Decolonising Lifelong Learning in the Age of Transnational Migration

Shibao Guo,Srabani Maitra

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000057904
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Education General

Decolonising Lifelong Learning in the Age of Transnational Migration examines how colonialism has shaped migration and migrants' transnational learning experiences. With the development of modern transportation and advanced communication technologies, migration has shifted from international to transnational, characterised by the multiple and circular migration across transnational spaces of migrants who maintain close contact with their country of origin.

The book interrogates the colonial assumptions and Eurocentric tendencies influencing the current ideological moorings of lifelong learning theories, policies, and practices in the age of transnational migration. It calls for an approach to lifelong learning that aims to decolonise the ideological underpinnings of colonial relations of rule, especially in terms of its racialised privileging of 'whiteness' and Eurocentrism as normative processes of knowledge accumulation. This volume cover a wide range of topics, including:

• Theorising decolonisation in lifelong learning and transnational migration

• Decolonising racism, sexism, and settler colonialism

• Decolonising knowledge production and recognition

• Decolonising the life course

• Decolonising lifelong learning policies

• Decolonising pedagogic and curricular approaches to lifelong learning

Overall, the chapters represent the collective efforts of the contributors in attempting to decolonise lifelong learning in the age of transnational migration. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Lifelong Education.

Theorising decolonisation in the context of lifelong learning and transnational migration: anti-colonial and anti-racist perspectives

Srabani Maitra and Shibao Guo

ABSTRACT

In the age of transnational migration, the practices and policies of lifelong learning in many immigrant-receiving countries continue to be impacted by the cultural and discursive politics of colonial legacies. Drawing on a wide range of anti-colonial and anti-racist scholarship, we argue for an approach to lifelong learning that aims to decolonise the ideological underpinnings of colonial relations of rule, especially in terms of its racialised privileging of 'whiteness' and Eurocentrism. In the context of lifelong learning, decolonisation would achieve four important purposes. First, it would illustrate the nexus between knowledge, power, and colonial narratives by interrogating how knowledge-making is a fundamental aspect of 'coloniality'. Second, decolonisation would entail challenging the hegemony of western knowledge, education, and credentials and upholding a 'multiculturalism of knowledge' that is inclusive and responsive to the cultural needs and values of transnational migrants. Third, decolonisation would lead to the need for planning and designing learning curricula as well as institutionalised pedagogy based on non-western knowledge systems and epistemic diversity. The final emphasis is on the urgency to decolonise our minds as lifelong learners, practitioners and policy-makers in order to challenge the passivity, colonisation, and marginalisation of learners both in classrooms and workplaces.

Tracing the shifting meanings of lifelong learning

Lifelong learning as a 'beautifully simple idea' (Field, 2000, p. vii) representing humanistic and emancipatory approaches to education, was perhaps first institutionalised as early as the 1960s or 1970s by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) that envisaged for a new vision of learning throughout the life of individuals and societies (Eifert, 2018). One of the first published reports in this context was by Faure, Learning to Be (1972), that argued for the principles of lifelong learning (initially referred to as lifelong education) to be enshrined as the basic concept in educational policies of both the developed and the developing worlds (Medel-Anonuevo, Ohsako, & Mauch, 2001). The report made a strong case for lifelong education - an education based on democracy, 'conceived of as implying each man's right to realise his own potential and to share in the building of his own future' (Faure et al, 1972, p. v). It thus encouraged learners to 'build up a continually evolving body of knowledge all through life "learn to be"' (Faure et al., 1972, p. vi).

The humanistic and democratic principles underlying lifelong learning in those early years, however, underwent drastic changes in the 1990s that ushered in new social and economic contexts especially in the global North. With the advent of economic globalisation and neo-liberal restructuring, many western countries such as Canada underwent deregulation and privatisation of public services. Correspondingly, there was a decline in full-time employment, dismantling of employment protection legislation, cutbacks in minimum wage levels and a shift toward part-time contingent/precarious jobs.

In this neo-liberal world of uncertainty and contingency, workers were expected to be flexible, adaptable and willing to be trained continuously in a wide range of skills to serve the changing labour market needs (Edwards et al., 1998). A notion of employability tied to skill acquisition thus moved to the economic sphere, 'placing emphasis on individual skill development and preparedness for employment, with less concern for the availability of employment and appropriate opportunity structures' (Edwards et al, 1998, p. n.p.). This economic imperative impacted the policies and practices of lifelong learning as well, invoking it as a 'utilitarian discourse... represented by the "skills" agenda' (Eifert, 2018, p. 28). As Cruikshank (2002) rightly pointed out, under the banner of lifelong learning, it was training that started to be considered as the essential tool that will enable workers to compete for jobs in the neo-liberal economy.

