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Futures in the education of educators
Janice Malcolm, University of Leeds
The broader context
In this paper I want to consider some current developments in the training and career experience of adult educators and make a case for proactive engagement in policy by those of us now working in the field. These developments are occurring on a number of different levels. Traditional boundaries within the education system as a whole are becoming blurred, not through any coherent policy of creating a ‘seamless robe’, but rather as a result of a number of ad hoc initiatives which may have the effect of producing a single, if rather misshapen, patchwork garment. Thus for example universities increasingly work together with further education colleges to offer ‘off-campus’ higher education and progression routes; lifelong education, for so long a concept familiar only to adult educators, is now espoused as policy by all the main political parties; much of what remains of traditional local education authority adult education is now delivered by colleges; an increasing proportion of students in both higher and further education are adults; and most recently, it has been suggested that colleges - and thus ultimately the universities to which they are affiliated - should consider enrolling fourteen-year olds[1]. The education of adults is becoming indiscernible as a distinct area of educational endeavour; in the process it is also inevitably losing the ‘marginal difference’ which some practitioners saw as its principal source of emancipatory potential[2]. Professional distinctiveness may be another casualty; ‘educators of adults’ might now refer to anyone working in further, higher, professional, continuing or numerous other branches of education.
Whilst these traditional boundaries are crumbling, there is increasing intervention in the day-to-day work of institutions through the various (and usually unrelated) prescriptive quality assessment and inspection frameworks established within each sector. This inevitably has an impact on educators’ autonomy in that it influences both the content of educational provision and the management of institutions. Reductions in funding across post-compulsory education, combined with expansion of student numbers, further constrain the choices available to educators in their work. Within higher education, the end of the binary divide has also helped both to highlight the issue of the relative significance attached to teaching and research, and to problematise some traditional conceptions of ‘being an adult educator’.
Current indications are that a change of government is probable in the near future, and that there is therefore some scope for policy modification. Although there is admittedly little prospect of major structural change in any sector of education, this does at least open up the possibility of meaningful consultation on the general direction and content of education policy, and consequently of educational work, of a kind which has been all but impossible in recent years.
Being an educator
What then has been the impact of recent developments on the day-to-day work of educators of adults? The effects are perhaps most clearly visible in further education, where many of the changes described above are further advanced than in other sectors, and where adults now constitute three-quarters of the student body[3]. Thus for example tutors may find themselves working in contexts where classroom teaching is a comparative rarity; they may spend the majority of their time in workshop situations, or working with individuals within a group, all the members of which are at different stages of learning and assessment. The content of their teaching may be determined by an individualised and competence-based assessment framework which they have played no part in designing; they may have to assist students to make selections from packages of standardised and graded learning materials rather than produce their own materials. Those working in training organisations and ‘realistic work environments’ may experience these changes even more keenly, and may also be subject to production demands which conflict with educational activities[4].
Within higher education, the main effects of expansion in terms of tutors’ work have been an increase in class sizes and a consequent loss of contact with individual students. Modularisation, a handmaiden of expansion, has brought a further administrative load and has introduced an inevitable degree of alienation between tutors and their ever-changing students. In all sectors the number of prescribed activities and the bureaucracy associated with assessment and quality assurance have burgeoned to the point where they can occupy a significant proportion of the working week. Thus the individualisation and standardisation of learning, the size of the student body, and the demands of both institutional and external administration have effected a radical and frequently unwelcome change in what educators actually spend their time doing[5]. This in turn raises a number of questions about what claims, if any, they can realistically make to any emancipatory social purpose in their work, and has implications for the kinds of education and training which they need to enable them to function both effectively and ethically in the new educational environment.
Professional training
In recent years there have been moves in a number of different professional fields to modify, and in some cases transform, the training undergone by entrants to the profession. Education outside schools, for which mandatory professional training has never been established, has in some ways jumped a stage in its development as a professional activity. It is proceeding rather hastily from a situation where training and education of various kinds were available on a relatively casual and haphazard basis, to a scenario in which newly-developed qualifications may become to all intents and purposes a prerequisite for practice. This is evident in the recent exercise Mapping the FE Sector[6] which provides an occupational and functional map of the type normally used as the basis for vocational qualifications. The exercise followed lengthy speculation about the possibility of establishing an Education Lead Body, and was rapidly followed by the initiation of a similar exercise in relation to higher education[7]. At the same time a competence profile has been introduced in schoolteacher training (see, for example, Malcolm[8]) and the DfEE has announced plans to establish a higher-level vocational qualification for headteachers. The general drift of policy, if it can be given so precise a label, is towards a national system of teaching qualifications which may well be sector-specific, but which will focus on one or more models of teaching competence.
Some other professions, by contrast, are moving away from a skills-based training model towards one which emphasises knowledge, understanding, reflection and critical thinking. The obvious examples are nursing and other professions allied to medicine, where training has now been upgraded to degree level, and where the more menial tasks traditionally associated with the occupations are being delegated to vocationally-qualified technicians or assistants. This is linked with the question of European harmonisation, which has in some cases prompted a reconsideration of training routes to ensure that reciprocal recognition can be obtained by practitioners across the EU.
