at the decline of the Tory Party in Scotland coincided with the rise of Thatcher in England.
By contrast, Rebecca O’Rourke was fully aware of her own social class position. she was well aware of her working-class origins. But a significant difference was the way in which this awareness provided a positive focus for her commitment to teaching. Moreover, her class awareness was strongly associated with an awareness of gender, which was totally lacking in Brian’s account. Indeed, much of her teaching has been in the voluntary sector, or in partnership with this sector. Her first full-time job was in an administrative rather than a teaching role in a university continuing education department.
Nevertheless, at every opportunity, she did as much teaching as she could, even though her clerical, administrative and academic colleagues did not necessarily welcome this transgression of boundaries. Rebecca came to perceive clear hierarchical status divisions, which were in contradiction to her own egalitarian principles, as well as being incongruous with her relationship with students, through which she wished to play down the power relationships between teacher and student, preferring to emphasize the co-operative nature of teaching and learning. At the time (the late 1970s/early 1980s), there were very few women in university adult education in the UK, and there was a fairly obvious gender basis to differentiation and status that needed to be challenged. Rebecca did what she could but was overwhelmed and weighed down by the conservatism of the traditions she was working within, not just in the CE department, but in the university itself. Her radical progressive commitments were creating constant struggles, to the point where she had earned what she considered a negative reputation among colleagues. The weight of the tradition, the conservatism of her colleagues in a rapidly changing political economy, apart from a new and more interesting job opportunity elsewhere, led to her resignation.
She continued throughout the 1980s with a portfolio of part-time work, made up of quite diverse jobs, ranging from writing and research to political action, as well as teaching. Throughout this period, which she describes as one of collective activism, she still maintained her identity as a teacher, whether working with socially disadvantaged groups in inner city areas, or with women’s groups organized around specific interests, including gaining access for working class women into HE through what were becoming known as access programmes, and New Opportunities for Women. During this period out of university adult education, working in the public and voluntary sector, the political and educational worlds were changing, and her radical progressive ideals and practices were now timely and appropriate. Rebecca was appointed back into university adult education, this time as an academic. Inevitably, her activist principles heavily influenced her approach to, and her prioritisation of, teaching. Whilst she was able to undertake research (particularly for her doctorate), most of her satisfaction was (and still is) gained from teaching students. Although she has recently been promoted, career ambitions do not drive her interests; her political commitments, which are sometimes contradictory, and now more complex than they were when she first began working in university adult education, provide the basis of her sustained commitment to social justice. These commitments are brought together in her recent publication on creative writing (O’Rourke, 2005) in which she argues that the current dominance of educational values and processes in cultural policy is problematic for advocates of cultural action as a catalyst for radical social change. The book offers both a detailed ethnographic study and a historical account of creative writing in cultural policy and educational provision, and provides a contextual framework that highlights the contribution of adult education to cultural change and community development.
International and global influences
As well as party politics in democratic societies, another major influence on adult educators’ changing meanings of social purpose, has been the experience of coming into contact with other cultures where social purpose has different sets of meanings. We were part of a group of adult educators, from the United Kingdom and North America who took part in the Exchange programme mentioned earlier, which was sponsored by the Kellogg Foundation between 1984 and 1988. The scheme was intended to bring together those described as ‘young professors’ (not necessarily in terms of age, but rather in terms of the length of time spent in the field) from the US, Canada and the UK, to consider the global commitments of university adult education towards issues of democracy, social justice and world peace.
Twenty-one people took part in the Exchange programme. Just over a decade after the first Exchange, two of the participants took stock of where they were (Miller and Zukas 1995). By that time four had moved out of the field of adult education and one had died. Subsequently four of those remaining are known to have retired early from academic life.
Our initial sample was taken from those who participated in the British and North American professorial Exchange in 1984 and 1985. Efforts were made to trace the original participants and they were invited to take part in this study. The research has attempted to find out how significant the Exchange programme had been for the participants in terms of their own careers and biographies, and whether it had impacted on the construction of their own identities, practices and the values that underpinned their commitment to teaching adults, including social justice and equity. The qualitative data collection has been done through a mixture of face-to-face in-depth interviews, combined with the use of telephone and electronic forms of communication. In addition, a small number of the participants have written autobiographical accounts which have been drawn on to supplement the interview data. In the context of collecting these stories, we realized that the significance of social networks and that the stories being told were intertwined with others. So a decision was made to go beyond those directly involved in the Exchange, and to add stories from those whose lives had been touched by the influence of the Exchange on their practice.
