[ Current Issue ] [ Back Issues ]

Editorial

Volume 36, Number 1, Spring 2004

You say goodbye, and I say hello …
Miriam Zukas, University of Leeds, UK (m.zukas@leeds.ac.uk)

This edition of Studies is a joint production between Richard Edwards, who was Editor between 1998 and 2003, and me as the new Editor with effect from January 2004. I would like to pay tribute here to the contribution Richard has made both to the journal and to the education of adults (a contested term, as Richard has so frequently pointed out).

I was in the fortunate position of being on the panel which appointed Richard as Editor in 1997, and I remember being impressed by his fresh approach to thinking about the content and potential readership of the journal, and his commitment to working closely with the Board to shape and develop the journal. Over his six years as Editor, he has delivered on both. Beginning with the nature of the journal, Richard wanted to examine what was meant by ‘the education of adults’, understanding that the journal had a role in constructing as well as representing the terrain (or perhaps moorland would be a better Edwards metaphor). Richard’s general approach was to encourage a wide variety of potential contributors to think about writing for the journal, even if they did not see themselves as adult educators or adult education researchers. He was, himself, an advertisement for the journal, encouraging and supporting early researchers, suggesting Studies to people who might not have thought of it, and ensuring with Virman Man and NIACE that Studies was well-publicised both nationally and internationally.

This expansive approach can be seen in his editorials which offered readers a chance to step back from individual articles, and to consider the issues raised in the journal in a more integrated manner. The editorials weaved together issues of the moment, philosophical musings, quirky titles (‘Avoiding icebergs’ was his first; ‘Go now. Go now’ was the last) and witty introductions to the articles to come. When taken together as a piece, the Editorials are a good record of the concerns of the British educational research community and those involved in aspects of the education of adults at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. They also reflect Richard’s critical engagement with those issues, and his erudition.

Richard was keen to have a working Board, and his collegial, consultative approach engaged us all in taking decisions about the direction of the journal. For example, we worked long and hard on reviewing the journal’s objectives and criteria for selection; when we began the debate about setting up an International Advisory Group, Richard ensured that we thought it through before embarking on this new venture. He streamlined and developed the review processes: for example, he suggested that each submitted article be reviewed by a Board member as well as at least one other reviewer, and his gentle reminders and efficiency ensured that the journal had a good reputation both for responding to potential contributors, and for feeding back constructively. He also used the Editorial to share with the readership some of the issues which occupied the Board, making the processes of review and editing more open.

I was appointed by the Board in April 2003 in time to shadow Richard for nine months. Despite having been on the Board for longer than I am able to remember, and working closely with him for the last six years, I did not appreciate fully the detail and thought and care - as well as the constant communication with the Reviews Editor, John Field, and our publisher NIACE, through Virman Man - which Richard put into Studies. We take for granted the delivery of each edition on time, and I have found the last nine months both inspiring through Richard’s example and terrifying. Richard completed the editing of five of the articles in this edition, and I am most grateful to him for sticking with it conscientiously until the end of his term of office - perhaps he does not understand the phrase ‘demob-happy’. In writing this Editorial, I realise that it could seem a little like an obituary rather than an appreciation, but readers will be pleased to learn that Richard is still with us as a member of the Board. I look forward to working with him and with the Board and International Advisory Group in a similarly collegial and consultative manner.

And now to this edition of the journal. Readers will already have been alerted to the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP). The first two rounds of funded research are well under way, with the third round just beginning. Within the first round, one of the funded networks was set up to consider Improving incentives to learning in the workplace, and we are pleased to publish some of the theoretical and empirical data emerging from four projects within that network. Phil Hodkinson and his colleagues write about an ongoing theoretical dilemma which has been addressed in the journal before: conceptualising the relationships between individuals and social structures in order to understand learning in the workplace. Here, they explore this relationship theoretically and, from the projects, suggest four overlapping ways in which biography is relevant to learning at work. These include the insight that the values and dispositions of individuals contribute to the co-production of workplace communities and cultures (somewhat underplayed in many accounts of organisational learning), and the suggestion that working and belonging to a workplace community contributes to the developing sense of identity of workers (again often understated in other accounts).

