Learning Trajectories, Violence and Empowerment amongst Adult Basic Skills Learners

Vicky Duckworth

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415828727
• eBook ISBN: 9781134089468
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

Learning Trajectories, Violence and Empowerment amongst Adult Basic Skills Learners offers deep insights into the lives of marginalised communities and the link between learning, literacy and violence, not previously carried out in-depth in a small scale study. It breaks the negative stereo-types of adults who struggle to read and write, who are often labelled and stigmatised by dominant discourses, and in doing so exposes why and how Basic Skills Learners often find themselves in marginal positions. The structural inequalities many face from childhood to adulthood across the private and public domains of their lives are revealed and probed, thus challenging neo-liberalism claims of an apparently egalitarian social field. The learners' narratives expose the contradiction, complexities and ambivalences they experience in their daily lives, and how they try to make sense of them from their structural positioning as basic skills learners in a society based on inequality of opportunity and choice.

Applying a feminist, qualitative, longitudinal, ethnographic and participatory approach, the book offers a critical perspective, drawing on Bourdieu's work as the theoretical framework, as well as using a range of feminist, sociologists of education, literature on the ethics of care and critical literacy pedagogy, including the New Literacy Studies. The author's personal position as an 'insider' with 'insider knowledge' of marginalised communities is also woven throughout the chapters and offers insights into the struggles, conformity and resistance faced by the participants in the study.

The book contributes to the debate on the impact of violence on learning and its link to class, gender and basic skills as well opening up a discussion on the power of a critical curriculum to empower people across the domains of their lives. It will be valuable reading for trainee teachers, teachers, education and sociology students, postgraduate students, as well as literacy specialists, researchers, academics, policy makers and managers of public services.

Chapter 1

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Overview of the book

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This book seeks to highlight how 16 former Basic Skills learners have been shaped by the public domain and the private domain of their lives. It is based on a six-year qualitative, longitudinal, ethnographic and participatory approach. The learners were all enrolled on basic skills courses at a Further Education College based in the North of England. This book explores how they arrived at their current position, and seeks to highlight the learners' perception of their reality, unscrambling the links between their past, present and future while striving to highlight the intersection of class and gender on their pathways onto basic skills programmes and their subsequent trajectories.

The interpretation uses a critical perspective drawing on Bourdieu's work as the theoretical framework, as well as using a range of feminist work, sociologists of education, literature on ethics of care and critical literacy pedagogy, including New Literacy Studies.

Bourdieu's notion of habitus, with modifications, is used to explore the historical, present and emergent character of the learners' trajectories. Further to this, the concepts of capitals and their relationship to the learners' trajectories are also employed. This illuminates the objective and subjective dimensions of identities across the domains the learners travel, together with how they inform and transform the habitus and their changing interplay between classed and gendered processes over the learners' life-course.

My positioning

My personal position as an ‘insider’ with ‘insider knowledge’ of marginalised communities was a key motivation to becoming a basic skills tutor and becoming involved in this study. For example, my own life-history has greatly influenced the commitment I have for finding opportunities to enable others to take agency and aspire to reach their potential. I was born and brought up in the same community as the learners, attended the local state school and was the first generation of my family to enter college and university; my subsequent trajectory has also contributed to this commitment.

Further to this, involvement in this research was driven by my experience as a tutor and programme leader delivering literacy in a college of Further Education based in the North of England. With an increasing move towards performance via target setting, results and accountability, like many tutors I felt a great deal of my time and energy was beginning to be governed by a managerial driven system based on close scrutiny of my paperwork, rather than my practice in the classroom. Avis (2005: 212) identifies how this shift towards performance management is at odds with the rhetoric of the knowledge economy, which places an onus on a non-hierarchical approach based on trusting and respectful relationships between teams. With the managerialist discourse, where managers claim the right to manage and where professional judgements are under intense surveillance, notions of ‘trust’ can be something of an illusion. A blame culture can be the result of such approaches whereby accountability becomes a means by which the institution can call staff to account. In an age of insecure employment and redundancies the pressure to conform to a management agenda can work to erode a practitioner's autonomy and undermine their professionalism.¹ Within this context, the space I had for critical reflection and innovative practice was very limited. Critical autonomy and deep forms of intrinsic motivation were essential in sustaining this research. My drive came from the knowledge that education can be truly life enhancing and transforming if appropriate mechanisms are put in place to push open spaces that create a meaningful enquiry into the learners' lives.

So, with no monetary assistance from the Further Education College (funding in the latter stages was supported by the Higher Education I work at) and a full teaching time-table which relied heavily on emotional labour (see Hochschild 1983; James 1989) and ‘underground working’ (see Gleeson 2005), my drive was the commitment to expose and address issues relating to the myriad of complexities of working with basic skills learners.

Throughout the book I have embedded my own and the learners' poetry, narratives and photographs into the study to show ‘ another person how it is to feel something’ (Richardson 2003: 190, my emphasis). In doing so I aim to celebrate the creative voice of the learners and do what Richardson refers to as showing rather than telling through creative expression.

Finding a critical space

I wanted to carry out an inquiry which opened a meaningful ‘space’ to develop a teaching and learning culture which moves towards a research based approach to Best Practice. As a critical educator/researcher, I sought to develop my practice through this research and reflect a critical pedagogy, providing a curriculum which is culturally relevant, learner driven, and socially empowering (Freire 1996; Barton et al. 2007).

I began with an interest in the class and gender issues that affect learning and have found that Bourdieu's work offers an appropriate and illuminating theoretical frame for my work. The theme of violence (both physical and symbolic), emerged strongly from participant accounts of their experience and has become a central focus of my analysis. The symbolic and institutional violence that shaped students' understanding of themselves within the educational context and the creation of a critical education provided a space which enabled the learners and me to explore and transcend the internal and external influences and violence that shape the learning experience.

Communities of practice

My progression through the research was also supported by the community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998; Wenger et al. 2002) in which I was involved. This included: Research and Practice in Adult Literacy (RaPAL) and North West dialogue. I was also North West Convener for the Learning and Skills Research Network (LSRN) and continue to be a member. It also embraced interactions in the construction of values and identity, for example, the sharing of values in the RaPAL community includes sharing more critical approaches to teaching basic skills and thereby encourages people to reclaim their own learning processes by building their own learning from their own experiences. Each of the communities has supported and contributed to my knowledge and practice, offering a critical space to reflect and develop my own professional practice and identity as a teacher, activist and researcher.

Practitioner Action Research (PAR) has been a key part in driving my practice forward: for example, rather than presuming to know what the learners want to learn and what type of resources are best, I began to listen more closely to the learners' voices, letting their needs, aspirations and dreams shape the lessons (Hamilton et al. 2007).

I would also add that my study offered opportunities to work closely with the learners to develop a framework and tools to empower them and their communities to share their stories in the public and private domain (see Figure 4.1).

Initial research questions

The research question I started with in this study was how 16 former Basic Skills learners have been shaped, their whole being influenced by and responding to the public domain of schooling, college and work and the private domain of family, friends and home. I wanted to explore the learners' perceptions of their reality in these domains while seeking to address in what ways their past, present and future have been influenced by class and gender, and how this has impacted on their pathways and subsequent trajectories.

From my experience of living and working with learners from disadvantaged backgrounds, I felt that the notion of neo-liberalism (and its implication that an individual is free to determine their own pathway) is limited by the impact of structural and historical inequalities: gender, race and class and other markers of identity that shape the learners' educational journeys (Leathwood 2006). One way in which this happens is that learners from disadvantaged backgrounds are not considered to have the right attributes to progress (Archer et al. 2003; Burke 2006). Indeed, many of the participants in this study are faced with cultural as well as national exclusion where choice for the ‘excluded poor/dispossessed working class is, mostly, a myth’ (Byrne 2005: 141). I wanted to add original evidence exploring these dimensions of learners' experiences.

The research group included 16 informants from across my Adult Basic Skills part-time day and evening class together with the New Deal full-time group. Their gender, age, occupation, ethnicity and social class are illustrated in Table 1 (Appendix 1). The New Deal course is aimed at supporting the participants back into employment. Their motivations for enrolling on the course and the impact of this will be fully explored in the study. Three of the initial research group, names listed in italics, left the course at differing stages and therefore could not be contacted through to the end of the study. Robert, engaged in the research social events but did not want his personal accounts revealed in the study.