Two important reports published around this time, UNESCO's Delors report, Learning: The Treasure Within (Delors, 1996), and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Lifelong Learning for All (1996), were instrumental in emphasising the economic rationale for lifelong learning and orienting it toward the 'principles of human capital and employability' (UNESCO, 2016, p. 4). For instance, Lifelong Learning for All presented the ideals of lifelong learning as the primary principle 'that will respond directly to the need to improve the capacity of individuals, families, workplaces and communities to continuously adapt and renew' (OECD, 1996, p. 3). Within a few decades, the discourse of lifelong learning shifted from 'learning to be' to 'learning to be productive and employable' (Biesta, 2006, p. 172).

While there have been some strong policy and practice conversations in the field of adult and lifelong learning about the economic rationale of lifelong learning (Biesta, 2006; Cruikshank, 2002; Edwards 1997; Field, 2000), what is largely left unaddressed is how skills and knowledge offered under the purview of lifelong learning often continue to be underpinned by colonial forms of knowledge formation and racial modalities. Exploration of such modalities is particularly important in the context of transnational migrants living and working in western countries. As has already been extensively explored by scholars, most governments and policymakers in the West are grappling with challenges that are quite similar - increased transnational migration, especially from non-western countries and lack of labour market integration for migrants in host countries (Guo, 2010, 2015a; Maitra, 2013).

According to OECD (2018) report, more than 5 million people settled permanently in the OECD in 2017. As a result of increasing migration, the foreign-born population in the OECD countries has reached 127 million people, representing an average of 13% of the total population compared with 9.5% in 2000. Among the top 10 immigrant-sending countries were China, Romania, Syria, India, and Poland.

While the range and scope of transnational practices vary considerably, there is no denying that transnational migration has produced ethnocultural diversity in many western countries. Although many of these migrant learners and their families are highly educated and bring educational backgrounds, employment-related experiences and professional expertise to the host society, they are frequently urged to return to lifelong learning and keep updating their qualifications and skills to remain gainfully employed. It is generally believed that lifelong learning has an important role to play in helping migrants with their adaptation and transition to a new society (Guo, 2010). Continuous acquisition of skills, knowledge and communicational abilities are thus deemed useful for transnational migrants in order to expedite their labour market integration in the host country and remain employable under the increasingly fluid demands of job requirements and the allied knowledge economies (Jarvis, 2007). Consequently, those who are unable to engage in lifelong learning are made to believe that they should take responsibility for their own learning and shoulder the blame if they fail to achieve socio-economic and cultural integration in the new country (Crowther, 2004).

Like any other form of learning, lifelong learning is a social and cultural phenomenon in sociocultural world where power is unequally distributed. Thus, the opportunity to learn and progress through learning depends on the individual's position in the social, cultural and economic structures (Jarvis, 2007). The issue is particularly pertinent in the context of settler colonies such as Canada, where politics of race and culture continue to circulate as residues of colonial history. Historically in Canada, for example, the White national subject has always been 'exalted' as a stable and superior being vis-à-vis Aboriginal peoples and other non-white groups living in the country (Thobani, 2007). These colonial and racialised perspectives have, for instance, resulted in Aboriginal peoples being subjected to debilitating forces of assimilation and colonisation through several oppressive federal government policies (Battiste, 1998). Moreover, to maintain an overtly white national character, state agencies have also tried to control and contain the demography of citizens by using race, ethnicity, nationality, and colour to determine who is most eligible to migrate, become a citizen and participate in the national economy. Racialised immigrants, brought into the settler nation, despite being highly educated, face increased barriers to their labour market integration. Such barriers typically include lack of opportunities for learning as well as devaluation and denigration of their prior learning and credentialism leading to their unemployment and underemployment, and downward social mobility (Guo, 2009, 2013; Maitra, 2015a, 2015b). To put into colonial contexts, particular representations of the 'native other' are naturalised, their knowledge delegitimised and thereby considered deficient and inferior (Giroux, 1997; Memmi, 2000).

Given the above contexts, in the following sections, we will delve deeper into the question of whether practices of lifelong learning are responsive to such colonial, racial, and cultural frameworks that mediate knowledge/skill acquisition, recognition and validation in the age of transnational migration? Drawing on a wide range of anti-colonial and anti-racist scholarship, we will make two arguments. First, we will argue that discourses of lifelong learning are discriminatorily employed to create an 'abyssal divide' between the knowledge, learning and credentials brought to western countries by racialised transnational immigrants. Such abyssal divides are based on colonial assumptions of racialised migrants being 'deficient' and 'backward' compared to white, settler norms. Racialised migrants are thus often barred from integrating into the labour market; their previous knowledge and credentials derecognised and invalidated. Second, curricular and pedagogical approaches associated with lifelong learning can also have colonial undertones. In this context, we will draw on scholars who have specifically examined soft skill training curricula that many immigrants in western countries are encouraged to imbibe in order to remain employable in the labour market. We will show how the curricula are often suffused with cultural and racial values geared toward assimilating immigrants of colour to the dominant and normative national culture of the country. We will conclude by arguing for the decolonisation of practices of lifelong learning as a powerful form of redressing the inequities built into the standard, prescriptive models of lifelong learning. While our discussion is primarily based on the Canadian context, much of our findings are also relevant to many other immigrant-receiving nations in the West, where practices of lifelong learning continue to be underpinned by colonial and racial ideologies.

