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Editorial

Volume 37, Number 1, Spring 2005

Stretching or shrinking?
Miriam Zukas, University of Leeds, UK (m.zukas@leeds.ac.uk)

The papers within this edition represent an even more divergent array of perspectives on the education of adults than usual. In terms of content, they range from a detailed analysis of lifelong learning within the popular North American television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer through to the suggestion that the contemporary use of ribbons for particular causes (pink for breast cancer, red for AIDS and so on) is a form of popular education; such diverse contributions raise, once more, the perennial question of what
‘counts’ as the study of the education of adults. They push – perhaps further than ever – at the outer edges of Richard Edwards’ moorland of lifelong learning and perhaps, for some readers, go too far? Do let us know.

For the last year these questions about what counts as the education of adults have been rather too close to home (or should I say work) for comfort. Within the UK, universities have, one by one, restructured their departments of adult and/or continuing education out of existence. Now it is the turn of my own department in Leeds. The debates within the UK are all too familiar: should the state be supporting adults who wish to participate in higher education, or should they focus on young people from disadvantaged backgrounds? What is adult education or continuing education and how is it different from what other departments already do? Surely we should be ‘integrating’ adult education into all provision so that we have no need of specialist provision?

Why are research interests in the education of adults any different from those in education, and shouldn’t we be merging those research interests, particularly in view of lifelong learning? Surely everyone is a lifelong learner? Is the education of adults the business of a university? And on, and on... Readers from other countries will be familiar with the flavour of these arguments, even if they take different historical and social forms elsewhere.

Of course, the study of and provision for the education of adults in universities has always been fragile in the UK, particularly in England, as events have shown. The fight for small spaces on the edges of universities (or outside the walls) has been written about on more than one occasion in the pages of this journal. But I am struck by the sharp ironies in my particular situation when the discourses of widening participation and lifelong learning and the concerns about what to do with an ageing population have never been so ubiquitous.

One reason for this split between policy concerns and the world of universities (certainly the world of research) emerged at the last meeting of the Board of Studies. Collectively, we have noticed that we appear to be living in parallel worlds: the world of research, as we know it, and the world of government- or quango-sponsored research studies. Take, for example, a recent study carried out by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), which was concerned with inequalities in young people’s participation in higher education (HEFCE, 2005). The 267-page report contained barely a reference to any journal articles or academic texts (although there were many references to other research reports published by the Department for Education and Science, or HEFCE itself). This is not the place to discuss the merits or otherwise of the study (one headline finding, for example, was that the 20 per cent of young people living in the most advantaged areas of the country are five to six times more likely to go to university than the 20 per cent of young people living in the least advantaged areas of the country). But the issue is that increasingly we seem to have policy formulated by research which is disconnected from the broader theoretical and conceptual issues played out in journals.

Although regrettable, this state of affairs seems relatively benign compared to the changes that seem to be dominating the funding of educational research in the United States and elsewhere. In a recent article in the British Journal of Educational Research, Patti Lather describes how, by funding only certain kinds of educational research in the move towards ‘evidence-based policy and practice’, the US federal government has made an incursion into legislating scientific method. She outlines how, as far as federal policy research is concerned, there has been a significant shift towards ‘randomised field trials’ as the gold standard in the evidence-based movement.

Although the ‘evidence-informed’ practice debate (notice the shift in the discourse) is alive and well in the world of educational research in the UK, there is no room for complacency. The more university and policy researchers inhabit separate spheres, the less likely we are to be able to influence what is recognised as ‘good’ research. The Board would like to encourage authors to engage critically with policy-oriented research and we, in turn, will try to maintain a watching brief on the ‘parallel universe’ in terms of reviews, reviewers and contributions.

None of the articles in this edition would satisfy the requirements for evidence-informed
practice. There may be those who would ask if some even satisfy the requirements that they should be about the education of adults (one of the journal’s criteria). Our reviewers (to whom we are eternally grateful) think they do. Each author has received feedback (often copious) and responded to that feedback in constructive and thoughtful ways to try to address the points made by reviewers. This is a long process and at least one article has taken about two years to reach publication.

However, despite their remarkable diversity, all five papers illuminate issues raised by at least one other author through common theoretical themes such as social capital, structural issues such as gender and class, and content issues such as literacy. Jocey Quinn’s paper on the re-imagined university draws from her research with both women staff in universities and women students; she critiques the notion of learning communities (a phrase associated with universities and other learning sites) suggesting that, for women, universities are rather more spaces of imagined communities than they are real ones. Alongside this idea of imagined communities, she suggests that the notion of ‘imagined social capital’ might extend our understanding of the ways in which we conceptualise social capital, particularly in contrast to the everyday (mundane) experiences of women in universities.

Pat Millar and Sue Kilpatrick’s paper also takes up the theme of social capital, although this time within the context of community development. Their work in Tasmania on community-based adult education programmes for disadvantaged communities of women leads them to suggest that we have to reconceptualise collaborative leadership as a process (rather than understanding leadership as being distributed amongst individuals) which emerges from collaborations between community members, groups, programmes and providers. Their ethnographic study details a familiar world in which initial high levels of enthusiasm and commitment tail off as women’s lives and previous educational experiences intervene; requirements such as filling in forms and writing assignments highlight literacy issues; national packages determine the curriculum.

By contrast, Pierre Walter’s ethnographic study of everyday literacy and numeracy practices amongst women on a community-based literacy programme in a small village in north-eastern Thailand suggests a rather different approach. His research shows how we have to understand women’s literacy as embedded within networks of family and community support, together with indigenous technologies of oral and visual communication. This challenges ‘the normative construction of our own valuing of individual literacy and numeracy’, and also focuses attention on the ways in which cooperation, mutual dependence and the ability to draw on and work within social networks can be seen as ‘new basic skills’. Taking the two papers together, I am struck by the ways in which community-based approaches, so much a part of Walter’s study, have constantly to be reinvented in so-called developed countries. In Walter’s study, social capital provides a solid basis for shared learning, whilst Millar and Kilpatrick’s study argues that shared learning is the basis for the development of social capital.

Following on from her earlier work on romantic fiction, Christine Jarvis argues that, as adult educators, we should look to popular culture to consider the kinds of representations of education available to furnish the popular imagination. Her take on the relationship of lifelong learning to the television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is that the series presents institutional learning for adults as destructive and suspect, and self-directed and dialogical education as painful and potentially dangerous, but essential for survival. She suggests that one of the reasons for the series’ preoccupation with education lies in the audience’s often-painful experiences in formal education and the difficulties of learning outside formal educational structures. Readers who are unfamiliar with the series (as I was) should not be put off: Jarvis draws on detailed analysis of several episodes to support her argument that we should take culture seriously.

Similarly, Dorothy Lander looks critically at the cultural phenomenon of wearing ribbons as popular education. Her wide-ranging argument threads through the paper which connects medieval Christian crusaders with the contemporary practice of ribbon-wearing, via the nineteenth century Canadian women’s temperance movement. She suggests that colour metaphors serve to reinscribe gender, class, race and religion-inspired symbolism into current consciousness and popular education practice. Her genealogy of colours for ribbons and their use at particular times by popular educators is fascinating, but raises serious questions for the so-called ‘positive’ association between ribbons and social movements. She challenges adult educators to ask questions about the performativity of ribbon work: ‘Where is the problem-posing and reflective learning from war among the citizens who tie yellow ribbons around trees . . .?’.