Unravelling the story of a milestone text: tales from the Handbook of Adult and Continuing Education

Symposium co-ordinator:

Nod Miller, University of East London, UK

Panellists:

Paul Armstrong, University of Leeds, UK

Ronald M. Cervero, The University of Georgia, USA

Richard Edwards, University of Stirling, Scotland

David Gosling, University of East London, UK

Elisabeth R. Hayes, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Juanita Johnson-Bailey, The University of Georgia, USA

Linden West, Christ Church University College/University of East London, UK

Arthur L. Wilson, Cornell University, USA

Miriam Zukas, University of Leeds, UK

Paper presented at SCUTREA, 31st Annual Conference, 3-5 July 2001, University of East London

The beginning of the story

Nod Miller

The Handbook of Adult and Continuing Education has been published every decade for the last seventy years by the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education.

Each successive handbook has attempted to reflect the state of theory and practice in adult education in the era in which it has been published, and each text has become a mainstay of courses of training and research in the field, used extensively as a reference work by scholars and practitioners.

The most recent version of the handbook was published in the Autumn of 2000, and contains contributions from over sixty scholars and researchers based primarily, but not exclusively, in North America. The editors of this volume set themselves the testing task of selecting and shaping contributions which followed in the tradition of earlier handbooks by providing 'definitive' accounts of the state of knowledge and practice in adult and continuing education, while at the same time rendering transparent the process of knowledge production which lies behind the production of an academic reference work. In this way they were attempting to follow a pattern set by their predecessors while recognising the challenge offered by analysts of knowledge and power in postmodernity.

I was invited to contribute a chapter to the 2000 handbook as a result of a conversation with my friend and colleague Ron Cervero, who encouraged me to discuss an idea for a chapter about learning from experience with Butch Wilson, one of the handbook editors. My proposal was accepted, and the editors' comments on my first draft were encouraging. Nevertheless, I prepared my chapter for publication with some trepidation. I found myself in greater then usual uncertainty about the truth, authenticity and substance of my version of a story about experiential learning. I am accustomed to incorporating autobiographical material into the academic texts I produce as a matter of course, but on this occasion I agonised a good deal about the extent to which it was appropriate to base my chapter on a story about my own learning from experience. In the end I went ahead and did so anyway. During the process of writing I was acutely conscious of my identity as a British adult educator and anxious about the extent to which my experience might translate into a publication which was largely North American. I reflected a good deal on the differences between the cultures and practices of British and American educators as I had experienced them over fifteen years of transatlantic exchange. I also revisited epistemological and ideological questions from the 'new' sociology of education, into which I was socialised as a graduate student in the mid-1970s (see Young, 1971).

When it became apparent that several of the contributors to the handbook (as well as a good sample of the intended audience for the text) were to be present at this conference, I was keen to initiate further discussion of this case study in the process of knowledge construction. I asked some of the contributors to tell their stories of how their texts came to take the shape they did. I then approached several British colleagues and asked them to comment on aspects of the handbook from their own theoretical and experiential perspectives. I am grateful to all of them for rising to this challenge. The questions which they raise will form the starting-point for the discussion during the symposium.

Our collective story begins with a narrative and some questions from the two editors of the 2000 handbook, Butch Wilson and Betty Hayes. Theirs is a knowing account of some contradictions inherent in producing 'definitive' accounts of knowledge. Juanita Johnson-Bailey and Ron Cervero offer some reflections on their chapter, which deals with race and whiteness in adult education, and grows out of their experience of the way that students and colleagues react to their contrasting ethnic and gender identities.

Like me, Paul Armstrong is a British scholar who started his professional career as a sociologist. He reflects on the changing shape and relevance of sociologies of adult education, as reflected in successive handbooks and in his experiences of adult education in Britain and the USA.

Miriam Zukas also shows how her transatlantic travels over the course of her professional career illustrate wider cultural shifts and social movements. David Gosling's contribution to the symposium is a story from the vantage point of educational development, a neighbouring field to that of adult education, as well as being part of a continuing conversation with critics such as Zukas. Richard Edwards is critical of what he sees as a relative absence of the postmodern in the handbook, while Linden West's view of the handbook reflects his particular concern with understanding learners' selves, subjectivities and identities in a time of postmodern uncertainty.

Whence a handbook ...

Arthur L. Wilson and Elisabeth R. Hayes

The charge placed to us for contributing to this symposium included reflecting on 'putting the handbook together, with a brief back story for those not familiar with the handbook'.