Transnational migrants' lifelong learning

Creating an 'abyssal divide' between the knowledge, learning and credentials

In the context of transnational migrants living in western countries like Canada, lifelong learning tends to take complex forms of knowledge, skills and training. In order to explicate such complexities, it is important to understand first the challenges of devaluation and denigration that many immigrants, especially immigrants of colour, experience in the host countries. Lifelong learning broadly defined constitutes learning that goes beyond the initial formal education to continue throughout one's life and therefore has to do with the 'acquisition of new skills and knowledge in relation to the world of work' (Biesta, 2006, p. 173). Learning through work, therefore, is an important dimension of lifelong learning (Fenwick, 2003). Indeed, UNESCO's Education 2030 Framework for Action clearly spells out the need to provide flexible lifelong learning opportunities to citizens in order to ensure 'equitable and increased access to quality technical and vocational education and training' as well as the 'recognition, validation and accreditation of the knowledge, skills and competencies acquired through non-formal and informal education' (UNESCO, 2015, p. vi). The notion of credential recognition is also closely linked to the lifelong learning tradition of Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition, which involves the recognition of formal, non-formal and informal learning acquired through various means (Andersson & Guo, 2009).

In many traditionally, immigrant-receiving countries in the global North, notwithstanding official discourses of equity and recognition, skilled migrants, particularly those from racialised backgrounds, face an ironic situation in which those whose skills are most needed encounter special difficulties in gaining access to these professions (Wagner & Childs, 2006). Discrimination buttresses selective recruitment systems that value locally obtained education, and experience over new migrants who come with qualifications and credentials from other, particularly non-western countries (Webb, 2015). Thus, as Wagner and Childs observe, immigrant optometrists become taxi drivers, social workers become hospital cleaners, teachers become clerical assistants, and environmental engineers stack supermarket shelves. In other words, continuing ideologies of racialised undervaluation of immigrant bodies lead to a de-recognition of their skill sets and credentials. The colonial ideologies of race here does not function merely as a cultural artefact of society but has very real material consequences by selectively ascribing immigrant communities into either the lowest rungs of the labour market or shutting them out of the formal labour market altogether (Das Gupta, Man, Mirchandani, & Ng, 2014).

Let us return to Canada - a country that has been quite successful in attracting well-educated migrants since the 1990s. According to the last census, the proportion of the Canadian population born abroad had risen to a near historical high of 21.9% in 2016, for a total of 7,540,830. The top source countries for migration were the Philippines, India, China, Iran, Pakistan, Syria and South Korea. The government plans to boost the immigration programme further, to reflect 13% increase in immigration by 2020.¹

Even though skilled immigrants bring significant human capital resources to Canada, a number of studies demonstrate that highly educated immigrant professionals experience deskilling and devaluation of their prior learning and work experiences after immigrating to Canada (Branker, 2017; Mojab, 1999; Guo, 2009, 2013, 2015a, 2015b; Maitra, 2013, 2015a, 2015b). In a Vancouver-based study with immigrants from the People's Republic of China, scholars found that most recent Chinese immigrants came to Canada with post-secondary education (72.5%). However, they could not find jobs in their original professions because their Chinese qualifications and work experiences were not recognised. Their lack of access to professional occupations resulted in downward social mobility to the extent that some lived in poverty (Guo & Devoretz, 2006). Branker (2017) and Pendakur (2005) noted negative labour market outcomes for Caribbean and Afghan immigrants in Canada. Maitra's previous paper (Maitra, 2015b) reported similar challenges faced by highly skilled South Asian immigrants in Canada. Despite being well qualified, many South Asian immigrants faced what can be described as the 'triple glass effect' (Guo, 2013) while trying to translate their skills into appropriate opportunities in Canada. They were either asked by employers and recruiters to get Canadian work experience or told that their foreign credentials were not enough and that they need Canadian education or certification. To sum, most South Asian immigrants thus encountered a 'glass gate' that denied them an entry into professional communities along with the 'glass door' that blocked their job opportunitie...