Disrupting Adult and Community Education

Teaching, Learning, and Working in the Periphery

Robert C. Mizzi, Tonette S. Rocco, Sue Shore, Robert C. Mizzi, Tonette S. Rocco, Sue Shore

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781438460925, 9781438460918
• eBook ISBN: 9781438460932
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

Honorable Mention, 2017 Phillip E. Frandson Award for Literature in the Field of Professional, Continuing, and/or Online Education presented by the University Professional and Continuing Education Association This groundbreaking book critiques the boundaries of where adult education takes place through a candid examination of teaching, learning, and working practices in the social periphery. Lives in this context are diverse and made through complex practices that take place in the shadows of formal systems: on streetscapes and farms, in vehicles and homes, and through underground networks. Educators may be family members, friends, or colleagues, and the curriculum may be based on needs, interests, histories, and cultural practices. The case studies presented here analyze adult education in the lives of sex workers, LGBTQ activists, undocumented migrants, disabled workers, homeless youth, immigrants, inmates, and others. Focusing on learning at the social margins, this book challenges readers to reconceptualize local, national, and transnational adult education practices in light of neoliberalism and globalization.

RETHINKING LOCATIONS OF
ADULT EDUCATION PRACTICE

1

Lifelong Learning as Critical Action for Sexual and Gender Minorities as a Constituency of the Learner Fringe

André P. Grace

Neoliberalism and globalization have driven a change culture of crisis and challenge that has altered life, learning, and work since the 1970s (Barros, 2012; Giroux, 2004; Harvey, 2005; Jarvis, 2007; Schuller & Watson, 2009). As I emphasize in my book Lifelong Learning as Critical Action (Grace, 2013a), the upshot of globalization and the neoliberal tendency to prioritize instrumental learning over social and cultural learning is a contemporary lifelong-learning paradigm that is limited in scope. As synchronous and omnipresent forces, neoliberalism and globalization have narrowed our view of education and what it ought to encompass, setting and shrinking parameters to how we envision lifelong learning as a way forward and a way out of difficulties we face in life, learning, and work contexts (Grace, 2013a). Indeed the contemporary politics shaping this paradigm contravene the notion of lifelong learning for all, which has been the buzz phrase of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) since the mid-1990s (Grace, 2013a). While lifelong learning has certainly become a large-scale international policy-and-practice phenomenon over the past twenty years, thanks in large part to the increasing fervor with which the OECD has spearheaded various educational policymaking initiatives, there is still much missing in its design (Field, 2006; Grace, 2006a, 2013a). With imprints of neoliberalism and globalization clearly evident, these policymaking initiatives have placed diverse demands on public education (schooling for children and youth), adult education (both in institutionalized and community contexts), and higher education (in colleges and universities). In higher education there has been a shift toward reducing learning to such extrinsic purposes as career preparation and learning for new economies from local to global contexts (Grace, 2013a; Greenspan, 2008; Holmwood, 2014). The OECD, in tandem with multinational corporate interests, national governments, and an array of educational interests, has ardently linked lifelong learning to the demands of neoliberalism, globalization, individualism, privatization, corporatism, competition, and progress as it is defined within a burgeoning knowledge economy (Grace, 2013a). Today lifelong learning linked primarily to economistic concerns is the usual purview of formal education as an institutional and predominantly instrumental endeavor. It is commonly the purview of education in many nonformal and informal learning contexts as well. From this perspective, instrumentalized lifelong learning can be viewed as the common link and thread that connects learning across the diverse spaces and contexts in which it now occurs. In this milieu, the tendency is to sideline learning for social and cultural purposes.

Amid the dynamics of neoliberalism, globalization, and other interlocking change forces, tensions abound in lifelong learning, which ought to be a lifewide educational formation that emphasizes more than learning that enhances worker performance and productivity (Burke & Jackson, 2007; Grace, 2012, 2013a). For learners, especially those in vulnerable categories who need lifelong learning to be something more, there are persistent and unresolved issues of recognition, access, and accommodation as they confront social, cultural, and political as well as economic challenges and calamities (Grace, 2013a). These learners constitute the learner fringe. They struggle to experience the rights and privileges of full citizenship in societal contexts where access to, and accommodation in, worthwhile learning and quality work remain substantive issues to address (Grace, 2009a, 2013a). They tend to matter little as learners in the neoliberal milieu, and their concerns are largely ignored or treated peripherally in mainstream lifelong learning. Those occupying the learner fringe are seen neither as contributors to the neoliberal world nor are they seen as valuable commodities in instrumental contexts where learning is geared to efficient economistic purposes. Moreover, educators who foster social and cultural forms of education that could improve their lot generally comprise a lesser tier compared to those educators who prioritize instrumental learning for middle-class learners (Grace, 2012, 2013a). These already educated learners are expected to return periodically to the learning treadmill to keep up with the demands of navigating a neoliberal work world (Grace, 2013a).

