, I had been asked to contribute to a symposium on the Handbook of Adult and Continuing Education (Wilson and Hayes 2000), the North American tome, which is produced every ten years and acts as focal point for state of the art reviews of theory and practice. This symposium, held at the SCUTREA conference in London in July, provoked much thought and discussion about the state of knowledge in the field and the different forms of knowledge that are being produced and utilised. In addition, many of the papers at that conference raised issues about knowledge production and the areas of knowledge embraced by the education of adults, especially in its guise of lifelong learning. 

Interestingly, this issue is also reflected in a recent editorial of our sister journal, Adult Education Quarterly (Hayes and Wilson 2001). As editor of Studies, I am keen to see such knowledge and the issues raised represented in the pages of this journal. At its July meeting, therefore, the Board agreed that a part of this edition be given over to the issue of knowledge production and new knowledges in the education of adults. There are several elements to this. A sub-group 90 Richard Edwards of the Board selected a small number of SCUTREA conference papers and authors were invited to amend them to take account of the discussions at the conference. These papers were then refereed in the normal way. We have included these following an extended review of the conference proceedings. In addition, we have commissioned an extended review of the Handbook mentioned above and also published an amended version of the symposium about it. This means that there are only four ‘regular’ articles in this edition of Studies. Ironically, however, they all in different ways contribute to the theme of changing knowledges.

I have chosen the theme of changing knowledges for a number of reasons. Educators of adults will be more than familiar with the notion of ‘really useful knowledge’ (Johnson 1993), the view that only that knowledge which served the interests of the working class was really worthwhile. It is a notion that has been extended and appropriated over the years to embrace the interests of women, minority ethnic groups, and gay and lesbian groups, to name a few. However, while contentious, it is at least arguable that it has become far from clear what constitutes such knowledge and whether the interests it is supposed to serve are as progressive as might have been believed – and of course still is – by many. I hesitate to call this the postmodern condition because of the "more heat, less light" principle that seems to surround such a notion.

The political grounding for knowledge claims may prove problematic, but this is also the case for educational research and the social sciences more generally. Positivism has largely been rejected in many areas of the social sciences and, noticeably, in educational research to such an extent that qualitative approaches have become the norm. However, it should be noted that the rejection of positivism is often based on a poor understanding of the position and limited to no engagement with postpositivist developments. Within qualitative research, there has been a proliferation of approaches, and a certain tension between the demands for rigour and maybe even validity – transgressive or otherwise – and the desire to legitimise alternative perspectives.

Claims and counter-claims are made but it is not always clear what the methodological basis for such claims are. Indeed, one may wonder where the methodological literature on research in this field is to be found.

Stronach and MacLure (1997) claim that there is an increased unruliness to knowledge and one can see why. The rules of the natural sciences no longer bind – if they ever did. The rules of politics also seem less binding. There is also the sense of a fluidity to knowledge, itself signified in the calls for lifelong learning as part of the processes of adaptation to change. Thus, the appeal of changing knowledges as a theme. There are three senses to this notion. First, the rather obvious one; knowledges change over time.

To avoid any linearity in that notion, I would suggest they also diversify and are contested. Second, the development of different knowledges effects changes for the people concerned, their communities, and so on. Third, there are also knowledges of change. How one understands changes are processed affects how one engages with them. So, in thinking about knowledge production in the education of adults we might consider the development of changing knowledges.

However, before entering into that for the articles in this edition of Studies, there is one last point I wish to examine. One of the challenges posed by post-structuralism and postmodernism to the social sciences is that all knowledge claims are discursive and that there is no way of establishing their truthfulness or falsity independent of discourse. In a sense then, all knowledge claims are language games, and it is the persuasiveness of our Editorial 91 discourses – including how convincing they make their truth claims – that establishes their validity. On this basis, perhaps, we should be concerned less with knowledge production and the contribution of research to knowledge in the field of education, than with the changing language games and discourse communities that constitute and reconstitute this as a field of study. The criteria by which we make our assessments may therefore alter. For instance, a discourse community has to be continually mobilised if it to sustain its identity. Part of that mobilisation may involve the evocation of certain texts, authors and ideas. This repetition may seem dull and ‘old hat’ from a perspective of knowledge production and research as new contributions to knowledge. However, from a language game perspective, it might have a legitimacy that would otherwise be denied. Rather than changing knowledges, therefore, the title of this editorial perhaps more provocatively should be changing discourses. While pointing to this, it is not a direction I wish to pursue at present, as it was not the basis for the selection included in this edition of Studies. However, I invite readers to ponder the issue when engaging with the articles herein. It does put them in a different light.