This focus on learning in the workplace contrasts somewhat with Arthur Gould’s focus on learning outside the workplace, as it were, in his report on study leave for manual workers in Sweden. His initial research, published last year in Studies, showed that the right to study leave was closely guarded by trade unions and others in Sweden, and remained an important part of the country’s strategy for lifelong learning. In this edition, Gould reports on his interviews with manual workers in which he explores their experience of study leave. Although no financial provision is made through the legislation which entitles workers to study leave, he concludes that the rosy picture painted by policy-makers and employers in his earlier study is indeed accurate: many employees exercise their right to educational leave safe in the knowledge that their jobs remain secure.

The challenges of learning in a somewhat unconventional industry are highlighted in Martin Cloonan’s study of a UK government-funded training scheme for unemployed musicians. The New Deal for Musicians is part of a larger ‘Welfare to Work’ initiative, but has had to expand traditional human capital approaches to take account of the cultural, social and what Cloonan calls ‘subcultural’ capital which are such important elements in the formation of musicians. The programme has also had to make allowances for the precarious career trajectories of musicians and the even greater than usual significance of insider knowledge and connections. Cloonan’s examination of the programme in Scotland through interviews with musicians and those who support their learning (music industry consultants and music open learning providers) provides a fascinating account of the importance of acculturation and social capital in the development of a career.

Staying with the theme of work and learning, Per Andersson, Andreas Fejes and Song-ee Ahn examine some of the challenges of recognising prior vocational learning in their study of a number of Swedish projects set up to ascertain immigrants’ vocational competence. They explore dominant assumptions about the measurement of competence through examination and grading, rather than vocational expertise, and show why it was difficult for those running projects to distinguish between so-called ‘school’ thinking (passing exams) and the recognition of prior learning.

There are many challenges in trying to develop methodologies for understand learning through the lifecourse, and Tom Schuller and Debra Evelyn set out to expand the range of possibilities for researching lifelong learning. Schuller’s article illustrates how visual imagery, particularly paintings, could be used to explore learning and its place in the lifecourse. He suggests that paintings enable us to understand the complexities of social context, period effects and age effects, and analyses several pictures to show just how they might generate and illuminate questions about the changing shape of the lifecourse and education’s role within this. In contrast, Debra Evelyn focuses on narrative as a form of research and representation, and explores how poetic storytelling could be a form of analysis which ensures that the researcher is ‘outside’ the data - in other words, that the researcher does not intervene as narrator. She chooses three examples of learning stories which she produced through interviews with students to respond to what she calls ‘adversarial’ questions such as whether or not these stories are research. If their arguments stir you to take issue with either of these pieces, we encourage you to make use of the Critical Comments section to respond (see below).

At the moment when English universities are likely to have to charge at least £3000 a year for fees (and at least this pro-rata for part-time students), discussions about the significance or otherwise of liberal adult education (LAE) seem somewhat overtaken by events. Nevertheless, our final article by Sarah Speight explores the historical development from 1948 to 1998 of LAE in English universities through the case study of archaeology. She describes a shift during this period from full-time established academics or ‘missionaries’ and ‘apprentices’ or young academics teaching adults for a short time, to a largely part-time tutor body (‘intellectual casuals’ as Roger Fieldhouse calls them) in delivering this liberal mission. She suggests that in some universities, adult education and its ‘intellectual casuals’ are almost out of a job as full-time academics teach standard age and adult (and even part-time) students side by side, and suggests that it is now time for continuing education to reinvent itself, For example with new research expertise on multi-age education. There are, of course, those who agree, but it could be that there are few left in continuing education to reinvent themselves even if the current policy environment were more hopeful.

Finally, Richard and I were delighted when Andrea Parmegiani responded to the journal’s long-standing invitation to comment critically on articles already published. Mary Jane Curry’s case study of a ‘basic writing’ tutor in a community college in the United States, in which she examined the limitations of a skills-based approach to literacy education, was published in Studies in Spring 2003. Parmegiani’s response examined the issues raised in Curry’s article from the point of view of part-timers with little training who are asked to teach such courses. Once we had agreed that this was an appropriate example of critical commentary, in the interests of promoting dialogue within the journal, we invited Curry to reply to the issues raised. And so we have a new Critical Comments section, in line with our invitation on the back cover. We encourage other readers to use the Critical Comments section to join in this particular debate, or to engage in other debates provoked by what you have read in the journal.