Changing Places?

Flexibility, Lifelong Learning and a Learning Society

Richard Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134741618
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Flexibility has become a central concept in much policy and academic debate. Individuals, organizations and societies are all required to become more flexible so that they can participate in the ongoing processes of change involved in lifelong learning. This book explores how the notion of a learning society has developed over recent years: the changes that have given rise to the requirement for flexibility, and the changed discourses and practices that have emerged in the education and training of adults. With the growth in interest in adults as learners, (primarily to support economic competitiveness), the closed field of adult education has now been displaced by a more open discourse of lifelong learning. This involves not only changing practices such as moving towards open and distance-based learning, but also changing workplace identities. Learning settings are therefore changing places in a number of senses: they are places in which people change; they are subject to change; and they are changing to include the home and workplace as well as more formal settings. This book takes an unusually critical standpoint: it challenges contemporary trends, explores the uncertainties and ambivalences of the processes of change, and is suggestive of different forms of engagement with them. It will prove an important text for policy makers, workplace trainers and those working in the field of adult, further and higher education. Richard Edwards is currently a Senior Lecturer in post compulsory education at the Open University.

Chapter 1
Introduction Waiting for the post?

. . . knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.

(Foucault 1987: 8)

This text is concerned with thinking differently about some of the changing discourses which have come to govern the education and training of adults in recent years and the consequence for practices. It examines the context for such changes and their contested nature. The focus for the discussion is on differing notions of a learning society and the ways in which that is being constructed in the changing practices and discourses of lifelong learning. The argument will be that to encapsulate those changes new forms of thinking are necessary which involve moving away from the dominant discourses of adult education. While much of the detail will focus on events as they are occurring in the United Kingdom, the suggestion is that many of the general trends have a wider applicability and resonate with much that is going on elsewhere in the world. To support this view a certain amount of literature from beyond the United Kingdom is incorporated into the text. Caution is always necessary in making comparisons between nations and even within nations. However, resonance of certain similarities of influence can be identified, particularly given the greater economic and cultural integration being experienced in contemporary conditions of globalisation.

Like all texts, there is an inevitable locatedness and selectivity which places certain boundaries around what is discussed and how it is presented. And the notion of boundaries will be central to this text. What constitutes the boundaries of a learning society? Who constitutes it as ‘a learning society’ rather than as ‘education’ or ‘training’? What are the consequences of a learning society being constituted in particular ways? Who are most powerful in defining the directions a learning society should take? How are the boundaries of a learning society maintained, broken down or crossed? These are questions which are central to evaluating the significance of the changes taking place currently and alternative visions for the future. Such issues are not easy ones to evaluate and there is no claim here to a definitive or universal account of a learning society. What is attempted is a contribution to a necessary dialogue if adult educators are to play an engaged role in the processes of change. Otherwise it is suggested they simply will be subjected to change by others.

The work is consciously informed by certain strands of poststructuralist and postmodern analysis. This in itself is controversial. However, such strands of thought signify the need to think differently if the differing conditions of the contemporary period are to be adequately conceptualised and addressed. During the 1980s, this was most noticeable from the Left in the work of the United Kingdom magazine Marxism Today, and its attempt to chart ‘New Times’, a restructuring of the economy and society and a breakdown of the consensual certainties of the post-Second World War period.

The ‘New Times’ argument is that the world has changed, not just incrementally but qualitatively, that Britain and other advanced capitalist societies are increasingly characterised by diversity, differentiation and fragmentation, rather than homogeneity, standardisation and the economies and organisations of scale which characterised modern mass society.

(Hall and Jacques 1989: 11)

The ‘New Times’ thesis, while influential, was not without its critics, and the same is true for poststructuralist and postmodern positions. While not adhering totally to a postmodern analysis, I believe the latter is highly suggestive and to ignore its contemporary power would be misconceived. As Kumar (1995: 195) suggests, ‘the contemporary world may not be simply or only post-modern; but post-modernity is now a significant, perhaps central feature of its life, and an important way of thinking about it.’

