Issues of access and relevance
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Issues of access and relevance in academic programmes for adult educators
Susan Knights, School of Adult and Language Education, University of Technology Sydney
Adult Education is, according to Darkenwald and Merriam, an ‘adventitious’ profession. None of us grew up wanting to be an adult educator; it was something we fell into almost by accident, often because we had developed expertise in something else and somehow found ourselves teaching it to other adults. I was interested to read in his autobiography that even Malcolm Knowles, one of the most fervent advocates of the uniqueness and distinctiveness of adult education, taught young adults for two years in the YMCA in Chicago, before he recognised that what he was doing was called adult education.
Given this haphazard nature of our profession it is unlikely that the traditional pattern of professional development, in which students are trained and tested to a minimum level of competence before they begin to practise, will be possible. Nevertheless adult educators and their clients have the right to expect that some sort of development will be available including access to academic programs. In this paper I will look at some of the issues related to providing these opportunities in an appropriate fashion, looking, obviously, from my own perspective, which is that of a member of a Faculty providing the widest range of academic programmes in adult education in Australia, the Faculty of Education at the University of Technology, Sydney.
Like all other Australian institutions of higher education we have just come through two years of upheaval during which my institution, the Institute of Technical and Adult Teacher Education, became first the Faculty of Adult Education and then the Faculty of Education in the University of Technology. When I welcomed students at the beginning of this academic year I said to them that for the third year running I was welcoming students to an institution which had just changed its name; none of those students would graduate from the institution in which they had originally enrolled. However there is some hope now that the dust will be able to settle and that we can get back to thinking about what we are actually doing and the way we are doing it.
First of all perhaps I should define who the students I am talking about are. In our Faculty the two adult education schools are the School of Adult Vocational Education, which provides programmes for teachers working in Technical and Further Education Colleges, FE Colleges in English terms, and the School for Adult and Language Education. The other school, which came into the University from a different institution, is a traditional School of Teacher Education. My School is the School of Adult and Language Education and our students are community-based adult educators, Aboriginal community workers, workplace trainers, adult basic education teachers and teachers of English as a Second Language. Those working in TESOL and to a lesser extent the basic Education teachers are less adventitious in their arrival in adult education since they usually have some sort of teacher education, although it tends to be child- rather than adult-oriented. For the rest whether working as calligraphy teachers with the WEA, teaching job-seeking skills to unemployed young adults, or training the Tactical Response Squad in the police force, they tend to have been put into the position of teaching adults with no specific training. What do they need in order to give them access to academic programmes which will help them develop in their work?
I have identified five issues relating to access to academic programmes: time, location, cost, academic requirements, childcare, and attention to special needs.
Time constraints
As our potential students are already working in the field of adult education one of their first needs is for a course that can be taken part-time alongside full or part time work. Since the adult education role is so often one which comes along after some expertise and experience have already been acquired in another field the people needing access to our programs are often already in mid-career and in no position to drop out of the workforce for two or three years to take up a full time academic programme. Apart from the immediate financial difficulties there is the question of expected rewards. Adult education is not particularly recognised as a career profession in Australia, there are relatively few institutions employing full-time adult educators and in the workplace training is often seen as a stepping stone to somewhere else. Therefore the immediate career advantages of acquiring a degree or diploma in adult education are likely to be limited.
To meet this need for courses which can be taken alongside full or part time work many of our programmes are offered on an evening and weekend timetable stretching over a number of years. The undergraduate diploma courses meet on one afternoon a week and some weekends, and students seem to be able to make the necessary arrangements to free themselves for this amount of time. One advantage of the work pattern of community-based adult educators is that they tend to work in the evenings and weekends themselves and so can sometimes arrange to take a certain amount of time off for study during the day.