One of the young professors, from the American side, was Stephen Brookfield. At this time, Stephen was keenly writing in order to get a tenured post which would enable him to get his green card. His early focus was on processes of adult learning, including independent and self-directed learning. Whilst he had read the writings of Illich and Freire, his influences were more likely to be Tough or Knowles, and only later Lindemann and Mezirow. However, in focusing on learning processes, it is evident that as he moved toward the promotion of critical thinking, that he was aware of the political significance of adult learning, and the importance of media literacy. Whilst overt references to social purpose or party politics were not explicit, he was aware of the political import of decisions about different strategies to adult learning. In an interview in 19961, following the publication of Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (1995), he said:
Group work is something I think I feel particularly strongly about because it is so uncritically celebrated … People do it because they want to make their classes more empathic and participatory and democratic. Those are all laudable aims, and I would support them. But I think the evangelical rhetoric sometimes overpowers attention to context and masks the fact that groups can be forums where egomaniacs can run wild and where some people's voices become silenced. Teachers can interpret students' talking actively.
He concluded that interview by stating that
Since I've begun to take my own advice seriously, I talk to my students much more. In the last ten years I've learned a hell of a lot. I think I'm a much better teacher than I was. Because I listen to them, I started to question so many assumptions, progressive democratic assumptions that I'd accepted. But it took me 15 - 20 years before I felt confident enough really to start questioning them and probing them; so maybe this kind of stance only comes after a period of experience. That's a question I'm really interested in.
In his most recent book, Brookfield (2005a) is raising issues of empowerment, racialised and feminised versions of adult learning in supposed democratic societies, and is drawing on European critical theorists for the tasks of challenging ideology, contesting hegemony, unmasking power, overcoming alienation, learning liberation, reclaiming reason and learning democracy.
Interviews with other North Americans as part of the study confirmed that their perspective on social purpose had been heavily influenced by global and international perspectives. Brookfield had initially spent a year (1980-81) at the University of British Columbia as a visiting professor, and he was by no means the only non-Canadian who was working at UBC at that time. Interviews with Dan Pratt and Tom Sork, themselves born in the USA, just how many faculty members had come across the border, and how many others had come from overseas, including Europe (including Kjell Rubenstein) and New Zealand (Roger Boshier). Being American in a Canadian university, although commonplace, was not particularly easy, but did have advantages, that both Dan and Tom talked about in their interviews, in terms of perspective-taking, seeing their own cultures differently, and bringing different perspectives into Canadian adult education teaching and research. This has enabled them to develop a thriving international community of scholars on the taught and research postgraduate degree programmes, including, more recently, an e-learning Masters delivered with European and Australian partners. In his interview, Tom revealed how significant adult education conferences were at the time in terms of networking for employment opportunities, and it was following an AERC conference in Vancouver, that Tom decided that is where he wanted to move to work, having spent some time at Florida State University, North Carolina and Nebraska in the US. Many of the stories told during the interviews talked about the importance of networking. International conferences, it would appear, among their many other purposes (Armstrong, Miller and Zukas, 1997, ix-xiii), add to social capital. Dan talked about how his cross-cultural perspectives on adult learning had been stimulated more by networking with graduate students.
We were concerned to find out how adult educators survived major shifts in political and economic discourses, in their global context. Miller and Zukas (1995) had already observed that the language and metaphors of the economist heard in the USA, which were strange to the British ear in 1984, were by 1995 commonplace. The impact of globalisation was very evident. One of the participants in Miller and Zukas’s study referred to the differences in awareness of political ideologies in the USA and the UK. Now this difference is understood as consensus politics in the UK.
Both authors of this paper, were very influenced by the international and global perspectives they engaged with following participation in this exchange. Nod Miller , for example, in thinking autobiographically, states
I entered university adult education in 1979, after a short career in further education and three years of postgraduate study in the sociology of education and the mass media. At that time I was relatively secure in my identities as a feminist, a marxist and a media sociologist. Although my reading of the literature on deschooling society (for example, Illich 1971) made me sceptical of any easy educational solution to social inequality and injustice, I was committed to doing whatever I could in my personal and professional lives to contribute to radical social change. My feminist perspective, underscored by the slogan ‘the personal is political’, meant that I saw the micropolitics of social interaction as important as involvement in large-scale political movements. My working-class origins were also very influential on my views about the need to work towards social equity in education. During the seventeen years that I spent in the University of Manchester, I worked with educators from all over the world, and spent a good deal of time debating the relationship between education and development. I was socialised into a more global perspective, and my perceptions of racism were sharpened massively by my interaction with colleagues and students from diverse nations and cultures, and by a number of professional visits to Third World countries.