Movements in professional education for educators thus appear to be going in the opposite direction to those occurring in other forms of professional preparation. The reasons for this are complex; whilst to some extent the changes are clearly a product of the paradoxical triumph of the NCVQ model within education in particular, I would suggest they are also attributable in part to the reluctance of post-compulsory educators to see themselves as a group with common professional concerns and engaged in common activities - inhabitants of the same unfenced moorland, to borrow an appealing metaphor[9]. To pursue the metaphor a little further, the introspection and clannishness of the moor-dwellers may have left the way open for others to erect their own arbitrary boundaries and introduce crossing points or even passports, developments which will not necessarily be conducive to the greater educational good.
The models of competence adopted in this new generation of teaching qualifications may not be as rigid as that adopted by NCVQ and so roundly criticised over the years by SCUTREA members and others; however it seems likely that they will share some of its basic characteristics. I do not propose here to repeat or add to the general arguments about the ‘competence colossus’[10] but to consider instead the implications of these developments for the training and development of educators of adults.
Futures and how to deal with them
There is something rather unnerving about trying to imagine the working lives of future educators; it is difficult to avoid sinking into dystopian fantasy. They are currently growing up, computer-literate in a world of ‘flexible employment’, processed through the various key stages of the National Curriculum, perhaps moving on to ‘impoverished and authoritarian forms of learning which make no attempt at all to incorporate breadth, critical analysis and challenge’[11], warned repeatedly that education is their main insurance against a life of poverty and unemployment and worse still, that they will have to keep it up throughout their lives in order to survive at all. Such experiences are likely to form a stony and infertile soil for liberal or radical ideas about the purposes and potential of education, although they may render these future educators less troublesome, both as employees and as citizens, than some of their predecessors. However it is vital that opportunities exist for them to be exposed to and analyse these ideas, if education is not to be a mechanistic, sterile and ultimately oppressive experience for the majority of both tutors and students.
This suggests to me that the preservation of space for ideas, analysis and commitment in the training and development of educators is of crucial importance, and yet this is precisely what is squeezed out when the balance of training shifts too heavily towards skills, competences and workplace practice. The FE mapping exercise includes a rather tortured paragraph about ‘values’ which demonstrates how the emancipatory commitment of educators can be adapted to fit the skill requirements of a new training system:
A draft statement of principles and commitments was initially produced through analysing ... the mission statements and commitments of FE corporations and the values expressed in community education [...] this could allow those scrutinising the functional map to evaluate whether the map accurately reflects the spectrum of work roles. A statement of values can help those developing the map further to audit whether these values are portrayed in the detail.[12]
Who needs dystopian fantasy when you can have a ready-made statement of professional values to help you audit your role map? Yet we have little to offer in response to such pernicious banalities, of which we can doubtless expect more when the higher education mapping exercise is finished. Ecclestone’s call for ‘policy scholarship’[13] as a means of resistance to this type of encroachment on the intellectual independence and professional commitment of educators is timely and warrants serious consideration. Similarly Bates’ invitation to researchers to ‘explore the difficulties in arriving at consensus over common standards in the context of professional dissensus’[14] is one that needs to be accepted before contentious ‘standards’ are externally imposed on the profession as a whole. It is precisely because there is no standard route into the teaching of adults that we have been able to develop the diversity of approaches which currently characterises training and development for educators; and it is for the same reason that we are not as prepared as we might be for the questions raised by the proposed creation of a monolithic qualifications structure. SCUTREA’s recent initiatives in the area of professional ethics demonstrate an awareness of the problems, but also show how very difficult it is to accommodate diversity within simple codes.
There has of course been a discussion, for as long as I have been involved in education, about emancipatory practice, reflective practice and so on - in short about the content of professional development. My point here is that the focus of these discussions has been principally on conceptual critique and small-scale practical application, rather than on policy-building. This is fine when we are left to our own alternative or oppositional devices, safe in the knowledge that no-one is sufficiently interested in or threatened by our activities to interfere. It becomes problematic when, as in this instance, what has been a fragmented and amorphous field of practice crystallises into an object of national policy intervention. However the particular political context in which this is occurring may provide a unique opportunity for those engaged in the education of educators to participate in the construction of that policy - unique at least to those of us who have spent the majority of our professional lives being systematically excluded from national policy debate.
Millar[15], referring to the construction of the new South Africa, demonstrated the importance of educators preparing themselves for a proactive policy role, and seizing opportunities as they arise or are thrust upon them. Whilst not wishing to romanticise or overstate the possibilities presented by the current context, I would suggest that this is precisely what is needed in terms of intervention in the process of creating a qualifications structure for educators of adults - and indeed in other areas of education policy. We have to some extent given up expecting to be listened to by policy makers, and perhaps even given up imagining how we might develop the system if anyone cared what we thought. The prospect that arises now is not that educators will be actively invited to shape developments - this seems highly unlikely - but that in the turmoil and uncertainty of a new political departure, opportunities are created for debate and participation which may have a profound influence on future policy.
We as educators should be ready to participate in this process with ‘intellectual work incisive enough both to contribute moral and intellectual grounding for [professional] practice and, even more urgently, to impact the construction of national policy’[16], not for our own benefit - it’s too late for that - but for that of our successors, and more importantly their students.
[1] Utley, A (1996) Colleges plan to enrol children. In Times Higher Education Supplement 5 April, p. 1
[2] Steele, T