One of our chief interests in managing the construction of the millennial handbook was to make its construction transparent. So looking back on a journey already traversed and following on Baudrillard, we playfully pirate our own reflections (see handbook chapters 1, 2,& 42) to present some sense of the kind of handbook we were trying to create and our reflections on that effort.

Once upon a time ... We are both entrapped within but emboldened by our times.

The largely American-constructed handbooks (beginning in 1934) nicely traverse (although typically belatedly) the rise and subsequent dominance of a particular ideology framing the practice and study of education. Put bluntly, the handbooks have been unabashed accounts of scientistic boosterism. It is our sense that the handbooks (see chapter 1) were swept up in and produced out of the modern twin pulls of occupational professionalization through science and (some) adult educators' quest for academic position and legitimacy.

Briefly, our take on some 75 years of complex occupational history is this: The dominant model of occupational professionalization in the US is based on empirical science (largely positivistic and structural-functionalist).This approach has produced some important insights into the field's description, structure, and practice. There is indeed a significant place for providing procedural principles and grounding them in observational certainty when possible.

The applied knowledge ('knowing before doing' modeled on medicine and engineering) view of professional practice, however, does not well accommodate the ambiguous, constantly shifting demands of actual work in which conflicting values, perspectives, and expectations reveal no simply technical or obviously right choice about what to do. Traditional applied science perspectives are not able to respond well to such ambiguity. Observational certainty does not easily resolve value and political conflict -hence reasonable practitioner skepticism. In more technical terms, the professionalization epistemology of positivism and structural-functionalism produced - that is, did not resolve -the classic theory-practice gap.

Our perspective on constructing the handbook drew heavily on the view that professional practice is not simply problem-solving but also problem-setting. Practitioners' practical understanding of the conditions facing them and their choices of action depend less on acquired instrumental problem solutions and more on how their assumptions, values, and experiences shape their understandings of possible action, on how their biography and their place in the social and historical traditions in which they work frame their visions of what should be done. With this understanding of professional practice as a starting point, we proposed critical reflection on practice as an organizing theme for the handbook. We set out to contest (or at least mildly to undermine) the dominant technological interest of control with a view which we termed 'prudent action' - which was just a palatable way of proposing a praxis in which we ask how individual experience, community position, and historical location shape the very way we see ourselves in the world and thus predicate how we act in and on that world.

On 'choosing' travelers The perspective on knowledge construction that informed this handbook included the belief that it is impossible to define a body of knowledge in any comprehensive manner.

In orienting this handbook towards critically-reflective practice, we asked authors to take an approach that was problem-centered rather than subject-centered. A key consideration in selecting authors was the extent to which they demonstrated how their chapters made explicit the paradigms shaping both understanding and action. We envisioned informed choice and prudent action resulting from greater awareness of the assumptions guiding actions, exposure to alternative ways of constructing problems in the field, and therefore to alternative conceptions of both the ends and means of practice. We expected all chapter authors to challenge the false dichotomy of theory and practice by illustrating the integral relationship between how we conceptualize practice and the actions we consider to be possible as well as desirable. In identifying and selecting chapter authors, we looked for contributors who would support this critically reflective process by articulating their own beliefs, positions, and visions for the topic they chose to address.

  • On a journey completed? As potential editors for the millennium handbook, we faced the task of challenging a 75-year tradition in knowledge construction in American adult education. Surprisingly (to us anyway), our proposal to promote a more reflective rather than solely empirical-analytical edition was accepted with some regard and only some initial resistance by the proposal reviewing committee. We engaged in a lively subtextual conversation throughout the construction of the handbook (some of which is best left unprinted). We attempted from the beginning to be reflectively critical of our own work and kept track of our observations during the process (some of which now appear in chapters 2 and 42). Some of our remaining questions are as follows:
  • Did our efforts turn the complexities and potentials of critical reflection into just another instrumental process?
  • What's the big deal about critical reflection anyway? Is this just another example of (American) adult education coming lately to an intellectual party?
  • In appropriating critical reflection as organizer, did we embrace it uncritically? Does this effort wrongfully position critical reflection as a panacea to shortcomings of technical rationality? Conversely, did we make a straw dog out of technical rationality? Is critical reflection just another form of privileged rationality?
  • What was the magnitude of our error in presuming that colleagues in the field, having appeared to endorse notions of critical reflectivity, actually were prepared to engage their work within the spirit and confines of the concept?
  • Any perusal of chapter authorship will have to raise this question: just whose knowledge is important?