In this chapter, therefore, I shall provide some background on the approaches underpinning the positions adopted in the text as a whole. First, I shall outline the poststructuralist influence, largely derived from the work of Foucault. In particular, this text will make use of the notions of discourse, power–knowledge and governmentality. Second, I shall outline briefly what is often viewed as constituting postmodernity, the particular perspective of the contemporary world which informs this text. The post-structuralist and postmodern are often deployed as mutually reinforcing, if differing, dimensions of a particular analysis. While this is largely the position adopted here, I also introduce the idea that discourses of postmodernity can themselves be subject to poststructuralist analysis. Finally, I shall outline the various notions of ‘changing places’ that I am using and lay out the course of the rest of the text.

It may be considered that this is a somewhat abstract and theoretical way to approach the subjects of lifelong learning and a learning society. However, in taking this stance I am attempting to make as clear as possible my own position and to foreground the fact that no text is constructed without assumptions. Readers can question those assumptions, the contradictions, ambiguities and ambivalences within the arguments herein, and foreground assumptions which may be implicit rather than explicit – the ‘silences’ upon which the text is built. I do not assume a transparency or uniformity in my own writing or in the readings of this text. For me, this is part of the ongoing dialogue necessary in constructing a ‘knowledgeable practice’ of lifelong learning.

DISCOURSE – POWER–KNOWLEDGE AND GOVERNMENTALITY

The notion of discourse has become increasingly important in academic and public debates in recent years. The roots of the growing influence of discourse analysis are beyond the scope of this text (Macdonell 1991). Primarily, it can be seen as a response to the perceived weaknesses of conventional notions of scientific and social scientific knowledge, in a period when the range and sheer amount of information available to individuals through various media has resulted in greater uncertainty as to what signifies ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’ and ‘progress’. Language has displaced consciousness as the focus for philosophical and social scientific debate, and science has itself been critiqued as simply another, rather than the privileged, language game.

The notion that scientific method is a neutral avenue for gaining truth about the ‘real world’ as a condition for knowledge, human emancipation and social progress has been subject to much criticism and, in some quarters, discredited. This criticism has come from both within and outside the scientific community. The validity of scientific method as neutral has been questioned, as has the knowledge gained from science and the consequences of scientific ‘progress’. This has been particularly marked in the human sciences. The inevitability of progress to emancipate humanity through the advance of scientific knowledge, what Lyotard (1984) calls the ‘grand narratives’ of modernity – the justifications for pursuing certain forms of knowledge – has come into question. Stemming from the Enlightenment, Lyotard argues that the grand narratives have provided a teleological rationale for the development of the role of the modern nation state and educational institutions and the narratives which support that development. Modernity is characterised by narratives of the pursuit of truth and emancipation through the application of scientific rationality, of emancipation through learning the world better. Progress is judged by such things as mastery of the physical and social worlds, the growth of scientific knowledge, the spread of a particular kind of rationality and the development of rational, enlightened and autonomous people.

Lyotard argues that the grand narratives of modernity have declined in influence in the contemporary period and no longer have the ability to compel consensus. Emancipation through the application of scientific rationality has been shown to be, at best, ambiguous and, in certain situations, far worse. The application of scientific rationality in Hiroshima and the Holocaust, nuclear tests in the Pacific and China, concerns over environmental degradation and the risks to humanity by the very progress science has brought about, have all led to doubt about the sustainability of the project of modernity. There is now a widespread recognition that there is too much of a gap between the aspirations embedded and promoted in the grand narratives and the constantly reconfigured materiality of want and oppression. Increasingly, the grand narratives are seen as masterful narratives and narratives of mastery, functioning to ‘legitimise Western man’s self-appointed mission of transforming the entire planet in his own image’ (Owens 1985: 66). Their declining influence and power in the contemporary period has also thrown into doubt the subaltern narratives they have helped to shape, including those of adult education and education more generally. Master signifiers are no longer quite as masterful. Universal messages, including those of education’s role in fulfilling the project of modernity, are now seen as historically located, cultural constructs, their universality and consequences open to question. Teleological certainty has been replaced by open-ended ambivalence with significant consequences for what constitutes a learning society. In recent years, therefore, the extent and level of doubt over progress have resulted in doubt over the capacity of science to represent the truth of the world.