Participation in the research group was voluntary. I informed each of my classes about the project and asked those who were interested to let me know after class. For those who voiced their interest I had a further meeting with them outside the lesson. I explained what the research would involve, which included interviews, collecting information about their life story and working together as a research group to make sense of the findings. From the beginning I was keen not to put any pressure on the group to say yes, so I asked them to think about it and let me know at a later date. I also wanted to make it clear it would be a collaborative study, where they had choice and power. This power included telling them they could set dates and places for interviews, they could also leave the study at any point and ask me any questions just as I asked them. I assured them that I would be willing to place my own narrative with theirs.

Following in the narrative tradition used by Walkerdine et al. (2001), Luttrell (1997) and Skeggs (1997), the main research tool chosen to collect life-history was semi-structured interviews. This was utilised to help the interviewees feel more confident and comfortable with the process and to facilitate the learners' stories to follow their chosen direction.

The semi-structured interviews were initially conducted utilising a series of questions, in bold, in Table 2 (see Appendix 2). The topics were chosen from my own learning journey and personal experience and used as a start point due to their ‘broadness’, with a view that most or all of them would be discussed by each member of the study group. This, I envisaged, would promote a participant-led approach insomuch as further themes would be generated which could then act as a focus of the subsequent interview sessions. These generated themes/topics, that are explored in this study.

Broad sociological overview

Oldham, a provincial northern town, poor and thinly populated in preindustrial times, metamorphosed to become both nationally and internationally known in the Industrial Revolution. Oldham is now a tapestry of cultures and ethnic groups. Most of today's Muslim population arrived in England in the 1950s and 1960s in large numbers from the Indian sub-continent. Arriving in Oldham, they worked in the cotton mills where there was ample work and demand for labour was very high. These immigrants were willing to work long hours and undertake menial jobs for low pay. Many of the factories they worked in, now derelict, initially brought people to the area for work and helped cement the community. With the demise of Oldham's textile industry, since the mid-20th Century, the town has seen hard times for the indigenous, the Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Caribbean Community.

Indeed, high unemployment, poverty and a lack of morale was manifested in the Race Riots, which hit Oldham hard in May 2001. The riots followed a long period of inter-racial tensions and attacks in Oldham. This fight to be heard may be compared with the protests of the Peterloo radicals, only this time the ethnic and white communities were hitting out at a system which they felt had abandoned them. Youths that were previously hidden from the public domain began to be heard. They gathered on the streets near the college where I taught. Many were former learners and told me about the unrest and unease they felt, but they were also keen to stress that this may get them heard and change the ‘shit’ in their lives. The Ritchie Report (2001) blamed deep-rooted segregation which authorities had failed to address for generations, together with poverty and lack of opportunity.

Threaded together

The historical thread and geographical landscape links the learners and me to each other through the sharing of location and history. Resistance, conformity and struggle that the learners and I faced and in some instances continue to face, are threaded through our historical narrative into the fabric of our lives; shaping both myself and the learners, and the lens through which we look when exploring our lives.

Oldham is where the learners and I grew up (although I was born a stone's throw away in North Manchester). We went to the local schools and as kids roamed the streets looking for adventure among the rows and rows of terraced houses, estates and rise of factories. In the centre of Oldham, yesteryear's workhouse² – now The Royal Oldham Infirmary – is where my three younger brothers were born (one under the care of the famous Dr Steptoe³) and it is where I gave birth to my daughters Anna and Niamh, and where the learners in the study had their children.

The changing face of Oldham

With childhood now behind the learners and me, many of the factories still fill our view as they spike Oldham's skyline. Some are skeletons of their former industrial glory, hiding places for kids on adventures and dumping grounds for residents' rubbish, rusty bikes and broken shopping trolleys. A scattering of crammed bin liners are left rotting where machines once churned and chimneys thickened the air with smog, (which locals still call pea soup). Others have metamorphosed into other businesses, such as bakeries and play centres.

Across the town, to what many consider the more salubrious ‘Saddleworth’ these broken skeletons have been mended and flesh laid on their bones; modernised as upmarket apartments laboured on by the working classes to fulfil the bourgeoisie taste for urban living.

Our lives in the fac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Research in Lifelong Learning and Adult Education series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Overview of the book
• 2 Social class, gender and basic skills revisited
• 3 Theoretical framework
• 4 Method
• 5 School as a site for violence and trauma
• 6 Home life, identity and learning in childhood
• 7 The public field of work
• 8 Violence in the private domain
• 9 Literacy and transformation
• 10 Conclusion
• Appendixes
• Bibliography
• Index