Challenges and Inequalities in Lifelong Learning and Social Justice

Susan Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415837712
• eBook ISBN: 9781317849827
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

The connections and interactions of lifelong learning and social justice are complex and contested. Both are seen as a means to unconditional good, with little account taken of the inequalities and equalities located in constructions of power. This book develops critical ways to engage with international debates about lifelong learning and social justice through a range of competing and contested definitions, setting out some of the complexities and challenges of linking the two concepts. In particular, it engages in debates about the equalities and inequalities of learner identities, displacement and place. Its chapters consider those marginalised in complex and multiple ways, including gender, social class, ethnicity, age and migration.

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

Learning to labour in regional Australia: gender, identity and place in lifelong learning

ANITA DEVOS

Monash University, Australia

This article considers how a group of migrant women in the town of Shepparton, Australia, understand their futures in the spaces created by globalising forces. Shepparton is a ‘case study’ of globalisation, at the centre of the movement of peoples, skills and capital globally. The issues it faces are compounded by profound climate change. The project uses collective biography to explore women’s experiences of working and learning in that place, and to scrutinise contemporary narratives of transnationalism and of the knowledge economy. The article reflects on the implications of the frameworks employed for feminist scholarship and social justice in lifelong learning.

Introduction

This article explores the experiences of a small group of migrant women as they settle into an Australian country town, Shepparton, a place undergoing profound change brought about through globalisation and climate change. The town serves as an important regional centre for the farming communities that surround it, has a population of around 60,000 and is located about three hours’ drive north of the city of Melbourne, Victoria. While the focus of this article is on these women in Shepparton, the kinds of issues facing this community are common to many communities as they struggle to engage in global economic activity in ways that are socially and environmentally sustainable (Farrell 2007). The significance however of focusing on locality—on this community in particular—is to open for discussion the relevance of place in research on women and lifelong learning. In the article, I consider how these women negotiate attachments as a consequence of migration, and how they imagine their futures in this new place in the context of feminist critiques of transnationalism and idealised notions of the global worker in the knowledge economy.

The article starts with an introduction to Shepparton, followed by an outline of the conceptual frameworks that underpin it, including the use of a collective biography methodology, and of theories of place. I introduce the women who participated in the research and relate three narratives based on accounts provided at a series of three collective biography workshops. My focus in the analysis of these narratives is on how the women forge a sense of belonging in a new place, and the meaning of home over time and place. In closing, I reflect on my own positioning as researcher in this work and on the value of the frameworks employed for feminist scholarship in lifelong learning.

Introducing Shepparton

Shepparton sits on the traditional lands of the Yorta Yorta people. The Yorta Yorta are the Indigenous Australians who traditionally lived around the junction of the Goulburn and Murray Rivers in present-day northeast Victoria (Echuca Moama Visitor Information Centre 2010). In 1996, 3% of the population was Indigenous, and 10% of the population was overseas-born. In 2006, the proportion of overseas-born had risen to 24% as a consequence of the active recruitment and development activities of the regional government. This has included establishing Shepparton as a centre for the settlement of refugees—from Iraq, Congo, Afghanistan and the Sudan in particular. Census data indicate the main language spoken at home is English (85%), then Italian (reflecting a post-WW2 wave of immigration), Arabic, Turkish, Albanian and Greek. North African and Middle Eastern-born people are now the largest group after Europeans. A predominantly Anglo-Australian community has thus been radically transformed over the last decade.

Unemployment is reported at 6% but this figure spirals to 80% amongst the Indigenous population. Like many country towns, Shepparton suffers from the drift of young people to the big cities in search of pleasure and work. Shepparton has median individual and household incomes lower than the national medians, and a higher proportion of public housing than the national average (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2006).

The main employers are schools, hospitals, the fruit and vegetable processing industry, dairy farming and supermarkets. Multi-national Coca Cola Amatil now owns the largest fruit cannery, a takeover that resulted in increased use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in the plant linking the company into global food networks. Following 10 years of drought, the cannery now sources many fruit and vegetables from different parts of Asia to can and export. Different fruit are now grown locally to suit emerging markets internationally. The company is known to be investigating moving production to low wage areas of Europe (Farrell 2007).