Location
This pattern of classes on one or two evenings a week and some weekends means that most of our courses are available only to students living within reach of the University. Some travel over 100 kilometres in each direction to classes and workplace visits by staff can involve significant amounts of travelling. The University of Technology, Sydney is not one of the six Australian universities designated as distance education providers so we do not provide distance versions of our courses but we do provide some on a block release basis for students living out of Sydney. The Aboriginal students who do our Associate Diploma in Adult Education (Aboriginal) come into the University for week-long blocks five times a year from all over NSW and some from Queensland. Similarly there is a block release version of the Graduate Diploma in Adult Basic Education in which students come into the University during vacations for concentrated blocks of study.
Such courses are expensive for students because of the costs of travel and accommodation in Sydney (the University has no residential accommodation, and leaving home to study is far less common in Australia than in the UK). Aboriginal students have most of their expenses covered under the Aboriginal Program Initiative scheme and the basic education teachers are mostly employed at reasonable salaries in the Further Education system. For other community-based adult educators living in the bush, many of whom work part-time or as volunteers, the option of a block release programme involving regular travel to Sydney is out of the question. For them there are an increasing number of courses offered on an individual distance basis by the University of South Australia and the University of New England.
Cost
The question of costs of studying is another access issue which affects all our students. Fees for University courses were reintroduced in 1989 and now stand at about $2,000 for a full-time year. However, students may opt to defer payment of their fees and a proportion of the fees owed will be collected each year through the tax system. No one begins to make repayments until annual income (as reported on their tax return) reaches the level of the minimum wage, currently around $23,000 per year (approximately £11,000). This means that some students who are very poorly paid or working on a voluntary basis will never have to repay their fees.
Academic requirements
Assuming that a potential student can fit in the time, lives within travelling distance of the University and can find the money for a course there is then the issue of meeting the academic requirements for entry to University. Here the fact that adult education students tend to be at least five years older than the average school-leaver provides the opportunity for a flexible, open entry approach. University policy allows for special entry requirements for mature students and so, except for the TESOL courses, we operate an open access system where experience in the field is more important than traditional academic attainments. An applicants academic experience and qualifications will decide at what level they enter the system: postgraduate diplomas and Master’s for those with first degrees, Bachelor’s level for those with traditional University entrance requirements or experience of studying in FE colleges or elsewhere since leaving school and undergraduate diploma level for those with no traditional academic qualifications.
Accepting students without traditional university entrance requirements means that we have a responsibility to offer additional support to ease their entry into the system. This is done through a system of academic advising in which every student in the Associate Diploma courses in Community Education, Aboriginal Education or Training and Staff Development has her or his own academic adviser. The adviser has an allowance of 20 minutes per week per student release from face to face teaching and is responsible for negotiating a programme of work which is formalised in learning contracts, visiting them at work and observing them in action, and generally being available for advice and assistance during the two years of the course. In addition to their own academic adviser students have access to assistance from the Faculty’s Study Skills unit if they need specific help with English language or other academic skills.
Childcare
The issue of childcare is one which often affects access to academic programmes and since the majority of our students are women who usually take the major share of childcare responsibilities this is an issue which arises from time to time. The University has a childcare centre which is available to our students and in cases of young babies there is a policy that they may be brought to lectures as long as they do not disturb the proceedings. Since our students have to be working in the field of adult education before they can be admitted to courses they have often already organised childcare to cope with their work commitments.
Attention to special needs
A final issue of access, and one which has improved enormously since our amalgamation into the University of Technology, is that of assistance for students with physical disabilities. For those in wheelchairs, of whom we seem to have one or two each year, our building is not ideal, but it is possible to schedule classes in the parts of the building accessible by wheelchair. Blind students seem to cope reasonably well by using tape-recorders for their notes and for their contract reports. With the assistance of the University’s liaison person for students with special needs we are now able to offer both signers and note-takers for our deaf students, of whom we have three or four each year. Access for students with physical disabilities is not only an equity issue which we need to address but also a case of enriching the experience of all staff and students connected with the programs. No amount of courses on ‘Teaching Adults with Special Needs’ can achieve as much as the experience of sharing a classroom with deaf, blind or wheelchair-bound fellow students on a week by week basis.