Nod goes on to say, specifically about the exchange,
My involvement in the Kellogg Exchange opened up new worlds and brought me into contact with a new set of researchers and broadened immeasurably my theoretical and practical insights into adult education policy, research and practice. I visited the USA on numerous occasions following my initial Exchange visit, and also made professional trips to Australia, Canada, Brazil, India and Thailand. The important side benefits of such activities were the insights into my back-home practice, and, most satisfying, the close bonds I formed with my British fellow-travellers (such as the co-author of this paper).
Changing times, changing perspectives
The co-author of the paper, Paul Armstrong, was aware of the ways in which international and cultural exchanges made him much more aware of difference, but at the same time, what is was that different nations at similar stages of economic development had in common. It leads to a much deeper understanding of one’s own culture, and awareness of the specific political and economic context. In a recent review of the transatlantic exchange, Paul wrote:
Interestingly these developments were accompanied by significant changes in social and educational theory which were providing academic adult education researchers different lenses with which to interpret what was going on in the world. In 1984, the discourse of Marxist critique was still evident, if not more so, due to the explicit social control strategies of the right-wing governments, who were silencing the voice of the unions and collective solidarity through the promotion of individualism and competitiveness, and the polarisation of the powerful and the powerless. Indeed, some of us at that time were optimistic that Marx’s prediction about the inevitability of capitalism sowing the seeds of its own destruction was about to be realized. However, with trade unions’ power reduced, and the increase in individual competitiveness and rational goal-seeking ambition, the reliance on the Marxist grand narrative was to be undermined. Indeed, any socialist ideas and values were to be severely tested by the challenges of postmodernism. Since then, social and economic theory has taken a number of ‘turns’. (Armstrong, 2004, 38)
At the time, Paul’s writings were heavily theorized through Marxism, particularly Gramsci (Armstrong, 1988). From the mid- 1980s to the mid-1990s, his papers delivered at the Adult Education Research Conference were primarily theoretical, but significantly shifted from a marxist grand narrative to a more postmodern discourse, in which he revisited earlier sociological theories of Durkheim and Marx. On reflection, he felt that his task was, possibly patronizingly, to take sociological theory as applied to the education of adults, and addressed through social purpose discourse to the North American communities of practitioners and researchers.
Nod outlines how a similar shift took place in her ways of knowing during this period of change:
My interest in conferences as learning events meant that I was frequently critical of the annual conferences which I attended. I was also critical of the what I perceived to be the largely white, male establishment in several of the professional organ
I entered university adult education in 1979, after a short career in further education and three years of postgraduate study in the sociology of education and the mass media. At that time I was relatively secure in my identities as a feminist, a marxist and a media sociologist. Although my reading of the literature on deschooling society (for example, Illich 1971) made me sceptical of any easy educational solution to social inequality and injustice, I was committed to doing whatever I could in my personal and professional lives to contribute to radical social change. My feminist perspective, underscored by the slogan ‘the personal is political’, meant that I saw the micropolitics of social interaction as important as involvement in large-scale political movements. My working-class origins were also very influential on my views about the need to work towards social equity in education. During the seventeen years that I spent in the University of Manchester, I worked with educators from all over the world, and spent a good deal of time debating the relationship between education and development. I was socialised into a more global perspective, and my perceptions of racism were sharpened massively by my interaction with colleagues and students from diverse nations and cultures, and by a number of professional visits to Third World countries.
Nod goes on to say, specifically about the exchange,
My involvement in the Kellogg Exchange opened up new worlds and brought me into contact with a new set of researchers and broadened immeasurably my theoretical and practical insights into adult education policy, research and practice. I visited the USA on numerous occasions following my initial Exchange visit, and also made professional trips to Australia, Canada, Brazil, India and Thailand. The important side benefits of such activities were the insights into my back-home practice, and, most satisfying, the close bonds I formed with my British fellow-travellers (such as the co-author of this paper).
