Habermas, Critical Theory and Education

Mark Murphy, Ted Fleming, Mark Murphy, Ted Fleming

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415806176
• eBook ISBN: 9781135224295
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas has had a wide-ranging and significant impact on understandings of social change and social conflict. However, there has been no concerted and focused attempt to introduce his ideas to the field of education broadly. This book rectifies this omission and delivers a definitive contribution to the understanding of Habermas's oeuvre as it applies to the field. The authors examine the contribution Habermas's theory has and can make to: pedagogy, learning and classroom interaction; the relation between education, civil society and the state; forms of democracy, reason and critical thinking; and performativity, audit cultures and accountability.

Additionally, the book answers a range of more specific questions, including: what are the implications for pedagogy of a shift from a philosophy of consciousness to a philosophy of language?; What contribution can Habermas's re-shaping of speech act theory and communicative rationality make to theories of classroom interaction?; and how can his theories of reason and colonization be used to explore questions of governance and accountability in education?

Section III
Habermas Applied Critical Theory and Educational Provision

7
Developing Competence in Collegial Spaces

Exploring Critical Theory and Community Education

John Bamber

Instead of tick-box training courses, we need time to talk to each other properly (Anonymous).

INTRODUCTION

This chapter concerns professional development issues in community learning and development (CLD) in Scotland. The Scottish government has developed three national priorities for CLD (Scottish Executive 2004): achievement through learning for adults, achievement through learning for young people, and achievement through building community capacity. Work with adults involves raising standards of achievement through community-based lifelong learning opportunities incorporating the core skills of literacy, numeracy, communications, working with others, problem-solving and information communications technology (ICT). Work with young people is concerned with facilitating their personal, social and educational development, and enabling them to gain a voice, influence and a place in society. Building community capacity means enabling people to develop the confidence, understanding and skills required to influence decision-making and service delivery. Professional workers are qualified to degree level, and the Standards Council for CLD endorses the degree. These largely community-based workers deploy a range of informal and sometimes formal educational methods, and they work in a wide range of public and voluntary organizations and agencies including local authorities, housing agencies and charitable bodies representing practice domains such as youth work. CLD is unusual in the extent to which it crosses public and voluntary sectors, and in its reliance upon part-time and voluntary staff. Because of this range, it is difficult even to estimate the total size of the workforce, as accurate data for the whole field do not exist. Although CLD features prominently in almost all aspects of government social policy, there is little financial commitment to the work compared, for example, to the school sector or social work. As an indication of the scale of the lack of investment, it has recently been calculated that there are only around 2260 full-time equivalent posts in Scottish local authorities (Learning Connections 2007, vii).

The issues in relation to professional development in CLD arise from contextual factors such as the lack of investment, the prevalence of short-term, highly targeted funding, the requirement for workers to participate in various kinds of time-consuming and often confusing partnership arrangements, and the infringement of administrative procedures on educational processes (Tett et al. 2007). The argument is that the overall effect of these and other steering mechanisms is to reduce the range of strategic choices open to practitioners. In turn, this reductive tendency curtails opportunities for learning and development as practitioners implement predetermined procedures in pursuit of set goals that increasingly divert them from face-to-face work with service users. To redeem this situation, it is argued that there is a need to create or to sustain appropriate work environments, so that CLD professionals can concentrate effectively on their core educational tasks. In appropriate work environments, workers would learn from direct contact with the communities they serve, while further developing their competence through purposeful interaction with colleagues (ibid.).

The argument about the benefits of purposeful interaction can be supported by recourse to Habermas’ understanding of competence. For Habermas (2003b, 33), competence is the capacity to construct the knowledge needed in resolving persistent personal, moral-practical, strategic-technical and theoretical problems. The chapter considers how this understanding helps to illuminate how practice competence is constructed incrementally in CLD. It highlights the necessarily discursive process through which practitioners continuously test the worth of their ideas and actions in relation to specific work-related problems and issues. Competence in this sense may be seen as a socially constructive achievement, which firmly locates professional development in communities of practice. The argument concludes by affirming the need to create and support collegial spaces in the workplace. To set the scene and to introduce the main themes, the discussion begins with the aims and nature of CLD in Scotland.

PROBLEMS OF DIVERSIFICATION IN CLD IN SCOTLAND

In 1998 the Scottish Office Report, Communities: Change through learning (Scottish Office 1998), introduced the idea that community education was a process of community learning and development rather than the discrete service for which all Scottish local authorities had up until then been responsible for twenty years or so. According to the report the process could be found in agencies and services such as schools, libraries or housing associations. It proposed that CLD would be more effective if such organizations used the process more consistently. This view was reinforced in the 1999 Scottish Office Circular 4/99, which required local authorities to develop Community Learning Plans in order to bring together the respective strengths and resources of all contributors. The role of local authorities was further enhanced by the statutory requirements on public agencies to engage with communities contained in the Local Government in Scotland Act 2003. The move away from community education as a discrete service had implications for professional training, and by 2006, the Scottish Executive Report Strengthening standards: Improving the quality of community learning and development service delivery was drawing attention to unprecedented demands for staff skilled in CLD approaches, due to the expanded range of settings in which community learning and development skills were needed including, for example, health and partnership work.

The effect of such policy initiatives has been to steer practice strongly in certain directions. In 2004 the Scottish Executive Report Working and learning together to build stronger communities (WALT) stated that CLD was concerned with:

• Empowerment—increasing the ability of individuals and groups to influence community circumstances.

• Participation —supporting people to take part in decision-making.

• Inclusion —recognizing that some people have more restricted opportunities and influence and so should be given particular attention.

• Self-determination —supporting the right of people to make their own choices.