Relevance
Once our students have succeeded in gaining entrance to our courses and arranging their lives to incorporate time for academic work how can we ensure that what they are offered is going to be relevant to their needs as practising adult educators? I would have to admit that our processes of course development over the years have probably fallen far short of the ideals presented in the literature of adult education. We have worked from hunches, personal preferences and our own experiences from elsewhere as much as from carefully researched needs assessments. We do have advisory committees whose members are practitioners and past students and our current students are also practitioners, since current involvement in adult education is a pre-requisite of entry to courses. My own Study Leave project at the moment is to examine the content and methods of adult education courses in British universities and see how they compare with our own. So in various ways we try to ensure that the courses we provide and which students have to take are relevant to their needs as adult educators.
The main mechanism for ensuring that our students, whose work situations are extremely diverse, can tailor the course to meet their particular professional needs is the use of learning contracts. The majority of written work in all our courses is organised on the basis of negotiation between lecturer and student about what is to be studied, what resources will be used, what will be produced and how it will be assessed. In the undergraduate diploma courses one third of the assessed work is connected with lecture courses and two thirds consists of contracts negotiated with individual advisers. In the Bachelor’s programme two thirds are lecture oriented contracts and one third independent study contracts approved and assessed by a group of lecturers working as a panel. This opportunity to set the agenda for the written work in the course is one of the aspects most frequently appreciated by students. A comment from one of the students in Training and Staff Development is typical:
Learning Contracts ensure that the learner learns what she specifically needs to know. This is most beneficial in group training where every adult approaches the training with a different level of experience, and a different need. For example, in the Institute of Bankers course, it was not meaningful for me to learn Commercial Geography (U.K.) though it was necessary for me to pass this subject to receive the Certificate. Similarly, even though my competency in a subject like Accountancy was sufficient for my needs, I was still required to pass the written examination in this subject. The Associate Diploma course, though loosely structured, gives room to the learners to improve in areas they decide they need a higher degree of competence.
(As another student pointed out this is not necessarily such an advantage for an employer since each student graduating from the course will have covered an individually tailored programme and the qualification itself will not necessarily indicate what has been learnt.)
Learning contracts are negotiated within the broad framework of a list of competencies generated for each programme. Students do not need to tackle every competency but need to be able to show how the work they are proposing to undertake fits within the general framework.
Another aspect of our programmes which seems to me to relate to relevance is that of assessment. Not all of my colleagues in the Faculty agree with me but I see absolutely no relevance to the work of an adult educator in the field (or in academia) of the artificially stressful situation of examinations. Our students proceed through their programmes by completing a certain amount of written work in the form of learning contracts, by successful practice in the field as assessed by field supervisors and by successful participation in collaborative study groups. There are no examinations and no grades.
So, these are some of the issues which seem to me to arise in attempting to provide accessible and relevant academic programmes for adult educators. Our solutions are by no means perfect; I worry about the geographical limitations of our programmes, I worry about our lack of attention to the content our students are teaching and of course there is one absorbing and challenging debate about the knowledge base itself. This is a debate which many of us in Australia are eager to enter without losing sight of the fact that out there in the field are hundreds of people involved in teaching adults in a multitude of settings and looking to us for some kind of opportunity to hone and develop their professional skills, to be challenged and reassured, to have the experience that a first year Masters student described as follows:
to ‘find’ the history behind our work; to read Lovett and find that others before us have tried similar things and made similar findings and had similar frustrations. To find that how to get people to make the shift from the individual to the collective is a recognised ‘problem’ that people have struggled with before. To begin to be able to locate politically our work, to begin to see it in its historical and social context. It feels a little like finding myself again, and getting the background I need to decide where to go next.
Reproduced from 1991 Conference Proceedings, pp. 38-41 SCUTREA 1997