Gender, Masculinities and Lifelong Learning

Marion Bowl, Robert Tobias, Jennifer Leahy, Graeme Ferguson, Jeffrey Gage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415667586
• eBook ISBN: 9781136294730
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Erwachsenenbildung

Gender, Masculinities and Lifelong Learning reflects on current debates and discourses around gender and education, in which some academics, practitioners and policy-makers have referred to a crisis of masculinity. This book explores questions such as: Are men under-represented in education? Are women outstripping men in terms of achievement? What evidence supports the view that men are becoming educationally disadvantaged?

Drawing on research from a number of countries, including the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the contributors' discuss a range of issues which intersect with gender to impact on education, including structural factors such as class, ethnicity and age as well as colonisation and migration. The book provides evidence and argument to illuminate contemporary debates about the involvement of men and women in education, including:

• The impact of colonisation on the gendering of education and lifelong learning
• International surveys on men, women and educational participation
• Gender, masculinities and migrants' learning experiences
• Boys-only classes as a response to 'the problem of underachieving boys'
• Men's perspectives on learning to become parents
• Community learning, gender and public policy
• Older men's perspectives on (re-)entering post-compulsory education

The book goes on to suggest the implications for practice, research and policy. Importantly, it critically addresses some of the taken-for-granted beliefs about men and their engagement in lifelong learning, presenting new evidence to demonstrate the complexity of gender and education today. With these complexities in mind, the authors provide a framework for developing further understanding of the issues involved with gender and lifelong learning.

Gender, Masculinities and Lifelong Learning will be of interest to any practitioner open to fresh ideas and approaches in teaching and programming connected with gender and education.

Part I

Concepts, theories and current debates

Chapter I

Gender, masculinities and lifelong learning

Entering the debate

Marion Bowl and Rober t Tobias

This chapter presents our reasons for embarking on this book and our aims in bringing it to publication. It goes on to explain how some of the terms which recur throughout the book are defined by us and, finally, to outline the book’s structure. The book arises from our discomfort about, and disagreement with, discourses surrounding what is regarded as male ‘underachievement’ and ‘under-representation’ in some forms of education. Briefly, these discourses rest on claims that there is currently a ‘crisis of masculinity’ or at the very least increasing confusion regarding the character of masculinity and men’s position in relation to the family, the economy, the state and civil society. These concerns have been expressed by writers in countries including Australia (Biddulph 1995, 1997), Aotearoa New Zealand (Lashlie 2005), the United States of America (Faludi 1999; Tiger 1999; Mansfield 2006; Sax 2009, 2010); and the United Kingdom (McGivney 1999, 2004; Sutherland and Marks 2001). Issues of boys’ educational achievement and men’s participation in education are also a topic of debate among practitioners and policy makers. It has been argued by some that boys and men are increasingly educationally disadvantaged relative to girls and women. Whilst this discourse has been effectively challenged in relation to schooling (Epstein et al. 1998; Francis and Skelton 2005; Skelton et al. 2006; Archer and Francis 2007), it persists in and pervades the field of lifelong learning and adult and community education (ACE).

Our sense that there was a need for this book was the result of discussions and debates which took place during 2007 with colleagues who teach and organize adult and community education, and who write and research in the field of lifelong learning. As adult education academics and practitioners we felt an intuitive resistance to a discourse – reflected in the media – of ‘failing boys’, ‘missing men’ and ‘gender gaps’ in education. One of the practitioner responses to this discourse has been to argue for provision that is in some way specifically ‘male’, premised on assumptions about men’s particular need for activities which ‘satisfy men’s desire for practical experiences’ (ACE Aotearoa 2007: 2). These assumptions include some or all of the following:

•	that there is inequality of opportunity for men in the sphere of lifelong learning;
•	that community-based education is a ‘feminized’ space;
•	that there is a need for specifically ‘male’ forms of educational provision.

The Men’s Sheds movement in particular (Golding et al. 2007) has sought to provide a community space specifically for men, in which they can engage in ‘hands on’ activities based primarily on construction and practising craft skills such as woodwork and metal work. Whilst we would not argue against the provision of educational opportunities to meet the diverse needs of men and women – learning separately or together – we view some of the suggested solutions to the assumed problem as representing, at best, an over-simplification of the issues involved in gender and lifelong learning. At worst, some of the concern about men’s participation has been hijacked in the service of an anti-feminist discourse which blames feminism, women teachers and women themselves for changing trends in educational participation. It is our view that, in spite of the gains of feminism in many industrialized countries from the 1970s onwards, many women remain disadvantaged in the spheres of education, work and social life.

While we recognize the desirability of a range of provision, including activity-based, practically-focused non-formal education, we contest the view that forms of educational provision can be, or should be, understood as masculine or feminine. This view represents a stereotyped and essentialist notion (Fuss 1990) of what it is to be male or female and a simplification of the complex interactions between class, ethnicity, age, sexuality and gender which shape educational aspiration and engagement. It also tends to reduce lifelong learning to an exclusive focus on activity, downplaying its potential to facilitate critical engagement and transformative learning (Foley 1999; Crowther 2000), which raises questions about gender and other power inequalities.

We do not dispute that, in the countries alluded to above, there is evidence that a greater proportion of women than men are involved in community-based adult education; however, we remain unconvinced by the evidence for a generalized and growing gender gap. We would argue that the reasons for women’s involvement in forms of community-based education relate, first, to their relative exclusion from other forms of education and training and, second, to the success of feminist educators in offering forms of education which have engaged with marginalized women. Furthermore, we note that in a number of countries discussed in this book, adult and community education is the area which has suffered most grievously from the effects of spending cutbacks, thereby predominantly disadvantaging women looking to return to education.

Our aim for this book is to explore what we see as a more complex, nuanced and sometimes contradictory situation in our field of practice. The book appraises critically some of the assumptions currently being made about gender and lifelong learning; in doing so we draw on historical sources, international literature and recent research around gender and education and men and their participation in learning.

We begin this introductory chapter by defining some of the key terms in the field of lifelong learning and indicate how we have used the terms in the book. We then outline the structure of the book and the contributions of its chapter authors, before moving on in Chapter 2 to present the theoretical framework on which we, as the book’s editors, agree. Overall the book argues that gender is but one of several key structural forces that have influenced education and learning over the past centuries. Other forces which have comparable impact, and which intersect with those of gender, include class, ethnicity, colonization, sexuality and age. In the light of this, the book provides evidence and argument to illuminate contemporary debates about the involvement of women and men in lifelong learning. It is worth stressing, however, that the extent to which invited chapter authors felt able to sign up to these theoretical assumptions varied – an indication perhaps that this is a debate which continues.

In arriving at a title for this book we also had to engage in discussion among ourselves about the terminology of our field of enquiry. It is to this we turn before moving on to outline the book’s structure.

Defining the field of lifelong learning and education: some key concepts

Confusion and conflicts over terminology in the field of lifelong learning have a long history. It is worth noting that all definitions are contextual: they arise out of particular material conditions and serve specific social and political purposes within particular historical contexts. In this section we briefly introduce some of the terminology which is central to this book and discuss some of the problems of definition which beset writers and practitioners in this field.

Education, learning and lifelong learning

The concept of education is an ambiguous one; its meaning has shifted historically. To call an activity ‘educational’ is to ascribe social value to it; and to say that someone is ‘educated’ or ‘uneducated’ implies a normative and evaluative judgment. However, the social values and the criteria underlying these judgments are not necessarily self-evident. They are strongly influenced by wider social forces and by the struggles of groups and movements to shape their destinies. As Raymond Williams (1983: 111–112) has suggested, the original meaning of the term ‘to educate’ was ‘to rear or bring up children’. It was only in the late eighteenth century that it came to be used in a more specialized sense to refer predominantly to ‘organised teaching and instruction’. Williams pointed out that distinctions between the ‘educated’ and ‘uneducated’ were made more commonly from the nineteenth century onwards – the very time when organized education was beginning to be widely developed. He argued further: ‘There is a strong class sense in this use, and the level indicated by (the word) “educated” has been continually adjusted to leave the majority of people who have received an education below it.’ Education therefore, and its companion term ‘training’ – which is frequently used to indicate a more instrumental, and less theoretical relationship with knowledge – are both terms which carry ideological messages.

If there are difficulties associated with the word education, the same is also true of the concept of learning. Stephen Yeo (1996) has argued that learning, unlike education, is an active and inclusive word, and hence is unconstrained by the notions attached to ‘education’. Learning, like breathing, is something that everyone does all the time, even if they do not realize it. And yet even the concept of learning is not innocent: its use is shaped by ongoing historical struggles, within which claims are made about the varying degrees of social importance of different forms of learning. Learning is closely linked with culture, and cultural traditions are not neutral. They embody values and relations of power. Moreover, learning does not occur in a vacuum, it takes place in a variety of social contexts; these vary in their degree of formalization and are shaped by various forms of social control. Indeed there are those (see for example Snook 2001; Jackson 2011) who argue that to refer in a policy sense to learning rather than education can have the effect of individualizing and atomizing highly complex social processes, masking the political and social basis of all forms of attitude formation and knowledge and skill acquisition, and denying the value-laden nature of all forms of learning and education. It tends to shift focus away from education as a citizen’s right and towards learning as an individual’s responsibility. In this formulation, the lifelong learner must constantly demonstrate willingness to retrain, up-skill and adapt in response to changing economic and social conditions.

Historically, the focus for discussion of education and learning has tended to be on young people and formal schooling. However, from the 1970s onwards, in particular, the term lifelong learning has been central to policy discussion nationally and internationally, sponsored through UNESCO, the OECD and the European Union (Lengrand 1970; Faure 1972; Dave 1976; OECD, 1996; Delors 1996). This focus on learning throughout life has acted as a counterbalance to the emphasis on formal schooling. However, the meaning of the term lifelong learning has been shaped to a variety of sometimes conflicting policy aims – an issue which has been discussed at length in the lifelong learning literature (Coffield 2000; Field 2000; Leathwood and Francis, 2006; Burke and Jackson 2007; Jackson 2011).

In its widest interpretation, ‘lifelong learning’ refers to the whole spectrum of learning activity from ‘cradle to grave’ and from formal schooling to incidental and unplanned learning. However, it is most commonly associated with post-compulsory education and the education and training of adults. Latterly, the term ‘lifelong learning’ has been ‘captured’ by hegemonic notions of human capital, the knowledge economy and training for work (Coffield 2000). It has also become something of a platitude, disguising a discourse of individualism, competition and unequal power and economic relations which remain structured by gender, ethnicity, age and class (Burke and Jackson, 2007; Leathwood and Francis, 2006; Jackson, 2011).

As editors we had some hesitation in using the term ‘lifelong learning’ in the title of this book. Whilst the notion that we learn throughout the life span and in informal and non-formal as well as formal contexts is scarcely a new one, the adoption of ‘lifelong learning’ as a central policy concept has left it at the mercy of a range of political agendas. For good or ill, however, educators have become caught up in these debates and these contested agendas. For the purpose of this book, we use the term ‘lifelong learning’ to refer to all educational activities in formal, non-formal and informal contexts, but with a particular emphasis on those which take place with and among adults and outside compulsory schooling.

Formal, non-formal and informal education and learning

The significance of non-formal and informal learning has long been recognized by those educators who have sought to expand notions of education beyond that which is ‘provided’ by educational institutions (Freire, 1972; Foley, 1999; Crowther et al. 1999, 2005; Brookfield, 2005). Non-formal and informal educators drawing on rad...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Concepts, theories and current debates
• Part II Changing discourses and images
• Part III Gender, masculinities and learning in the life course
• Part IV Implications
• Index