Editors’ Introduction
An Interrupted Conversation
Paul Armstrong, Janet Coles, Rebecca O’Rourke and Miriam Zukas
Lifelong Learning Institute, University of Leeds, UK
Introduction to the proceedings of the 36th Annual SCUTREA Conference, 4-6 July 2006, Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds
We approach Inter-Cultural Perspectives on Research into Adult Learning: A Global Dialogue, SCUTREA's 36th annual conference, in terms of resuming a conversation for three reasons. First, as the fifth in a series of international conferences, it provides an opportunity to extend the conversation and debate about research into adult learning more widely than the annual conference usually affords. Secondly, dialogue is the purpose and the theme of this year’s conference. Finally, we resume the conversation in a very tangible way as the 2005 SCUTREA conference ended abruptly - leaving many conversations unfinished - when news of the London bombings broke on the morning of its final day. Conversation is an appropriateway of thinking about a conference; it validates the informal exchanges of meeting, listening and learning that are woven into the formal work of the conference.
5th International Conference
During the 1980s a series of exchanges between participants at the North American Adult Education Research Conference, the Commission of Professors of Adult Education, and SCUTREA, was supported through funds from the Kellogg Foundation, secured by Phyllis Cunningham at NorthernIllinoisUniversity. Its purpose was to encourage those working in university adult education in North America, including Canada, and the United Kingdom to engage in dialogue – a TransAtlantic Dialogue (TAD). One of the outcomes of this initiative has been a regular conference to facilitate international dialogue over issues relating to research in the education of adults and lifelong learning. The first conference was held in Leeds in 1988, nearly 20 years ago, and we are pleased to be able to host the fifth conference here again - and to see that seven pioneers from the 1988 Conference are also giving papers at this conference.
Dialogue shares its etymology with two other words: dialect and dialectic. Dialectics, with its delineation of contradiction, its focus on critical examination as a means to determine, in Kant's terms, objects beyond the limits of experience, seems closest to the spirit of dialogue the series of international conferences seeks to promote. But dialect - a variety of language arising from local peculiarities - offers the conference an equally important principle, too. Its emphasis positions the negotiation between the local and global - the need to be clear about our differences and disagreements as well as our shared and common values, practices, contexts and experiences - right at the heart of dialogue.
On Dialogue
Many of the leading theorists and practitioners whose ideas have contributed to the study of adult education including Habermas, Gadamer and Freire have all placed strong emphasis on the power of dialogue for learning. Freire, for example, said that 'Dialogue is the encounter between men (sic), mediated by the world, in order to name the world'. Gadamer saw dialogue as a special kind of conversation between equals through which those engaged come to understand they were in the very process of constructing knowledge. Dialogue is a process; it is a set of social interactions. Habermas argued for the need for ‘ideal speech situations’ in fostering both understanding and a human collective life’. But dialogue is not just a discussion or a debate in any competitive sense, because it represents a collective will to come to an understanding in a world of risk and uncertainty.
This emphasis on dialogue as a means not just to understand but to change the world directs us to two schools of thought which extend the insights of theorists such as Habermas, Gadamer and Freire in ways which we find relevant and stimulating. First, the ideas on dialogue from the eminent physicist, David Bohm, who was renowned for his contribution to quantum physics and theories of relativity but toward the end of his life, also developed a keen interest in the praxis of dialogue. Second, the contribution which the concept of transversal politics, a form of situated theory, developed by Cynthia Cockburn (1998) and Nina Yuval - Davis (1997) makes to thinking about dialogue as praxis.
Bohm believed that:
In Dialogue, a group of people can explore the individual and collective presuppositions, ideas, beliefs, and feelings that subtly control their interactions. It provides an opportunity to participate in a process that displays communication successes and failures. It can reveal the often puzzling patterns of incoherence that lead the group to avoid certain issues or, on the other hand, to insist, against all reason, on standing and defending opinions about particular issues.
Dialogue is a way of observing, collectively, how hidden values and intentions can control our behavior, and how unnoticed cultural differences can clash without our realizing what is occurring. It can therefore be seen as an arena in which collective learning takes place and out of which a sense of increased harmony, fellowship and creativity can arise
Because the nature of Dialogue is exploratory, its meaning and its methods continue to unfold. No firm rules can be laid down for conducting a Dialogue because its essence is learning - not as the result of consuming a body of information or doctrine imparted by an authority, nor as a means of examining or criticizing a particular theory or programme, but rather as part of an unfolding process of creative participation between peers.
(Bohm 1991)
Cockburn (1998) and Yuval - Davis (1997) might argue that a more valuable dialogue takes place when the peers can recognise - and communicate - the differences between them. Their concept of transversal politics, a form of situated theory, attempts to enact and theorise a democratic practice of talking across conflict. The idea is to find ways of doing things which involve neither the imposition of a single universal, which refuses to recognise that there really are 'differences', nor the retreat into those differences as tightly-bound, exclusivist and essentialist. Now extended into a range of political and cultural political settings (Cockburn and Hunter 1999), transversal politics was developed in action-research projects with women in sites of sectarian struggle in Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine and Bosnia/Hercegovina. Nira Yuval-Davis provided a working definition for transversal politics.