We start with the review of the SCUTREA proceedings by Christine Jarvis. Although international in attendance every year, this year the conference was international in its organisation, with colleagues in institutions around the globe participating in the refereeing process. It was therefore bigger and more diverse than the standard SCUTREA conference. It therefore gives a flavour of the forms of knowledge production through research in scholarship around the globe, both the knowledge production processes in which colleagues are engaging and the quality of the knowledges they are producing. The proceedings give an opportunity to examine the common concerns and distinctive aspects of research in various – mostly privileged – parts of the globe.

The five articles that follow are the invited contributions from participants at SCUTREA. Lore Arthur provides us with some issues for those engaging in comparative research in the present era of greater inter-dependence and inter-connectedness. These are issues that can be turned back onto the question of what can be drawn from international conferences. They also point towards questions of theory and method that are of relevance to the contributions by Gallo and Lyon. Melina Gallo – co-winner of the Michael Stephens Award for best student paper – provides us with an example of knowledge production through the use of photography among migrant workers in the USA. She draws upon Freire and Mezirow to outline the empowering transformations of certain forms of workers and workplace education. Migrations of a different sort are examined in the article by Carol Lyon. She explores the transformations and triggers for change among women educators as they move from country to country in their professional lives. With increased discussion of globalisation more generally, the experiences and learning of migrating educators opens fresh areas for research. This is also the case in the article by Tara Fenwick. She outlines some of the pedagogical challenges for educators raised by the increased turn towards self-employment among Canadian women. This opens up areas of workers’ education that have been largely overlooked by adult educators and some of the positive connotations of enterprise and entrepreneurship.

Each of these latter three papers, based on empirical studies, is interesting in its own right, and in many ways credible and persuasive. However, the status of the claims made is actually hard to evaluate, as the methodological framings are not as apparent as they might be. This is common in research and scholarship in the education of adults, and means that any changes produced by such knowledge may be less secure than might at first appear to be the case. Thus while each points to changes in 92 Richard Edwards knowledge production – the means and focus for knowledge production – the quality of the processes in play is hard to assess. It is in the leap from data to claims that there is both excitement and danger.

The final article in the selection is by Nicky Solomon and her colleagues. They explicitly focus on changing knowledge production by reflexively giving an account of a collaborative research project involving the four authors. Reflexivity has become an important element of contemporary qualitative research, as by providing such accounts one can both validate one’s claims and also express their limitations and limits. However, such reflexivity is often descriptive, a confessional text that often highlights what could and should have been done differently. What Solomon et al do, however, is begin to provide an analytically reflexive account, thereby changing the knowledge about knowledge production as well as engaging in alternative knowledge production practices. In this way, they point towards the changes effected through such notions as partnership and collaboration. Whether they address all the concerns of reflexivity we leave to the readers. Alvesson and Skoldberg (2000: 7–8) argue that reflexivity entails outlining the systematics and techniques in research procedures, clarification of the primacy of interpretation, awareness of the political-ideological character of research and reflection in relation to the problem of representation and authority. Solomon and her colleagues indicate some of this, but a systematic analytical reflexivity may necessitate more.

