Fresh Perspectives on Later Life Learning

Brian Findsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138604919
• eBook ISBN: 9780429887369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Erwachsenenbildung

Over the last decade there has been a resurgence of interest in what adults learn in their later years (often described as beyond 65) and how this learning is linked to current personal, social and global issues. This learning commonly occurs in informal ways as seniors go about their daily lives. This kind of informal learning can be supplemented by non-formal education (via participation in planned learning as members of organizations) and less frequently in formal education structures such as universities.

This book highlights how older people are learning in a myriad of ways and conditions. It covers everything from individualistic learning through to national issues of older adult education. Fresh perspectives are provided on biographical insights into retirement and higher education, how older people generate know-how in the company of others and in cross-cultural aspects, such as Chinese elders in Hong Kong and M?ori seniors in Aotearoa New Zealand. In addition, the links between health and learning are explored, as well as the commitment universities in three countries have made to become age-friendly.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Lifelong Education.

Retirement, learning and the role of Higher Education

Anne Jamieson

ABSTRACT
This article brings together some of the main findings from research on older learners, conducted and published by the author over a period of 10 years. This research investigated the characteristics, motivations and benefits of formal learning. The samples were drawn from among both students and graduates from a London university. Data were collected both through questionnaire surveys, including a follow-up study, and life history interviews. The material collected was analysed in a variety of ways, building up a picture of the meanings of formal learning for different individuals and at different points of the life course, including retirement. The author, having herself retired and become ‘an older learner’, ends with a discussion of the meanings of learning in her own retirement, in the context of her research findings.

The research context

This article will examine what education means to people in later life, particularly in retirement. The focus is on formal learning, that is, structured classroom activities with clear learning objectives, sometimes, though not necessarily, resulting in a recognised qualification.¹ The adult learners who were the focus in this research, attended classes in a university setting or organised by the university (extramural studies), and would seem clearly to fall within the definition of formal learning. The programmes of ‘extra-mural studies’, as the name suggests, were not part of the mainstream university system. However, teaching and assessment were at first-year undergraduate level. When the research first started, there were a few courses on offer that were not assessed, but during the period of the research, funding policies changed, and eventually all courses became assessed. As will be discussed below, students taking these courses ranged from those aiming for a qualification to those studying purely for interest and who did not take part in any assessment. What follows will seek to bring together the research undertaken since the mid-90s, and reflect on some of the main findings that emerged over the years.

In addition to this review, one new perspective will be added: that of my own personal experience engaging in learning as an older adult. I have now myself ‘arrived’. In fact, I have been here for some years. That is, being in my 70th year, I now definitely count as one of the ‘older people’ that I have over the years been studying, teaching and writing about. Having been retired for nearly five years, and during this time participated in many educational activities, I see an opportunity to reflect on my research in the light of my own experience, and vice versa. Biography has long been an accepted as an illuminative addition to quantitative work, not least in ageing research (see, for example, Bornat, 2002). Autobiography, despite its obvious limitations, has the potential to yield interesting insights, especially if linked to more large-scale findings. (Jefferys, 1997). As an academic who researched ageing and adult/older learners for many years, I learned a great deal from my ‘study participants’ about the different strategies individuals adopt to manage their post-retirement stage – the third age. I was in a sense provided with a series of possible maps depicting the road to and through the third age, as will become evident below. Many of these maps made a deep impression on me and have no doubt provided inspiration for my own ‘third age’ (Laslett, 1991).

Several factors brought me into the area of lifelong/later life learning: first, as a gerontologist, I was of course interested in later life, and more specifically, the life course of adults. I shall return to this below. More pragmatically, as a lecturer, based since the early 1990s at a university college serving mature students, I became aware of the large number of older people attending courses of various kinds. My curiosity was raised as to why this was so and what role this played in their lives. Furthermore, I had convenient access to different groups of potential research populations. Finally, I succeeded in obtaining financial support from several research funders.

From reviewing existing research on later life learning/education, certain trends were evident: only a small minority of older people – be they defined as 60+ or 65+ – participate in classes. They tend to be already well educated, and more women than men participate. In terms of motivation, research studies would often – and still do – list a range of options, often distinguishing between factors such as ‘subject interest’; ‘intellectual stimulation’ and ‘to meet people’. There were attempts to theorise in the form of classification of learners, as, for example, Swindell’s (1993) grouping of individuals by motivation into those who were ‘product oriented’ (seeking knowledge) and those who were ‘person oriented’ (seeking social contact). As regards outcomes or benefits, most studies of learners find them reporting positively, indeed enthusiastically, on the benefits, and there is no shortage of publications advocating learning as a way to improve health and general quality of life (e.g. Dench & Regan, 2000; Schuller & Watson, 2009).

The questions this research raised for me were:

•What exactly is it about individuals that attract them to learning?

•What exactly is it about education (formal learning) that attracts and benefits individuals?

The first question is the most pertinent one: it is by now well established that in many respects, diversity among the adult population increases with age. In other words, it is problematic, if not futile, to generalise about ‘older people’. We need to know, not just how older learners differ from ‘non-learners’, but the ways in which older learners differ among themselves, and therefore the variety of ways in which individuals may benefit from formal learning.

The second of these questions concerns the learning setting, both the type of institution (e.g. university, community centre) and the classroom setting, the pedagogical approach, the level of teaching/learning, (e.g. Higher Education qualification or non-assessed course), and the subject taught.

The research: older learners in a Higher Education setting

The research I have conducted over a period of 10 years has largely focused on these questions, using both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Being based at Birkbeck, University of London, I had access to populations of adult learners. It had until the late 1990s a large department or centre offering extramural studies, that is, open access courses, which attracted a large number of students who did not necessarily aim for a qualification. Among these were many retired people. Extramural qualifications did exist, in the form of certificates and diplomas, and many took these and went on to the mainstream degree study.

