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Adult education and community needs: towards a distinctive extra-mural contribution
Dr. Colin Fletcher, Cranfield Institute of Technology
There is neither calm nor balance. In each country there is progress and upheaval, peace-making and preparation for war. Lifelong learning is a strategy for progress.[1] The general question is, I feel, the relation between lifelong learning and changes in a nation’s way of life. The specific problem of this paper is the contribution of extra-mural work to lifelong learning in its region, to make the connections upon a carpet of host communities. Moving from the general to the particular is like sighting villages on a vast terrain. It is important that the overall perspective remains clear to villagers and travellers alike.
Extra-mural work has the potential for effects much greater than its size would suggest. For it is sheltered by university values and thus free to pioneer. Through a spirit of enquiry and by the co-ordination of resources, extra-mural work can further the understanding, choices and actions of communities. The needs exist. The potential to transform them is there. Examples of practice show up the internal problems of such work.
As Keeble has said of youth work in the community:
The important question is whether, in our present situation of apparently incoherent searching and largely unconnected activity, we can envisage forms of connection, networks, signposts and forms of mutual aid and recognition which will sustain and extend the relationship.[2]
Needs do not fall into one’s lap - they have to be found. Needs are weak, intermittent and separate signals which adults make when they are not sure, not determined and not in contact with other adults with similar feelings to themselves. Needs contrast with demands, which are the strong, regular and collective communications that people make about and for themselves.
Two kinds of communities have needs: those of interests and those of residence. (Strictly speaking, both are real or potential networks in the same social space. The recognition of communities requires that one looks to the groups which link families or certain members of many families.[3])
Interests have their roots in people’s stage in the life-cycle and their branches in the life-styles which they would like to develop further. Interests lie in survival skills which are as much intellectual and emotional as they are physical and practical. Newman says that
the extent to which the experience is one of leisure or survival learning will depend as much on the individual student’s circumstances and motives for attending as it will on the style and subject-matter of the activity itself. A woman may attend a dressmaking class as a practical way of filling a spare evening each week. Another may attend because she cannot afford to dress herself and her family any other way. And in one dressmaking class, in an affluent suburb of an affluent city in Australia, a middle-class woman once said with sudden earnestness: ‘I came here because I wanted to learn something. Because I felt so inadequate’.[4]
No adult, or stage of adulthood, is without uncertainties and tensions.[5]
A community of residence has a common environment upon which change is being brought about and for which innovations can be sought. There is a dilemma of residence which depends upon the rights to property conferred, the coherence of clusters of property and the extent to which the future is threatening. Stepping beyond this dilemma to citizenship, moving beyond the restrictions of personal space to the rights of local patriots, is what is meant by the needs of a community of residence.
The needs of communities of interests can be sought by assessment surveys. The needs of communities of residence can be given shape by community studies. Neither activity is new nor do they displace existing provisions. There are grounds to ask for test-beds in each university and an exchange of learning and learners in the process. Extramural work should be looking for needs as well as listening to demands. It is already in some places. I readily acknowledge that there is work all over the world from which I should learn. For the time being, though, I propose to outline a needs assessment survey and the experience of engaging in community studies.
It is also true that assessment surveys and community studies are not the only ways of collaborating with community needs.[6]
An assessment survey
In 1978, the Burra Community School of South Australia formed a task group to determine and rank order unmet community needs. It was resolved that the following information was required:
a) a picture of the total possible needs
b) knowledge of existing programmes
c) needs broken down into categories and the community divided into specific groups
d) judgements of discrepancies between needs and programmes
Having taken the advice of a member of the department of Further Education a needs matrix was formed. After some discussion, the needs were classified as being:
intellectualphysical
emotional vocational/financial
social cultural
spiritual/moral
and the community sub-groups as being:
pre-school children employees
school children employers (and self-employed)
youth unemployed
home makers senior citizens
Dr. Craig Cameron of the D.F.E. devised a method. A list of community groups was drawn up and wide publicity was sought for the forthcoming survey. Task group members took each matrix cell in turn, visiting community group organisers and talking with people at large. The findings were combined with the task group members’ views to produce a list of needs of most widespread concern. These were:
senior citizens - housebound sub group
pre-school children and students - disadvantaged sub group
and
unemployed - vocational
employees - vocational
and
total community - emotional
In the last need, for example, the following detail was included:
Home makers are a large group in the community. They seem to be tied within the church or school/parent programmes. No marriage enrichment programmes, no discussion groups or courses in how to deal with problems or stress.