Clearly then, there is vital political and pedagogical work to do to recast lifelong learning as an encompassing project enveloping all learners. In order for lifelong learning to be an inclusive and meaningful discourse for today and tomorrow, I have suggested framing lifelong learning as critical action that prepares citizens as learners for work and for the rest of life (Grace, 2013a). This formation of lifelong learning emphasizing holistic development has this modus operandi: to nurture social engagement, political and economic understanding, and cultural work to benefit learners as citizens and workers. Here learners need to feel confident that lifelong learning is a wide-ranging paradigm involving principles and practices that can help them to make good choices as they question what constitutes worthwhile learning, quality work, and the good life. For example, in this chapter I consider how lifelong learning as critical action engages sexual and gender minority (SGM) youth and young adults in useful, sensible ways that flesh out a politics and pedagogy of critique, hope, and possibility aimed at nurturing and supporting them. In the end, these young learners build assets and functional toolsets needed to grow into resilience as a process and outcome. SGM youth and young adults deliberately and deliberatively engage in critical action and become change agents in personal contexts as well as in an array of institutional and community contexts. Lifelong learning framed as critical action is especially important for these individuals as well as for others occupying the learner fringe. These learners are mediating life, learning, and work in peripheral spaces where they deal with social, cultural, economic, and political exclusion. For them, lifelong learning, especially as it has evolved under neoliberalism and globalization, has been bounded and exclusionary, with responsibility for lifelong learning shifting from the public to the private domain (Grace, 2013a). In this milieu, learners are expected to take individual responsibility for their own learning and the blame when lifelong learning fails. The historically valorized concept of lifelong learning has become highly politicized, leaving many citizens to question the meanings and values associated with the construct within increasingly instrumental paradigms of work and life (Grace, 2012, 2013b).

The learner fringe has become even more disenfranchised in recent years. Social upheaval and a politics of dislocation continue to mark their lives indelibly (Grace, 2006a, 2013a). Since the profound panic that first engulfed the global financial market from October 6–10, 2008 (Krugman, 2009), the plight of the learner fringe has worsened amid the faulty logic of neoliberalism that suggests if you improve economic output, then social advances will flow in tandem (Grace, 2013a). In this milieu, the vast economic debacle has implications for lifelong learning and subsequent responses to meet learner needs now and into the future. In this regard, lifelong learning as critical action has two objectives: (1) to interrogate the neoliberal formation of lifelong learning as a predominantly economistic venture, examining social, cultural, and political change forces that demand lifewide policymaking in governmental, educational, and other institutional contexts; and, in critical counter measure, and (2) to implement inclusive, holistic, and engaged forms of lifelong learning that attend to matters of ethics, democratic learning, learner freedom, and justice in civil and economic contexts (Grace, 2013a). With regard to the latter, as I demonstrate in my book Lifelong Learning as Critical Action, there are pockets of hope and activity in learning for social and cultural purposes (Grace, 2013a). This more holistic learning often involves the learner fringe. It is driven by their individual and social needs that extend beyond the need for instrumental learning focused on economic advancement. In this regard, I explore constituent groups comprising the learner fringe who navigate diverse social and cultural contexts in Canada, Australia, Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Within this exploration, I consider the politics and realities of locating such constituencies as youth and young adults, older women, learners with disabilities, Aboriginal learners, and SGM learners. These groups are often considered to be vulnerable learners running social and educational deficits, at least from neoliberal perspectives. Such narrow characterization requires that we interrogate how neoliberal institutions define learners; how communities define them; how educators define them; and how learners define themselves.