Beck (1992) suggests that the forms of progress based on science that have been experienced have created what he terms the ‘risk society’, in which it is the very existence of humanity which is at stake. More specifically, questions have been raised about the interests science supports when its development is embedded in the practices of the state and capitalist institutions. State policy and profit influence science into following particular directions and supporting particular views of progress. While this critique of science has proved very influential in certain quarters, it should not be overstated. Scientific knowledge has maintained credence among many planners and policy-makers and continues to be highly influential in shaping processes of change.

The challenge to traditional science, therefore, has taken a number of forms. The ideological critique of science is that it supports particular interests. However, it masks or mystifies those interests by presenting itself as a neutral and disinterested activity. In other words, the very neutrality suggested is already a specific ideological position, a dimension of ideological hegemony. Ideological hegemony is gained by that grouping in the social formation which can establish its interests and perspectives as ‘natural’ to the social formation as a whole. While science rests in an assumption of knowledge as universal and generalisable, an ideological critique assumes social formations to be divided and knowledge to be particular to specific groups and interests. This critique is very influential in socialist, marxist and certain branches of feminist and post-colonial analysis. However, scientific method and ideological critique tend to share both the view that the ‘truth’ can be established and a view of history as progressive, even if its basis is different. More crucially, they share a view that language transparently conveys meaning. It is the critique of the latter which has resulted in the increasing weight being given to forms of discourse analysis within academic study.

The turn to discourse has resulted in part from a similar critique to that offered by an ideological critique. Knowledge is held to be partial and contingent upon the specific factors and contexts within which it is constructed and presented. In questioning the status of scientific method as foundational knowledge, the foundations of discipline-based education are also undermined, to be displaced by a diversity of situated knowledges. There is also an emphasis on the oppressive consequences of assuming knowledge to be universal, that is, true for everyone across time and in all settings. However, discourse analysis differs from ideological critique as it does not assume that language conveys a single transparent meaning. The meaning of language is held to be contingent on the specific contexts in which it is constituted. There are constant processes of constructing different meanings from the same texts. The assumptions within such texts, the issues they exclude and marginalise from legitimate debate and the consequences of the acceptance of what they construct as ‘true’ become the subject of analysis. Which discourses are most powerful and how they frame practices become significant questions.

In this approach, it is the story-telling capacity of human beings which is held to be fundamental to their being (MacIntyre 1981; Edwards and Usher 1996). Increased attention is given to texts and the ways in which discourses construct certain objects as ‘knowable’ and ‘known’ and certain perspectives as ‘true’ – the ways in which they ‘tell a story’. All forms of social reality are textualised in the sense that they are represented and inscribed. The social world is narrated into being through the discursive practices in which we engage and which make our experiences meaningful. Thereby the place and significance of narrative as a ‘world-making’ practice are foregrounded. Social practices such as the education and training of adults and lifelong learning can be seen as texts, worlds defined, delimited and constituted through narrative processes. A social practice can be multiply ‘written’ or narrated, it can be ‘read’ and interpreted with single or multiple meanings and can be ‘rewritten’ or re-presented with different meanings. In the contemporary conjuncture, it is possible to suggest that there is a rewriting and rereading of adult education taking place.

Through narratives, selves and worlds are simultaneously and interactively made. The narrator is positioned in relation to events and other selves and an identity conferred. Positioning oneself and being positioned in certain discourses becomes therefore the basis for personal self-identity. Narratives are both unique to individuals, in the sense that each tells their own story, yet at the same time culturally located and therefore transindividual. For instance, an adult educator may tell their own story rooted in their unique autobiographical trajectory, but the narrative is itself sedimented in the narrative practices of adult education and, beyond that, in the wider narratives of the culture and practices in which the adult educator are located. They live these stories; through them they construct others and are interactively constructed by them, as active, meaningful, knowable subjects acting in meaningful and knowable ways.