In a parting reflection on 'emergent subtexts', were there really any new thoughts here? Did the organizing frame really get us anywhere? We had a good time doing this, although we each had to bolster the other's spirit many times. What do we think we accomplished? Well, it may be appropriate the publisher chose a rainbow of mostly grays to encase the effort.

Reflections on 'The invisible politics of race in adult education'

Juanita Johnson-Bailey and Ronald M. Cervero

Adult education, like all areas of education, mirrors the world in which we live, and as with all educational systems, it can play a significant role in reproducing and maintaining the status quo. North American society is a place replete with hierarchical systems that privilege some and deny others. While the stated goals of adult education have consistently been set forth as aspiring towards leveling the playing field for all adults, especially those lacking a basic education, and as desiring to empower learners so that they might engage in full citizenship, just the opposite often occurs.

This unacknowledged and unintentional mis-education occurs along many lines of demarcation that confine a disenfranchised populace by race, class, gender, ethnicity, and dis/ability. In our chapter we focused our attention on one such category: race. Specifically, we focused on how race, and our understandings of it, have been shaped and addressed by the field of adult education. By presenting race as the locus of the discussion, we did not mean to imply that it is the only salient issue affecting our society. However, it is our contention that race, as an immutable concern throughout history, can serve as a consequential lens through which to view other oppressive systems.

We entered this discussion on race aware of how our positions in society have affected our thoughts and actions.

As a Black female associate professor and as a White male tenured full professor, we first began our dialogues about the manifestations of powerful societal hierarchies as student and professor. As our conversations grew in depth and honesty and developed into presentations and writings, it was impossible for us not to notice how others responded differently to the expression of our ideas. During a class presentation, one student hailed the White professor as a hero for concerning himself with issues of equity that would lessen his power base. And that same student commented that the Black professor was 'whining' about her lot in life when she offered the same critique.

In analysis, we felt that whiteness and maleness, which translated into the advantage of not being assigned race or gender, permitted the White male professor to seem objective and scholarly. However, the characteristics of race and gender disadvantaged the Black woman by restricting her position to one of emotion-based intuitive subjectivity.

It was further noted in subsequent presentations that identical statements from each of us elicited responses that confirmed this pattern of bias perceptions. Each such encounter added to our awareness of how positionality affected the ways in which our independent scholarships were perceived. Such understandings encouraged us to expand our examinations to our individual practices and more specifically to the field of adult education in general.

It led us to understand through dialogic struggles and research that the focus of 'race' as 'other' (brown, black, yellow, or red) was problematic because such a locus obscured the real issue of where power was centered and whose interests were being served - the normative White majority. Our shift to whiteness (Johnson-Bailey and Cervero, 1998) as the invisible construct driving the discourse on societal hierarchies, which included race as a major category, steered us on a new inward direction that required that we first examine the issue of normalcy, shrouded in whiteness and invisibility. This ever-present factor was indictable in adult education literature and practice, masquerading as the democratic ideal or the universal goal.

Beyond a sociology of adult education

Paul Armstrong

When I first entered university adult education in Britain in 1978 I was asked to teach a postgraduate module on 'The Sociology of Adult Education', to parallel another two modules on history and psychology. At this time there were no publications specifically addressing the sociology of adult education, apart from some short articles and conference papers, the sociology of education (focusing mainly on compulsory schooling) was into its new phase following the publication of Young (1971). The application of neomarxist perspectives shifted the focus from varieties of functionalism and the more recent symbolic interactionism to issues of social and cultural reproduction and hegemony, and the transformatory potential of education. The debate was about social control versus social change. I relabelled the module I taught 'The Ideology of Adult Education' to reflect this shift in focus.

At the time SCUTREA had thriving interest groups organised within disciplinary boundaries (history, psychology as well as sociology) reflecting both the curriculum of postgraduate adult education programmes in Britain and the research agenda. My own early research and writings were not only rooted in sociology, but were seeking to promote its value as a perspective on adult education (Armstrong, 1989). There were also, I recall, inter or multi-disciplinary interest groups, including one that focused on international and comparative adult education, and one that focused on women and adult education. These represented a shift in thinking that cut across disciplinary boundaries, and also challenged our subject identities.