In this chapter I take up this analysis with particular attention to sexual and gender minorities as a constituency of the learner fringe. First, I consider the dynamics of constructing lifelong learning as critical action, with some consideration of the utility of the social history of adult education in framing its formation. Then, after considering sexual and gender minorities and their holistic learning plans, I conclude by calling on caring professionals—understood in this chapter as schoolteachers, adult educators, social workers, counselors, and other significant adults with the disciplinary knowledge associated with the caring professions—to engage in lifelong learning as critical action that makes the lives of the learner fringe better now. Such critical action involves engaged professional practices soaked in findings emanating from researching resilience and further framed using critical perspectives emphasizing democracy, freedom, ethics, social justice, and equity.

Constructing Lifelong Learning as Critical Action

I have been an educator for over three decades, and I have worked in public schooling (for children and youth), adult, and higher education (Grace, 2007a). As a lifelong educator, I advocate that learners need to be recognized, respected, and accommodated across power relationships and the contexts that locate them in everyday life, learning, and work. This involves holistic learning as a lifelong and lifewide venture incorporating instrumental, social, and cultural purposes. I have recently explored the achievement of these educational priorities in the face of neoliberalism and globalization as powerful change forces that prioritize learning linked to the economy over learning linked to the whole of life (Grace, 2013a). In doing this work five principles apprise my philosophy of “teaching and learning as resistance,” in order to make life better now for the learner fringe (Grace, 2007a): (1) teaching is a political engagement that builds an inclusive practice guided by an ethic of mutual respect; (2) teaching is enhanced as a social construct and process when it emerges in the intersection of social theorizing and practice; (3) teaching as a social process has to be interdisciplinary, mining history, philosophy, psychology, and other disciplines for insights, and intradisciplinary, mining public, adult, and higher education for further insights; (4) the teaching-learning interaction has to be dynamically staged as a critically reflective, interactive, and collective engagement where educators and learners both contribute; and (5) learning has to be a holistic and lifelong endeavor, addressing the instrumental, social, and cultural needs of learners across life, learning, and work domains. For me, these five principles are embodied and embedded in lifelong learning as critical action that attends to ethical, political, psychosocial, and cultural aspects of an ecological educational practice that is integral to sustaining democratic citizenship. This practice incorporates the intellectual, the organic, the pragmatic, and the ideal in weighing realities and desires for living a full and satisfying life (Grace, 2013a). It interrogates survivalist approaches to lifelong learning that primarily engage learners in skill pruning to abet workplace performance. It critically questions what is included or excluded as well as gained or lost in developing learners as human resources.

Mining the History of Adult Education as Social Education

In designing lifelong learning as critical action from policy and practice perspectives, it is useful to turn to the history of adult education for inspiration (Grace, 2012, 2013a, 2013b). In Canada, this history demonstrates a collectivist orientation to learning, especially as it is linked to social action and social progress (Welton, 2011). In a nod to Canadian adult education constructed as social education historically grounded in “collective orientations to the world” (p. 4), Welton (2011) challenges adult educators to involve adults in lifelong, lifewide, and democratic learning. He sees such learning as integral to a critical sociality in which the “concept of civil society subsume[s] local action and individual social movements into an idea of representation, resistance, and action that incorporates a vast array of ordinary communal activities” (p. 3). This understanding of civil society reflects a history of Canadian adult education as community-based and critically oriented (Grace, 2006b). However, in today’s world sociality is twisted by an individuality that burdens citizens as learners and workers who are held captive by, as well as accountable to, systems and structures that are the sources of problems and ties that bind individuals in a neoliberal world (Grace, 2013a). Welton describes this world as it emerged during the late twentieth century: “We became conscious of ourselves as persons who were constantly adapting to new learning challenges—in our bodies, minds, and spirits; at work; in civil society’s many domains; in cultural expression and play” (p. 7). This self-consciousness caught up in individualism and accountability tended to work against possibilities for a cohesive, integrated social. Moreover, it demonstrated neoliberalism at work, shifting the blame to individuals for failures in learning, work, and life contexts (Grace, 2013a). While this state of affairs can be construed as a bombardment of lifelong learning and constituent adult e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledegments
• Introduction Starting Somewhere: Troubling Perspectives of Periphery and Center in Adult and Community Education
• Rethinking Locations of Adult Education Practice
• Educators’ Work with “Peripheral” Spaces of Engagement
• Immigrant Experiences of Work and Learning in the New World Order
• Transnational Adult Education and Global Engagement
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover