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Editorial, Volume 4, Number 1, Autumn 2002

Student voices in Access, Jonathan Brown

My study is sometimes needed as a third bedroom. So in the middle of the final editing of copy for this issue, I was required to clear up some of the piles of paper to make the room ready for its alternative use. Inevitably, such a process brings to the surface (and to the wandering attention) long-lost papers. So, it was, that I chanced across a dusty version of a talk given ten years ago. The Adult Learners’ Perspective (Brown, 1992) was the title of my contribution to a celebration (it should have been a wake). This well-attended conference marked the transfer of the Unit for the Development of Adult Continuing Education (UDACE) from an entirely benevolent host (NIACE) to a short-lived and more problematic home with the Further Education Unit (FEU). (It is noted that the then Head of UDACE now describes this move with commendable neutrality as ‘a tidying-up exercise’ by the then Department of Education and Science (McNair, 2001).)

On re-reading the accidentally-discovered ‘script’, I was struck both by how little had changed in ten years and how little my talk of 1992 relied upon the student voice. Indeed, the current issue of JACS makes the point so well in the papers from Warmington, and Gibson and Waters. So also does the recently published Accessing Education: Effectively Widening Participation (Burke, 2002), where the student voice is clearly evident. Indeed, Burke uses the contrasting discourses used in access and widening participation as a key part of her analysis. So that one of the key questions raised is:

How do these discourses frame and shape the experiences of access students and the subject positions available to them? (Burke, 2002, p 9)

Edwards (1998, p 24), writing of the professional development of guidance workers and counsellors, has argued that for the practitioner to understand the nature of their role and how their work meshes with theory, it is necessary to map and locate the dominant discourses. So that:

Practice can be located in a range of discourses - for example practitioner, professional academic - and capability can be said to be increased insofar as one can translate meanings within and around the practices of guidance and counselling.

If this is true of guidance and counselling, then it should equally well apply to the processes involved in access (including tutoring, learning, and indeed, guidance). Within these discourses that of the student will be a critical one, just as that of the user is for Edwards:

Although much emphasis is placed on the user as central to guidance and counselling practices, there are few discourses of the user within the area itself. Although it is the user who is positioned as having issues/problems to be addressed and the developmental needs to be met, it is only relatively recently that the users’ perspectives have been sought and their views published. (Edwards, 1998, p 31)

Translated to the perspective of the adult learner whose position I talked about in 1992, this sounds to be an apposite explanation. So in flagging-up the voice of the student in this issue of JACS, the hope is that we are adding to what was previously a more muted discourse.

The impact of Government policy and the often-unintended outcomes of policy change are articulated in the contributions from Diamond, and Martin and Williamson. Policies in the arenas of regeneration and of social inclusion are so well-intentioned and solutions so multi-faceted that perhaps the unintended is inevitable. Martin and Williamson plead for ‘new kinds of educational identities’ and at the end of their personal view say:

The current discourse on widening participation is a desperate attempt to prop up the old institutions and make them work in different ways. What we need are new kinds of institutions. And please, let there be much more fun in all this learning!

Fun would certainly be welcome.

The early days of any substantial project require its positioning and the asking of many questions. The questions posed by Cole are in an area of increasing Government interest and are critical to the nature of FE Colleges. It is hoped that there will be further reports on the impact of ‘mixed-age’ learning.

I am particularly pleased to publish a response to my last editorial, which extends and gives more substance to the idea of a pre-history to access. Crowther, in looking at some nineteenth-century movements for popular education and learning, contributes towards this debate. He sees this as relating to ‘developing a more equitable and inclusive society’. More thoughts on this would be welcome.

References

Brown J (1992) ‘The Adult Learners’ Perspective’, Educational Guidance News and Views, Summer, pp 1, 23-24.

Burke P J (2002) Accessing Education: Effectively Widening Participation, Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books.

Edwards R (1998) ‘Mapping, Locating and Translating: A Discursive Approach to Professional Development’, Studies in Continuing Education, vol 20(1), pp 23-38.

McNair S (2001) ‘UDACE - Unit for the Development of Adult Continuing Education’, in H Gilbert and H Prew (presenters) A Passion for Learning: Celebrating 80 Years of NIACE Support for Adult Learning, Leicester: NIACE.