Changing times, changing perspectives
The co-author of the paper, Paul Armstrong, was aware of the ways in which international and cultural exchanges made him much more aware of difference, but at the same time, what is was that different nations at similar stages of economic development had in common. It leads to a much deeper understanding of one’s own culture, and awareness of the specific political and economic context. In a recent review of the transatlantic exchange, Paul wrote:
Interestingly these developments were accompanied by significant changes in social and educational theory which were providing academic adult education researchers different lenses with which to interpret what was going on in the world. In 1984, the discourse of Marxist critique was still evident, if not more so, due to the explicit social control strategies of the right-wing governments, who were silencing the voice of the unions and collective solidarity through the promotion of individualism and competitiveness, and the polarisation of the powerful and the powerless. Indeed, some of us at that time were optimistic that Marx’s prediction about the inevitability of capitalism sowing the seeds of its own destruction was about to be realized. However, with trade unions’ power reduced, and the increase in individual competitiveness and rational goal-seeking ambition, the reliance on the Marxist grand narrative was to be undermined. Indeed, any socialist ideas and values were to be severely tested by the challenges of postmodernism. Since then, social and economic theory has taken a number of ‘turns’. (Armstrong, 2004, 38)
At the time, Paul’s writings were heavily theorized through Marxism, particularly Gramsci (Armstrong, 1988). From the mid- 1980s to the mid-1990s, his papers delivered at the Adult Education Research Conference were primarily theoretical, but significantly shifted from a marxist grand narrative to a more postmodern discourse, in which he revisited earlier sociological theories of Durkheim and Marx. On reflection, he felt that his task was, possibly patronizingly, to take sociological theory as applied to the education of adults, and addressed through social purpose discourse to the North American communities of practitioners and researchers.
Nod outlines how a similar shift took place in her ways of knowing during this period of change:
My interest in conferences as learning events meant that I was frequently critical of the annual conferences which I attended. I was also critical of the what I perceived to be the largely white, male establishment in several of the professional organisations which I encountered. I was vocal in my criticisms, and worked with like-minded colleagues to make what were designed to be feminist or marxist interventions in academic communities, running ‘alternative’ workshops or making impassioned speeches in business meetings. I saw myself as engaged in a struggle conducted from the margins of each professional groups. However, it was only a short time before I found myself making bids for formal power in these organisations, and for six years between 1985 and 1993 I chaired two national associations. From my marxist perspective of the time, I saw myself being incorporated into the establishment, and recognised that my power to change structures and processes (or, at least, to surprise and shock) was somewhat diminished as a result.
This had an impact on her theoretical view of the world and her practice:
In 1995 I moved to a new job in the University of East London, a new (post-1992) university. I was attracted by this university’s reputation for widening participation in higher education, and for pedagogic innovation, as well as by the title (which I still hold, although the department has disappeared) of professor of innovation studies. However, many of my colleagues (in both Manchester and East London) clearly saw as incomprehensible my move from a star-rated research department in an old, elite university to an undergraduate department in a former polytechnic with a low research base.
I was energised by my shift of location, and stimulated by the multi-cultural environment of East London. At the same time I was shocked by some of the differences between my old and new institutions, particularly in terms of the anxiety and low morale of my new colleagues. I soon learned how easy it is to be ground down by constantly seeing one’s place of work castigated for high ‘wastage’ rates and notable for its appearance close to the bottom of newspaper league tables of university performance.
My belief that there was huge potential in this diverse, working-class, demotic university led me to seek out the Vice-Chancellor (something I should not have dreamed of doing in Manchester) and outlined some of my ideas for putting UEL on the map by highlighting the university as a prime example of lifelong learning in practice. Two years after my initial meeting with the V-C, I was assistant vice-chancellor for lifelong learning, responsible for co-ordinating strategic efforts in this area across the institution, and directing a year-long festival of lifelong learning to mark the millennium.
If I ended my tale here, it could fit quite neatly into a narrative model of the heroine’s journey. However, the festival of lifelong learning was not exactly the triumph for which I had hoped. It began well, and we assembled an impressive programme of events, but soon after its launch fears of financial meltdown for the university, anxieties about audit and damaging press coverage of failing, ‘mickey mouse’ universities brought staff morale to rock bottom. Furthermore, it seemed that there was widespread perception of lifelong learning as a capitalist, New Labour plot amongst colleagues with whom I hoped to form alliances. Celebrating learning was really hard work.