The result of these trends is a shift from questioning whether or not a discourse gives us a ‘true’ representation of the ‘real world’ – a continuation of the modernist scientific approach – to an examination of the ways in which a discourse constructs ‘truth’ and the consequences of accepting it as true – a form of cultural analysis. In other words, rather than assuming a hierarchy of knowledge with science at the pinnacle giving us ‘objective truth’ – embedded in the notion of disciplinary knowledge – there is the constant search for the cultural conditions that produce this hierarchy and recognition of the plurality of knowledges. Discourse therefore displaces knowledge as the object of study as problems and inequalities surrounding the universality of knowledge come to the fore. This can be illustrated in the practices of lifelong learning in a shift from a focus on teaching, as the transmission of the (usually) university-generated canon of disciplinary knowledge, to learning, in which greater weight is given to, for instance, the experience of learners and practitioner-generated knowledge. A group of American women adult educators have posed this shift as a question of first,

who shall be heard and second, what kind of knowledge shall be considered legitimate. The project of formal knowledge construction in our field is characterised by a preference for the knowledge of scholars rather than that of practitioners or the people who are the field’s constituencies, and a preference for knowledge born of reason and science rather than emotion and experience. These preferences are woven in complex and subtle ways into an historically and culturally determined web of beliefs, values, and norms that justify the exclusion of some and the inclusion of others in the knowledge-making process.

(Group for Collaborative Inquiry 1993: 44)

The focus on discourse, therefore, has been associated with recognition of the heterogenity of meanings and powerful consequences that are engendered in the use of language and narrative processes.

Macdonell (1991: 1) points out that the emphasis on discourse has ‘radical implications not only for the disciplines of the humanities, literary studies and human science, but for all knowledge’. Meaning can no longer be ascribed to human intention or a common language. It is itself a site of contest, to which the trivialising reports over ‘political correctness’ in parts of the media attest, and can only be elucidated in the exploration of the particular discourses under consideration. The examination of lifelong learning and a learning society, and the changes taking place within them, are themselves subject to these implications, as illustrated by the many different and contested views in which knowledge and truth are constructed through and in a range of discourses.

The use of discourse as a key concept in this text is not uncontroversial. A more conventional text would survey the field and positions within it and attempt to evaluate which visions of lifelong learning and a learning society describe the situation most accurately and/or are normatively more appealing. However, to do so would have been to ignore some of the important debates which have emerged in the wider sphere of intellectual debate and their significance for an understanding of what is occurring in the education and training of adults. It would have required this text to be unreflexive about producing a text which is intended to encourage critical and self-critical reflexivity. For part of the power of academic discourses – of which this is an example – lies in their construction as ‘neutral’, a universal and privileged position from which ‘truth’ is established, when they are as partial and as inscribed with power as other discourses. This is particularly significant for a text on education and training, for, as Ball (1990c: 3) suggests, ‘educational sites are subject to discourse but are also centrally involved in the propagation and selective dissemination of discourses, the “social appropriation” of discourses. Educational institutions control the access of individuals to various kinds of discourse.’

Discourse analysis is not therefore without its problems and its critics. Nor is it a homogeneous field in itself. However, what it makes possible in the discussion of a learning society and lifelong learning is an examination of who is setting the agendas, how, what those agendas are and where and how they are contested. It takes us beyond the ideological critique, which tends to become reduced to somewhat stale polarities of ‘them’ or ‘us’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘emancipation’ or ‘oppression’. Rather it offers an opportunity, through exploiting ambiguities and ambivalences of meaning, to build alliances in specific contexts in which interests may be reconfigured, if not overcome. Here

discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any more than silences are. . . . Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy.

(Foucault 1981: 100–102)

For instance, feminists, the new right and new middle classes may all support experiential learning for differing reasons and use each other’s interest to contest and reconfigure opportunities for adults (Edwards 1994b). In this sense, experiential learning does not ‘belong’ to any of these groups, nor is it inherently emancipatory or part of the interests of particular groups – it has multiple and ambivalent meanings.

The...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CHANGING PLACES?
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION WAITING FOR THE POST?
• CHAPTER 2: EVERYTHING MUST CHANGE?
• CHAPTER 3: BOUNDARIES, FIELD AND MOORLAND
• CHAPTER 4: FLEXIBLE FRIENDS?
• CHAPTER 5: PROFESSIONALS, ACTIVISTS, ENTREPRENEURS
• CHAPTER 6: THE/A LEARNING SOCIETY?
• BIBLIOGRAPHY