Next we move to the review of the Handbook of Adult and Continuing Education (Wilson and Hayes 2000) by Janice Malcolm. Critical reflection on practice is the guiding theme for each of the chapters in this book and Malcolm provides an evaluation which points towards the locatedness of such a process of knowledge production, in particular the North American focus of the Handbook. This is followed by the article by Nod Miller and her colleagues. This has a different format to the conventional article primarily because it is based on a conference symposium and authors were very restricted in terms of the space available to them for comment. However, it also points to another issue in knowledge production, the question of representation. Research articles tend to be restricted to certain linear formats, varying somewhat depending upon whether they are based on empirical work or involve theorising from the literature.

This has been challenged in recent years and in some circumstances different formats have been attempted – not always successfully. Here changing knowledge involves changing forms of representation. The article by Miller et al at one level provides a linear narrative, which has an introduction (Miller), reflections on the experience of putting the Handbook together (Wilson and Hayes) and of making a contribution to the Handbook (Bailey and Cervero), before a number of very different critical encounters (Armstrong, Zukas, Gosling, Edwards and West). This is rounded off by a reply from Wilson and Hayes. Yet it is also fragmented, suggesting different positions and points of engagement, in some ways, illustrating the many forms of encounter there can be with a text and a certain futility over editorial intention. The Handbook was not to be a definitive text, yet it is read and critiqued as though this is the work it is seeking to achieve. The text has a certain authority invested in it by readers, even as the editors might question such authority themselves. In terms of knowledge production, this points to the issue of how to represent (self-) questioning, reflexive, tentative forms of knowledge.

Before moving on to the regular articles in this edition of Studies, there is one final point to make. Knowledge production is not only about what and how, it is also about Editorial 93 who and for whom. In relation to the latter, there is a resounding silence and more attention needs to be given to the possible and actual audiences for research. It is all very well researching and publishing, but who, if anyone, is reading? In relation to the former, it is noticeable that all lead authors are women. This was not intentional. The Board and I selected contributors on the basis of the quality and interest of their existing contributions and their known capacity to engage the literature. Meetings of the Editorial Board in recent years have noted the increasing numbers of women researchers are publishing in Studies. Between 1986 and 1989, 27% of authors were women, while between 1996 and 2000 this figure had risen to 41%. This is a trend that the Board welcomes, but also points towards the increased significance of gender over class in the study of the education of adults. Gender, however, is not confined to women nor to studies by women and we would wish to encourage a wider debate on these issues. For the moment, though, those involved in the education of adults should celebrate the growing number of active women researchers in this area. This is another set of changes that no doubt impacts upon knowledge production in important ways.

The four other articles in this edition were not chosen specifically for what they contribute to our understanding of changing knowledge. However, there is a sense in which they also point to certain issues within this theme. This is most apparent in the article by Edward Taylor, Julie Beck and Elaine Ainsworth who have conducted an empirical study of the peer review process in an adult education academic journal. 

They point to many of the issues already raised in relation to the uncertainty surrounding the evaluation and representation of qualitative research and the imprecision there can be in claiming a qualitative methodology. This may itself be a result of change processes, as different approaches to research inevitably raise questions about the standards to be applied to them. By contrast, in a situation of great change, South Africa, Ruth Albertyn and her colleagues provide an analysis of empowerment through learning based in the most traditional of quantatitive research paradigms. While this might appear quite anomolous, it also challenges those who make claims for empowerment drawing upon qualitative traditions to demonstrate the rigour of their analysis.

The article by Julia Preece contributes to changing knowledge by drawing upon poststructuralism to indicate some of the curriculum implications for working with socially excluded groups. This is how different knowledge affects changes in practice, at least in principle. The article by Mike Davis and Sue Ralph points to an area of research that is likely to be increasingly influential for educators of adults, online learning. We have seen very little such research in Studies to date and the Board wishes to encourage more contributions on this theme. Both in terms of research issues and methodology, online learning raises important issues.

Lastly, I must apologise to Michael Welton, whose article appeared in the last edition of Studies minus an important section, which was erased at some stage in the production process and was not spotted prior to publication. Studies aims to publish high quality articles and have high quality production values. Sometimes we fail. I can only say that Michael accepted my apology in the politest manner, which made the Editor’s role somewhat less excruciating than it might have been.