• Partnership —recognizing that many agencies can contribute to community learning and development, and should work together to make the most of the resources available and to be as effective as possible.

In setting the parameters for the work, WALT informs understandings of practice knowledge because it influences the sorts of problems and issues that professional community educators identify and address. WALT is only partly helpful, however, in explaining practice knowledge.

Ideas about practice knowledge are also influenced by continuing debates about the purpose of community education in Scotland. Tett (2002, 1–2) has attempted to capture the essence of the debate, by arguing that two contesting traditions emerged in the nineteenth century. The first of these was the ‘radical’ tradition, “committed to progressive social and political change, that tried to forge links between education and social action.” The second ‘reformist or conformist’ tradition was concerned to help people solve their problems but was not committed to challenging dominant ways of thinking. This more critical approach to policy and practice has been broadly described as a social democratic perspective, which points to the importance of citizens being able to question and scrutinize the decisions of experts as a fundamental prerequisite for a healthy democracy. From this perspective, as Tett (ibid., 112) explains:

What is essential is to engage the critical intellect of people in a way that creates more rounded human beings and enables people to engage with public issues. Community education is about the development of skills, human relationships and the engagement of people in understanding the wider social forces that impact both locally and globally.

Although echoes of these debates can still be clearly heard in certain forums such as academic conferences, and other formal or informal gatherings of professionals, in Scotland today the emphasis is on facilitating predetermined learning outcomes in specified geographical areas where regeneration and capacity-building are now more likely to be prioritized along with involvement in community-planning processes. At the same time, partnership working is being promoted across a range of agencies, while practitioners manage more staff and volunteers than previously. This shift in the nature and scope of the work away from the educational role of the worker has caused confusion about CLD, to the extent that in 2007 the CLD Workforce Survey reported difficulties in deciding ‘who CLD workers are, where they are employed and how they may be classified’ (Learning Connections 2007, 3). The process of diversification has impinged on professional identity, and raised significant questions about what it means to be competent in this field. Different conceptions of competence may be seen, for example, in the academic and professional frameworks that govern CLD training in Scotland: the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF 2007) and the Community Education Validation and Endorsement (CeVe 1995) group. Broadly speaking, the former stresses intellectual capacities while including the need for appropriate skills, and the latter emphasizes practical skills and processes that clearly depend on high levels of analysis that remain unstated.

Amid this underinvestment in the field, the confusion about the role of the worker, and questions about the nature of competence, one of the first acts of the Interim Standards Council for Community Learning Development, established in 2007, was to commission research into continuing professional development needs. The ensuing investigation by Tett et al. (2007) focused on early and mid-career practitioners. Their work provides a unique insight into ways in which the nature and structure of work currently affects practitioner learning and development in CLD.

FACTORS AFFECTING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN CLD

In an online survey, the CPD researchers asked practitioners how they would prefer to spend their time. They received replies from 124. On average, early career repondents wanted more time doing face-to-face work and less time planning. Mid-career respondents also wanted more face-to-face work with groups, more time to manage staff, and less time on networking, administration and planning (Tett et al. 2007, 14). What should be noted here is the importance of the intersubjective dimension for both groups, as this theme will be developed later in this chapter. In terms of stimulus for learning, respondents were overwhelmingly positive about what they had gained from engaging directly with people in communities. They added the significant rider, however, that sufficient time needs to be available for such learning to happen. This last point is particularly important, as the most distinctive aspect of CLD is the educational process by which practitioners engage with people in attempts at social change. This kind of work affirms professional practice, without which fieldworkers can become less confident in their professional identity. As the researchers (ibid., 40) note, however, full-time professional staff now devote more time to managerial work, leaving part-time staff and volunteers to undertake what used to be regarded as core informal educational face-to-face work with individuals and groups. The lack of opportunities to practice in this way can result in a loss of confidence and a feeling of becoming deskilled—a mutually reinforcing process with negative consequences for the sense of professional identity. This helps to explain the finding (ibid., 41) that mid-career practitioners are more likely to have a fairly sound sense of themselves as informal educators, whose primary task is to work in developmental ways with groups and individuals around self-defined interests, aspirations and needs. This sense of self is rooted in a strong consciousness of their own culture and history within the former Community Education Service. Early-career practitioners, in contrast, tend to see their work in terms of meeting predetermined targets and top-down demands.

It is worth noting that some staff reported no easy access to CLD colleagues because they worked, for example, as a pupil support worker and so were part of a school-based group without any other CLD professionals. Having acknowledged this kind of problem, some respondents had also learned from working alongside and collaborating with others from outside their own organizations. This is significant because the confidence to complete challenging work is highly dependent on informal support from colleagues, and confidence is crucial to the sense of agency in the workplace. As Boud et al. (1993, 3) have observed: “A belief in our ability to act and learn is a prerequisite for learning; without this we are passive participants in the constructs of others.” When asked about the availability and utility of systematic staff development processes, in several cases preference was expressed for the kind of staff development that builds on and enhances collegial relationships and collective identities. Moreover, as CLD provision is highly diverse, training has to prepare professionals for a wide variety of settings and practices. There is a need, therefore, for supportive workplaces in which practitioners can reflectively engage with colleagues in order to understand the specific demands and characteristics of particular contexts and settings (ibid., 39). Among other things, working alongside others enables staff to learn from each other, especially new practices and perspectives, and thus to bring fresh insights into their work.

While definitive status cannot be claimed for Tett et al., their findings are consistent with other sources. The 2008 Audit Commission ...

Table of contents

• Routledge International Studies in the Philosophy of Education
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Section I Introduction
• Section II Key Issues and Debates in Habermas and Education
• Section III Habermas Applied Critical Theory and Educational Provision
• Section IV Conclusion
• Contributors
• Index