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Editor's Letter - February 2006

If there is a theme that runs through this issue of Adults Learning it is that of dialogue: dialogue between teachers and learners, between providers and their partners, between community activists and academic specialists.

Cristina Da Milano’s account of a remarkable offender learning project at the prison of Rebibbia Nuovo Complesso, in Rome, shows what can be achieved when socially excluded learners are treated as equal partners with a real say in what they do.

The work she describes is grounded in the idea that culture, a powerful instrument of exclusion, can also be a means of social inclusion. Prisoners used objects discovered in archaeological digs at the prison, which is built on an ancient Roman site, to develop a museum within the prison walls. In addition to practical skills and training in the care and understanding of archaeological objects, the prisoners gained an improved sense of self-consciousness and of citizenship.

The dialogical approach used in developing this programme reflects a faith in human potential, and a commitment to creating opportunities for it to flourish, which is shared by popular education. Popular education, as defined by Jim Crowther, Vernon Galloway and Ian Martin in Popular Education: Engaging the Academy (NIACE, 2005), is rooted in the real interests and struggles of ordinary people. It is also committed to forging direct links between education and progressive social and political change, with a curriculum that stems from the experience and interests of communities.

Eurig Scandrett, Tara O’Leary and Teresa Martinez describe how Friends of the Earth Scotland has used popular education methodology to encourage ‘a reflexive dialogue’ between academic specialists and communities struggling with issues of environmental justice. FoES’s understanding of environmental justice developed ‘largely through the experiences of adult education work with communities involved in struggling against environmental damage in their localities’.

Their article examines two FoES projects involving community-based, popular education. Through these projects the social needs of the communities are addressed by accessing the ‘relevant knowledges of educators, whether academic specialists or experienced activists in the NGO or the university’. But the process of knowledge generation itself ‘is embedded in the dialogue with the activists engaged in struggle’.

Projects such as these create spaces in which the voices of people struggling to improve their lives and the lives of their communities can be heard. Despite the current policy rhetoric around ‘choice’ and ‘localism’, voices of this sort are rarely audible. Real learner participation at conferences and other events which might shape policy remains elusive.

It’s time we started listening. We might even learn something.  

Paul Stanistreet, Editor, Adults Learning