In ‘transversal politics’ , perceived unity and homogeneity are replaced by dialogues which give recognition to the specific positionings of those who participate in them as well as to the ‘unfinished knowledge’ that each such situated positioning can offer … The boundaries of a transversal dialogue are determined by the message rather than the messenger.
(Yuval-Davis 1997: 130 – 131)
The Conference Dialogue
Cynthia Cockburn has described her work in ways that could usefully inform our work as adult educators, researchers into adult education and, especially, participants in the dialogue of this conference about dialogue. Her focus has been on what exactly is involved in doing transversal politics, in terms of its democratic process and identity work (Cockburn 1998:9). One of her aims is to ‘delay closure’, to refuse to “skate over difference and division, to assume harmony and cohesion” (Cockburn1998:9). It is a principle which we hope will inform the conference dialoguesabout diversity and difference in the processes of doing research. It is important thatwe begin to understand where we have common interests and shared understandings but it is equally, if not more important, to track where, and why, there is divergence. Research and its significance in the construction of knowledge is a global phenomenon. The various historical and cultural contexts encompassed by the contributions to these proceedings offer each of us a chance to look at the world of adult education research from standpoints and starting points different from own. Through dialogue on research, we can explore the possibilities of living in a more research-informed process of knowledge construction and deconstruction. We are not naïve enough to believe this is a panacea, but it is a starting point for engaging with and understanding the worlds we live in.
At the risk of stating the obvious, much has changed in the past twenty years since the first international adult education research conference was held - both for adult education, as practice and research, and for the world more generally. The range of themes and topics presented at the conference reflects many of these changes, with papers which draw from a much broader base for intercultural exchange than North America and the UK addressing issues including: intensification of work, patterns of migration and settlement, globalisation as a form of post -capitalism, expanded concepts of sites of learning, changes in communications technology and adult education as a profession. The conference as a whole creates, we hope, a space for reflecting upon these changes and the demands for change that new times and struggles present. We have much to talk about, and much to listen to. This includes whether and how lifelong learning engages explicitly with contemporary global politics, including post - imperial and post - communist economic development, civil war, environmentalism and sustainability, faith-based fundamentalism (Christian and Islamic) and last, but not least, the enacting of wars on terror and acts terror
This Time Last Year
The 2005 SCUTREA Conference, held at the University of Sussex in Brighton, some 80 miles south of London, was drawing to a close on Thursday 7 July 2005 when news broke of a terrorist attack in the capital. Details were not clear, but it was obvious that this was a serious incident, likely to bring the city to a standstill. Many delegates had already set off for, or were planning to travel to, London. Those with friends, family or colleagues in the affected area were understandably very anxious, but overall there was calmness as the conference organisers put contingency plans into place and delegates helped each other to sort out onward travel arrangements. Many of those at the conference will have stories to tell of that day, some were touched more directly by the explosions than others, but no one was unaffected.
Back home in Leeds, we had another shock to come. The search for the bombers took the police to West Yorkshire and it emerged that three of the four bombers had been born, raised and educated in Leeds. The Home Office's Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on 7 July 2005 (2006) locates the bombers in their home environment. It describes backgrounds which many lifelong learning practitioners would be familiar with, either directly from their own experience or in their colleagues and students. Second generation migrants experiencing greater educational opportunities than their parents but not necessarily unlocking the social mobility associated with educational achievement, perhaps because their energies and talents stayed with the socially disadvantaged. The report identifies a ringleader, Mohammad Sidique Khan, who is described as having "developed a vocation for helping disadvantaged young people, and took on part-time youth and community work while finishing his degree." (Home Office 2006). He was, for us, the kind of person we might have worked with or taught as well as the person who brought terrorism to a new and frightening threshold in this country.
The ways in which we react to and understand terrorism changes with the degree of closeness we have to the people, places and ideologies involved. The particular conjunction between London, Leeds and Brighton in July 2005 made us aware both of the importance and the difficulty of trying to think about whether and how lifelong learning and terrorism stand in relation to each other, and we hope this dialogue becomes part of the life of this conference. But, as we prepare for the SCUTREA Conference 2006, we sincerely hope that it will not be remembered as the place you were when you heard the news about...
References
Bohm, D., Factor, D. and Garrett, P. (1991) ‘Dialogue – a proposal’ accessed on June 9 2006
Cockburn C. (1998) The Space Between Us: Negotiating gender and national identities in conflict, London: Zed Press
Cockburn, C. and Hunter, L. (1999) (eds) Soundings 12 Transversal Politics, London: Lawrence and Wishart
Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin
Gadamer, H-G. (1979) Truth and Method, London: Sheed and Ward
Habermas, J. (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1, Cambridge: Polity Press
Home Office (2006)A Report of the Official Account of the Bombings in London on 7 July 2005. Published by the Home Office, 11 May 2006; accessed on June 9 2006
Yuval-Davis, N. (1997) Gender and Nation, London: Sage
36th Annual SCUTREA Conference Proceedings 2006
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