Perceived skills shortages have led many local employers to recruit overseas under Australian temporary work visa regulations. A range of overseas-trained professional and trades people now live and work in Shepparton under 457 visas, which allow the worker and his or her family to live in Australia for five years with the sponsorship of an employer. The area health service and hospital is completely reliant on overseas-trained health professionals, mainly from the Indian subcontinent, the Philippines and the UK. The largest foundry hired 10 welders from China under those same visas. As Farrell (2007) notes, globalisation is both sustaining and producing this community through the global movement of capital and of peoples.

Shepparton is part of Australia’s ‘food bowl’, with the dairy and stone fruit industries completely reliant on water drawn from the Murray Darling river system. Due to the long-running drought, dams in the region are at an average 15% of capacity, and water restrictions are in place. The river system is in ecological crisis, with high levels of salinity and undrinkable water. The scarifying effects of drought on farm families are often exacerbated by government policies as Margaret Alston (2006) observes, a policy shift in the early 1990s determined that drought would be viewed as a ‘business risk’ rather than as a ‘natural disaster’ with many families ‘caught in a cycle of poverty […] adopting various strategies, including seeking off-farm work in order to maintain some cash flow’ (155–6). As Alston notes, ‘families have adopted the rhetoric of self-reliance and tend to blame themselves for their situation’, while farm women are carrying unsustainable loads (paid work, household labour, care work, farm work, community work) in order to ‘adapt to these new measures’ (156). Service industries based in the town are in turn reliant on the survival of the agricultural industry.

The environmental and other challenges confronting Shepparton have led me to explore a place-based approach to research and meaning making in this project.

A place-based approach

The concept of place has its origins in human geography but has in recent years been taken up by scholars working in different disciplines including education (see for example Somerville 2008). Cresswell (2004) speaks of the problem of defining place, and of distinguishing it from space and landscape (10). In this article, I use the term ‘place’ to refer not to a set of compass coordinates, nor to the region defined for the purpose of national statistical collections, not even to the town of Shepparton—itself a construct of early white settlers, and later town planners and bureaucrats. I understand place to mean not just a thing in the world ‘but a way of understanding the world’; it is ‘a way of seeing, knowing and understanding’ that enables us to see attachments and connections between people; ‘as a rich and complicated interplay of people and environment’ (Cresswell 2004: 11). Place, he argues, is about how we make the world meaningful (12).

Place also has a visceral and material dimension. People are connected to particular places, both for the physical qualities they hold and for the meanings they carry and the values and ideals they represent. A profound attachment to place is recorded most acutely amongst Australia’s indigenous peoples, many of whom were displaced from their traditional lands at the time of white invasion or later. Learning about place and forming community are critical processes in the development of sustainable communities (see Devos et al. 2009). Place, then, is a mechanism for mobilising connections between people. For Somerville (2008: 10), place pedagogy has three key elements: ‘our relationship to place is constituted in stories and other representations, the body is at the centre of our experience of place; and place is a contact zone of cultural contact’. Place making, or the process of forming communities through sharing experiences of place, acts as a form of pedagogy (see Gruenewald 2003) that resonates with feminist traditions of popular education. For this research, I used a collective biography methodology to produce stories of the women’s experiences of being in this new place.

On collective biography

Collective biography is a collaborative research methodology that draws on the memory work of German feminist Frigga Haug (1987) together with more recent work by Bronwyn Davies and Susanne Gannon (2007). The process involves the sharing and reviewing of memories amongst a small group in an iterative process to explore how subjectivity is constructed amongst the participants in that group, or to explore ‘the process by which women became part of society’ (Haug 1987: 43). It takes everyday experience as the basis of knowledge (Onyx and Small 2001: 775). The memories may be recorded in written text, or as spoken memories and audio-recorded.

The process can entail remembering through distinct phases, and the identification of common storylines that, although individually nuanced, can reveal the effects of dominant discourses (Davies and Gannon 2006: 5, Devoset al. 2009). Haug and her co-researchers explained that human beings live ‘according to a whole series of imperatives: social pressures, natural limitations, the imperative of economic survival, the given conditions of history and culture’ (Haug 1987: 45). On account of these imperatives, our lives are collectively shaped in ways that we take up as individuals and make our own through personal experience. In this way, the relationship between the individual and the social, the personal and the political can be analysed (Devoset al. 2009). Collective biography has been further developed in the work of Davies and Gannon (2006) and may entail four phases of talking, recording memories, sharing memories and analysing memories (see Onyx and Small 2001 and Devoset al. 2009 for further detail of the method).