Four years on, there has been a complete overhaul of senior management and our university has a new corporate team. Faculties and departments have been replaced by schools, and innovation studies is no more. The post of assistant vice-chancellor (lifelong learning) has disappeared. I still occupy a cross-institutional position as head of the university’s graduate school, and greatly enjoy my work with doctoral students. I no longer spend most of my week in committees, which is a relief. But sometimes I am frustrated by a lack of opportunity or ability to influence widespread change from where I am. And at the end of an exhausting and confusing year, I have no clear sense of where I belong or where I am going next. I still see myself as a feminist; I don’t know whether I’m still a sociologist; I don’t call myself a marxist much; most of all, I think I’m a postmodern subject.
Ian Bryant and Rennie Johnston, together (Usher, Bryant and Johnston, 1997) and separately (Usher and Bryant, 1989; Bryant and Usher, 1997) had worked with Robin Usher, who with Richard Edwards (1994, 2001) were to make the most significant break with orthodoxy in terms of social and political perspectives through engagement with postmodern ideas and concepts. In interviews, both Ian and Rennie presented themselves as being pragmatic and located in practice (‘streetwise’ is how Rennie described himself), and both considered this was important in their writing and research projects Robin Usher, who preferred to play ideas, concepts and discourse. More than any other factor, they suggested, that the shifts in the theory in the 1990os had a much deeper and more profound impact on practice in university adult education than party politics and ideologies. Besides, through the lends of postmodernity, with an emphasis on diversity and difference in a global context, national and even regional politics was showing signs of developing a consensus, as political ideas around citizenship and democracy were being re-visioned not only across Europe, but the globe.
The fragmentation of social theory and political practice did more than the radical right for neutralizing social purpose. Rennie’s continued interest in civil society and citizenship (Johnston, 1998; and Coare and Johnston, 2003) was revitalized through a postmodern lens, and in particular, the ideas of Giddens and Beck on the risk society. Because
the world is becoming increasingly complex and unpredictable demonstrated for example in a rapidly changing and fragmenting global labour market, the pervasiveness of marketisation and consumerism, the new questions being raised about the role and funding of the welfare state, the exponential growth of the information society, a wider acknowledgement and assertion of cultural diversity and pluralism and a growing recognition of a global learning divide between ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ (Johnston, 1998, 138)
Rennie saw his task as bridging the gap between ‘radical rhetoric’ and ‘conservative practice’. The risk society poses questions about how social purpose can be sustained whilst engaging ‘usefully’ within civil society.
Whilst not included in the sample for this research project, the writings of Ian Martin are important for providing a critical analysis of the shifting conception of social purpose in these changing times, especially around notions of citizenship. Coare and Johnston (2002) recognise this new discourse, and acknowledge the shifting meanings and connotations of citizenship. Whilst their recent European Social Fund project working to promote the voice of community activism from a diverse range of ethnic communities, including both refugees and asylum seekers is built around a reconstructed notion of what it means to be a ‘good citizen’, an alternative view is provided by Martin, who is conscious that a reconceptualisation of citizenship will inevitably be linked to a transformed notion of social purpose. Martin talks about the need to sustain social purpose. He warns of the dangers of citizenship (Martin, 2003a) He argues that adult education in the HE sector still has the creative space to reconnect the social purpose agenda to hope through supporting local struggles as well providing a critical understanding of global capitalism. However, the academy needs to be stretched (Martin and Shaw, 1999). His conception of social purpose sustains the idea of a just social order, for collective benefit rather than individual improvement, and the location of educational practice back into its political policy context.
In short, Martin is arguing that education is now presented as sanitized and diversionary discourse, which neglects the need to engage in political debate; instead of citizenship being put back into politics, as the Crick Report (1998) sought to do through the UK’s national curriculum for schools, politics needs to be put back into citizenship (Martin, 2003b).
Telling stories: the significance of narrative and auto/biography
The nature and style of this paper, based as it is on a mixture of biography, autobiography and life writings is appropriate since the fourth and final theme to be picked up through the research are the significant shifts and changes in research methodology over this 25 year period. Although within sociology there had been a growing acceptance of qualitative methodologies and a rejection of positivist and empiricist research, that shift had yet to impact fully on adult education research. Although the research that underlies this paper was stimulated, in part, by Fieldhouse’s previous published research, there is no way that this could have been a simple replication of his original survey research. As a historian, we need to be grateful to him for breaking away from historicism and engaging in historiography. However, Fieldhouse is not a social scientist, and his monograph reflects this in terms of his uncritical use of the survey methodology.
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