During this period of research, funding criteria changed, and the emphasis on qualifications became more prominent. Public funding was cut for courses that did not result in a qualification. Eventually all these courses were ‘mainstreamed’, and the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies ceased to exist. At present, students can still enrol on an open access programme or module, but the fees are extremely high, and there are practically no older students now. When I retired myself in 2011, courses I had been looking forward to doing in my retirement were no longer affordable, if available at all. This trend is not unique for Birkbeck. Most extramural-type programmes have now disappeared from the Higher Education sector. Some Further Education colleges offer courses, as do various community institutions, the Workers’ Educational Association and the University of the Third Age.

The following are the research projects referred to in this article:

•Residential summer school study 1996. A questionnaire study of 90 participants in a residential summer school, organized by the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies, Birkbeck, University of London. Thirteen respondents were interviewed in depth, taking a biographical approach (Jamieson, Miller, & Stafford, 1998).

•Education and the adult years study 2000 and 2005. A large-scale questionnaire study of nearly 800 newly enrolled students in the Birkbeck Centre for Extra-Mural Studies. A follow-up study was undertaken of this population five years later. Forty-two biographical interviews were conducted at stage 1, and 34 at stage 2 (Adshead & Jamieson, 2008; Jamieson, 2007a; Jamieson & Adshead, 2007).

•The benefits of part-time Higher Education Study 2003–2006. This was a collaborative study between Birkbeck and the Open University, aimed at investigating the benefits of part-time undergraduate study. It entailed three waves of data collection through questionnaires to all graduates (Bachelors, Diplomas and Certificates), and yielded over 3000 responses (about half from each institution) (Jamieson, 2007b; Jamieson, Sabates, Woodley, & Feinstein, 2009).

None of these studies was specifically selecting older learners, but included all adults enrolled on courses. However, it became quite clear that a significant proportion of students, especially, though not exclusively, in the Centre for Extra-Mural Studies (20% in 2000), were aged 60 and above

Questions addressed

Overall, these projects together yielded vast amounts of information about adult learners in a Higher Education (HE) setting: younger and older; newly enrolled and graduates; those studying for a qualification and those who did not. The quantitative and qualitative data presented opportunities for many different kinds of analysis. The research team gathered information not only about students’ backgrounds, motivations and study experience, but, through the biographical interviews and prospective longitudinal approach, we learnt about their life courses, including other learning experiences outside the HE sector, before and following their period of study. Thus, we were able to understand more about their learning/study trajectories and their meanings in the broader context of people’s lives.

The following sections draw on selected parts of this work to address the following:

•Older students, an overview: using quantitative material, this section explores the socio-economic characteristics and reported benefits of study, and compares them with those of the younger part-time students.

•A life course perspective. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, this section will address more in-depth questions about the meaning of education over the life course and in retirement.

•What does education offer? Using mainly qualitative material, this section will explore the issues in terms of provision, examining the different components of formal study that attract (different) older people and the role of a HE qualification.

•Personal reflection. The final section will conclude with some reflections on my personal experience and discuss this in the context of my research findings.

Older students: an overview

Socio-economic characteristics

The baseline study of extramural students in 2000 showed that just under one in five were aged 60 and above (Jamieson & Adshead, 2007). This group consisted of people who had enrolled on a course/module, typically a two-hour session per week. Some of these would go on to complete a certificate or diploma, but most would not. Thus, our study of graduates (Jamieson et al., 2009) showed that 8% of all graduates were aged 60+. Two-thirds had taken a certificate/diploma level qualification, and the remainder had graduated with a bachelor’s or master’s degree.

The great majority of those aged 60+ who enrolled on an extramural course were retired people. There were, as expected, more females than males, though more so for younger age groups than the 60+ group, where as many as 43% were male. The tendency for a higher proportion of over 60s learners to be male is likely to be a cohort effect, linked to their prior higher educational level. Thus, as has been well documented in other research, supported from our research, upper/middle class people (i.e. those who are already relatively highly educated) are over-represented among adult, particularly older learners. Over half of those over 60 already had a degree. As regards marital status, married men and women were over-represented among older learners. This has been noted in other studies (see Dench & Regan, 2000), and we found in our study that widowhood was not the most important trigger to embark on studying.

Benefits of study

In our ‘Education and the adult years’ study (Jamieson, 2007b), respondents were asked a completely open question, inviting them to list the benefits of study. Subject-specific knowledge was reported as the most important benefit, followed by general intellectual stimulation, personal development and lastly the student contacts. For all these benefits, there were no significant differences between younger and older age groups. The (misguided) view that older learners are just there ‘for the fun’, for social reasons, is not born out of this evidence. The item ‘Meeting new people/making friends’ was not highlighted as a benefit by many, whether old or young. In the five-year follow-up study (Jamieson & Adshead, 2007), respondents were presented with a list of options of wider benefits (i.e. other than those related to work and study progression), from which they could tick as many as they liked. One finding that stood out was that, when prompted, respondents tended to identify many benefits, not spontaneously listed in the open-ended question, as applicable to them – a reminder perhaps of how knowledge is socially constructed (Berger & ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Retirement, learning and the role of Higher Education
• 2. Older learning engagement in the modern city
• 3. The company of others: generating knowhow in later life
• 4. Ageing, learning and health: making connections
• 5. Age Friendly Universities and engagement with older adults: moving from principles to practice
• 6. Learning in later life: a bicultural perspective from Aotearoa/New Zealand
• 7. Later life learning experiences: listening to the voices of Chinese elders in Hong Kong
• Index