Collective biography fosters the process of re/memory but memory is fluid and multilayered. The memory stories that emerge are a response to that particular topic at that time (Davies and Gannon 2006). In this instance, collective biography provides an opportunity to analyse individual experience filtered through the lens of this particular cultural context and historical moment. The themes for the memory work included the women’s experiences of school, after school, going to work, arriving in Shepparton, living in Shepparton and the future.

The women’s stories

Eight women participated in the project, including three Sri Lankans, three Indian women, one Philippina, and the author, a first generation Australian-born woman of European parentage. The women were approached to participate in the project through the multicultural project worker in a church-based community development organisation in the town. The publicity for the project invited the women to participate in a research project exploring ‘women’s experiences of work, education and training in Shepparton’ (Devos 2008). The multicultural project worker, Avoko, an Anglo-Australian woman, also participated in the first workshop.

Each of the three workshops had a different theme. The first workshop explored the women’s educational biographies and how they came to be living in Shepparton. At the second, we discussed what it meant to live in Shepparton, and the women were invited to bring in an item that represented to them something about Shepparton. At the third workshop, we considered how the women saw their futures. There were no fixed questions asked by the researcher but consistent with memory work conventions, the opening question invited the women to speak from memory (Onyx and Small 2011). Conversation at each workshop flowed around the broad theme of the workshop.

Five of the women are in Australia as spouses of 457 temporary visa holders for skilled migrants, one is the spouse of a skilled migrant living here as a permanent resident, and one is on a 457 temporary visa in her own right. Six of the seven women have school-age children. The women are educated with at least bachelor-level qualifications, two hold masters qualifications from their country, one holds a masters degree from a Belgian university, and one has a PhD and was a college lecturer in India. All the women are multilingual and fluent English speakers. While in Australia, the women are entitled to seek work but face long struggles to find even casual work.

In this section, I present three women’s narratives that I assembled from the stories the women related in the workshops. These stories capture a number of key themes related to the focus of this article and special issue: namely the means by which the women forge connection and a sense of belonging in the new place, or in turn, the ways in which their connections to place are disrupted; and the relevance of this case for social justice and lifelong learning in a globalising world. This method of presenting the data allows me to analyse ‘…vertical, individual storylines as opposed to [the] horizontal collective analysis’ (Somerville 2006: 44) more generally employed in this form of qualitative research reporting.

Fran

I trained as a Montessori teacher in Sri Lanka but I haven’t worked since I had children. At the moment I’m busy with four children, three of them in school and one in playgroup once a week, so I have two hours off on my own. During that time I have so many things to do—the shopping and so on. I really treasure that time. We built a house and settled in and I spend quite a lot of time doing my garden. When my youngest starts school, I want to start thinking about doing something with my Montessori background—maybe talk to the council about a kindergarten.

My husband’s done the AMC (Australian Medical Council) exam Part 1 and now we’re waiting to hear when he can sit Part 2. He did his MBBS 15 years ago and has since specialised so it was very hard for him to sit exams in general medicine.

I find people very nice and helpful here. All the plants are different here to Sri Lanka. When I see a nice garden and I want to know something I just ring the doorbell and ask. I have made lots of friends that way. People invite you in for coffee and then you in turn invite them home for tea. People who grow their own fruits and vegetables like to share with you.

I feel settled here, to an extent, but I miss my family. I want to talk to them every two days, just to hear they’re OK.

People read reports and scare me. A friend of my mother’s in Melbourne rang and said: ‘Are you still in Shepparton? What about the bushfires in Shepparton?’ I was upset. I am here with four children and it scares me when people ring and start these rumours. [The devasta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Lifelong learning and social justice
• 1. Learning to labour in regional Australia: gender, identity and place in lifelong learning
• 2. Raising expectations or constructing victims? Problems with promoting social inclusion through lifelong learning
• 3. Widening participation, social justice and injustice: part-time students in higher education in England
• 4. Personal stories: how students’ social and cultural life histories interact with the field of higher education
• 5. Parents, partners and peers: bearing the hidden costs of lifelong learning
• 6. Later life learning for adults in Scotland: tracking the engagement with and impact of learning for working-class men and women
• 7. Learning by dispossession: democracy promotion and civic engagement in Iraq and the United States
• Index