An evaluator of the survey pointed out that the task group members had drawn upon their intimate knowledge of Burra and been able to take the limits of the community for granted. It was also apparent that in many instances, services were available but that take up was hindered by ‘lack of knowledge, reluctance to become involved, inability to accept ‘charity’ and lack of accessibility’.
The advanced publicity stimulated public interest and the Community School had been assured of increased provision if needs could be found. This kind of active and open market research has to be backed up with clear commitment.
The task group members represented different existing interests and were genuinely surprised to find so many more. Further, the task group members had gained survey skills as had the Community School Council. One of the earliest realisations, 'needs will change with time', had produced a resolution that ‘needs assessment, therefore, must be a continuous process’. The Council and task group members were better equipped to do this and could narrow their focus to greater detail should they so wish.
The key adult education role which emerged was the counsellor/co-ordinator for specific group needs and pilot provisions. The key role performed by the member of the Department of Further Education was to give a framework with which local providers could unlock knowledge of resources; to ask the question ‘how little in relation to whom?’ rather than ‘how much as a whole?’.
Community studies
In such a course, local people are invited to co-determine and co-research a matter of common concern. Personal resources are mobilised in a consciously democratic mutual learning. As in need assessment surveys, the tutor is a co-ordinator.
There is almost a tradition of community studies at Nottingham University. Ken Coates and Richard Silburn began this kind of work in 1966. Their distinctive contribution came from transforming what had been learned in class into published reports. Class members co-authored a text which informed public debate. There have now been four such courses, two in Nottingham City and two in the town of Sutton-in-Ashfield.
In 1967, the first edition of St. Ann’s - Poverty, Deprivation and Morale in a Nottingham Community[7] was published. ‘Appendix One: A Method of Study’, says that ‘the group decided to conduct the research in two ways... to abstract information from published sources. . .’ and ‘to construct and carry out a social survey in the area’...’Our intention was then to analyse our gathered information, prepare a report and if possible invite to the class suitably selected permanent officials and representatives of the council to present them with our report and to invite their comments’.
A questionnaire was designed. During class time, and class members’ own time, 176 people living in the streets of St. Ann’s were interviewed. The measures of poverty produced controversial results and the problems were complicated by plans for the area. The practical postscript adds:
The City of Nottingham Corporation propose to clear St. Ann’s for redevelopment within the next few years.
The whole area had been divided into eleven phases and put into an orderly queue for demolition. The demolition was set to stretch out a further seven to ten years. The study group wrote of this:
Seven or more years without hot water is a school life in dirt or in a frantic and constant losing battle in dirt.
Their survey results were of use here, any short term improvement moneys would confront the problems of apathetic landlords and tenants with no conception of their elementary rights:
The phenomenon of poverty among wages earners seems to be self feeding, in that the lower a man’s wages, the more deprived he appears to be, the less aggressively he will construe his needs, the less he seems likely to respond with either vigorous complaints, or even active discontent.
The sheer incidence and extent of poverty in St. Ann’s could well mean that some would no longer be able to afford to live there and so new slums would emerge elsewhere:
The bulldozers will have brought in their wake, not new hope, but fortified despair.
The class was clearly angry with what it saw. There were photographs of what looked like the East End of London in Victorian times. But it was not. It was St. Ann’s in 1967 and underneath ran the captions:
Perhaps the trip to the outside lavatories encourages community contact.
Decent living is only possible through unremitting drudgery.
The effect of the Report was much greater than that of informing discussions with selected council officials. St. Ann’s was in the process of forming a Tenants and Residents Association. The Association linked with the School of Planning at the University to produce an alternative schedule and building scheme. The booklet was the only available document on the scale of the problems and yet the strong sense of community which existed. People wanted to remain in the area with their families and neighbours. The needs for decent housing, easy access to city amenities and each other’s company were orchestrated in the nick of time. The plans and the phases were changed in the community’s favour.
