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Like an elephant on the high wire: songs of adult educators
Nod Miller, University of East London
Richard Edwards, Open University
The social, political, economic and institutional contexts in which adult educators work have changed significantly in the last fifteen years. Adults now participate more fully in a diverse range of learning opportunities and many more educational practitioners now encounter adults as learners. The environment of lifelong learning is increasingly characterised by diversity and change, and one result is a sense of confusion about what constitutes adult education and what it means to be an adult educator. A clearly defined and secure future for adult educators may be an elusive goal.
Our aim in this paper is to investigate the metaphors and labels which adult educators use in order to characterise their identities and practices, and to examine the ways in which they employ image, narrative and anecdote to construct and reflect on their personal and professional selves. To this end we shall draw on our previous work on tribal groupings, professional networks, invisible colleges and sub-cultures among adult educators[1]. In addition we include data collected from practitioners of adult education in a workshop held during the course of the 1995 SCUTREA conference. It was from this workshop that the image of the elephant on the high wire emerged: this image carries distant echoes of Bird on the Wire, a song by ’sixties icon Leonard Cohen, whose songs and stories were part of the formative experiences of at least some in the constituency with which we are concerned.
This paper is therefore part of an iterative process for those who participated in the workshop last year. Our intention is to reflect back some of the metaphors and images through which participants’ identities were constructed; we are not, of course, suggesting a definitive or ‘true’ reading of the metaphors generated in the course of the workshop. We view the process in which we are engaged as one of discursive location and dislocation in which we indicate meanings within which those who participated may situate themselves or which they may contest. Drawing on contemporary developments in post-structuralist and postmodern analysis, we are suggesting not only that are there diverse futures for the identities of adult educators, but also that new theoretical perspectives may emerge which will inform the inscription of meaning in practice.
Theoretical concerns
Three inter-related sets of theoretical concerns form the background for this paper. The first of these is the contemporary interest in questions of identity and self-identity. In Modernity and self-identity[2], Anthony Giddens suggests that the uncertainties of contemporary life and the wide range of options available to people produce a situation in which ‘the self becomes a reflexive project’[3] in the context of a condition of existential anxiety. Attempts to overcome such anxiety through a choice of lifestyles never succeed entirely, with the result that identity becomes insecure, complex, multifaceted and uncertain. The notion of the stable, unified self may remain as a normative goal, but it is never to be achieved.
The second theoretical strand stems from the interest in neo-tribalism in contemporary social formations, which concerns itself with the shared sentiment, collective bonds and customs through which groups constitute themselves. In contrast to classical tribalism, which shaped all aspects of the individual’s existence, ‘neo-tribalism is characterised by fluidity, occasional gatherings and dispersal’[4]. Accordingly, people belong to many and various tribes within which they play diverse roles as expressions of their sociality. Within this perspective, adult education becomes a territory in which to investigate heterogeneous and transient tribal groupings.
The third strand originates in the interest in autobiography and life history as methods and foci of research[5]. The stories people tell about their lives and the ways in which their narratives are constructed constitute an important concern for many adult educators and social scientists. In telling one’s story the self is brought into being through discursive practices defining and delimiting the world and rendering it meaningful. Artefacts, stories, narratives and even songs are metaphors or ‘mediators and filters through which we not only live our lives with others in our environment but understand and symbolise that life and ourselves’[6]. Contemporary work on autobiography amongst adult educators provides powerful insights into the construction of identities and the wide variety of groups to which subjects see themselves as belonging.
Metaphors of adult educators
In the literature on adult education, the identities of practitioners are described and constructed in a multiplicity of ways. For example, Darkenwald and Merriam[7] distinguish between five ‘tribes’ of adult education; members of these groups are characterised as traditionalists, self-actualisers, progressives, guerillas or organisational maintainers. Each tribe is identified as having its own distinct values, concerns and pedagogic styles. While presented as a classificatory typology, this approach can also be read as a set of stories about adult educators as members of tribes; the specific stories act as a means of defining worlds, influencing practice and shaping identity. This typology suggests a firm set of boundaries, more closely aligned to the classical conception of tribes, in contrast with Maffesoli’s notion of tribes as fluid and changing.
In his discussion of metaphors as shorthand encapsulations of reality, Brookfield [8] uses the examples of ‘midwives’, ‘gatekeepers’ and ‘enablers’ as ways of framing adult education practices. Specific identities are adopted according to the perceived roles of the practitioners. Thus while there may be different metaphors of the identity of adult educators, difference is largely seen to play out between individuals rather than within individuals. Brookfield therefore suggests a grounded and bounded concept of identity.