Some years later the booklet became a Penguin called Poverty: the Forgotten Englishman; having had its local effects, the ripples continued into the theatre of national affairs. And, whilst the reactions and arguments were going on, Ken Coates and Richard Silburn turned their attention to the Chatsworth Street area of Sutton-in-Ashfield.
The group recruited in Sutton were just as enthusiastic as those in St. Ann’s. The pattern was repeated. There were few dropouts in the class, everyone attended as often as they could, the design was fully discussed before being put into effect, everyone did some field work, and then volunteered some writing of their own.
Even though the published report was not as professional as the St. Ann’s study, its effects were as quickly and extensively felt.[8] Chatsworth Street was declared a ‘General Improvement Area’ by the Ashfield District Council. Officials visited each house to encourage tenants or landlords to do them up. In some instances, the Council bought houses and then improved them. Quite literally, the rot was stopped.
Community studies do not necessarily focus upon housing.[9] Indeed, the second study undertaken by the St. Ann’s group was upon the morale of a council housing estate[10] and the second study group in Sutton-in-Ashfield[11] spent three years piecing together how the town centre shopping development had taken place. They called their study The Idlewells Story after the shopping centre’s name.
The group began with an interest in decision-making. They say:
For us the vital question was ‘who makes decisions in Sutton-in-Ashfield?’ At the beginning, we thought that local power, the big wheels of a small town, would be easily traced by analysing recent building activity.
But during fieldwork they found that
our question changed from what decisions did councillors make to did councillors really make any decisions?
The fieldwork was a painstaking process.
It was decided to begin with a close reading of the council’s minutes and at the same time make Companies House searches of the firms mentioned in the minutes.
Then a class member
took on the task of reading newspapers in the library and copying out extracts.
Even when the three sources were brought into line, the story was to take three drafts.
The introduction touches upon the class relationships whilst the study was in the making: a class member
drew out the first skeleton of events and then we went right back through the information to fill out the story. We re-wrote the account again because we were dissatisfied with its expression. Each time we returned to the writing, turnings became obvious and the way we had put things had often missed the point. Every sentence was written by one or other of us, read out aloud and agreed to by all before being allowed to stand in its present form. It seemed the only way to get to the bottom of how the Idlewells came to be as it is today without being unfair to someone or putting our own politics more prominently than the process which actually happened
The Idlewells Story was published in August 1981. The local council is again engaged in town centre development and the report has encouraged its members to look more closely at the credentials of developers and the possibilities of hidden costs. So far, then, the Idlewells Story has informed discussion on present plans.
Some problems of need surveys and community studies
Surveys and Studies are two ways of linking needs to enabling actions.[12] But no extra-mural department is being asked to ditch its existing provision for the sake of a fashionable risk-taking. Instead, it is asked that an extra-mural department consider small pilot schemes, testbeds, so that the problems and potentials can be weighed in the balance.
Professionals may not be prepared to have both a greater workload and less say in the content and pace of work. Practical supports exceed those required by most courses and the publication of reports is a commitment in itself. Politically, the open expression of needs can challenge the adequacy of present and projected provisions. In essence, both forms of practical adult education are based upon the premises of a greater freedom of expression and more control over resources. It requires a level of political commitment to incorporate these values into adult education practice.
It could be argued that parallel developments in counselling services and creative writing groups are equally as worthwhile and pose fewer problems. Perhaps, too, need surveys and community studies emphasise the social over the individual aspects of communities of interest and of residence. All the same, the concern here has been to point towards two distinctive contributions which extra mural work could make if the potential realised outweighs the problems which surface.
The premise upon which surveys and studies rest is that adult educators in the university sector act as ‘agents of awareness’. In essence, this phrase connects the particular with the general and aligns the actions with the aims. Extra-mural work defends adult education activity in its region by furthering its development as well as by protecting its own immediate boundaries. Within its boundaries there can be activity, like community studies, whose purposes are to facilitate citizenship.
In case this purpose is too lightly understood, it is worth repeating Suchodolski on the significance of Gelpi’s theories:
'To develop the man’ writes Gelpi ‘and not only the producer is not simply a humanistic principle, it is also a strategy for action against discrimination, inequality, and the violence of man towards man’.[13]
Such, surely, is the potential.
[1]‘We should guarantee that permanent education means to gain the values of authentic education originating from re