More recently, in the context of debates within cultural studies, feminism and postmodernism, Giroux [9] has argued that educators need to re-position themselves as cultural workers with an identity expressed in the metaphor of border-crossers. According to this analysis, adult educators’ identities are multiple and shifting, reflecting the complexity of the worlds within and between which they operate. Singular or tribal metaphors of identity lose their power to give meaning in relation to this complexity.
While the literature provides a rich resource of metaphors for adult educators, many writers seem to conceive practitioners’ identities as fixed and singular rather than open and multiple. We now move on to a consideration of metaphors adopted in the constituency of adult educators represented by SCUTREA in order to ascertain how members of this group define and construct themselves and the extent to which their identities may be represented by unitary labels or images.
An action research workshop on metaphor and identity
We decided to explore adult educators’ metaphors and identities in the context of an action research workshop at the 1995 SCUTREA conference. The workshop consisted of a number of activities.
1. Participants were asked to respond to a number of true-or-false statements, such as whether or not they had read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed[10], whether or not they had an e-mail address, and whether or not they had laptop computers, mobile telephones or at least one pair of Dr Martens shoes;
2. Participants were asked to group themselves on the basis of (a) the decade when they first identified themselves as adult educators, (b) the first location - for example, adult, further or higher education - in which they identified themselves in this way, and (c) their current locations as adult educators;
3. Participants were asked to brainstorm a list of labels by which they would identify themselves as adult educators;
4. Participants were asked to group themselves around the label or labels which they felt they would apply to themselves as adult educators;
5. The groups which formed were asked to construct posters which expressed the identities they had ascribed to themselves and through which they would attempt to attract other adult educators. Participants were provided with a range of materials to use in the construction of their posters, including photographic images of adult educators drawn from magazines and promotional material;
6. The groups were asked to introduce their posters as images of their identity as adult educators;
7. Participants were asked to reflect on questions of identity raised by and in the workshop.
8. The workshop discussion was recorded on audio tape and the activities were photographed throughout.
Metaphors and images of self-identity
Figure 1 summarises both the range of metaphors generated by workshop participants during the brainstorming exercise and the ways in which these were grouped by participants to construct an identity for their group. The extensive range of metaphors produced by participants is striking, although it is noticeable that labels associated with the academic disciplines of adult education, such as sociologist, psychologist or historian, were not among them. This suggests that notions of disciplinary and disciplined identities in adult education are not currently strong. There is greater diversity both in the range of metaphors adopted and the differing combinations of those metaphors among the groups. Each group felt the need to assemble a wide range of metaphors in order to represent its members’ self-identities. This suggests that the concept of a single bounded tribal metaphor for adult educators is inadequate, and needs to be recast in the more complex and multifaceted terms suggested in the notion of neo-tribalism. It seems, then, that adult educators need to be able to construct themselves not as a uniform community but as a community of differences, inclusive rather than exclusive.
Figure 1: Multiple identities of adult educators
GroupGroup
A TeacherB Translator
ResearcherInnovator
Fund-raiserPirate
Emotional Prop/WreckChampion
FixerCampaigner
Bridge-builder
Subversive
Co-ordinator
C LearnerDEar
Co-ordinatorFriendly face of feminism
ResearcherPeer supporter
CounsellorConduit
Bridge-builderRisk-taker
Demystifyer
Community Resource
Gambler
Subversive
Facilitator
Teacher
ETrainerFLearner
InnovatorResearcher
FacilitatorInnovator
LearnerFacilitator
In an earlier paper [11], we suggested that metaphors such as the ones above might be placed in a range of differing types of discourse, which we characterise as instrumental, aspirational and affective.
Each of the six groups formed during the workshop drew upon a range of metaphors rather than agreeing upon a single label. The heterogeneity between groups was also to be found within groups, indicating the multiplicity of identities within the notion of the adult educator. We can examine this by focusing on the image produced by Group D as a poster to represent their identity.
The elephant on the high wire
Central to Group D’s image is a drawing of an elephant walking on a high wire. This is a dangerous and unpredictable task, which clearly indicates risk-taking to be central to this group’s sense of itself. The large ears of the elephant facilitate the listening role of adult educators. A ladder to the high wire and pictures of groups of adults at the top of the ladder, in the stomach of the elephant and at its rear indicate the notion of a conduit and the change which participation in adult education can bring about. The playful scatology of this image of adult education as a digestive process suggests ambiguity as to who benefits from participation. The metaphor of peer supporter appears to be represented in the picture of two women placed on the elephant’s back, one of whom is asking the other to ‘lean on me’ - also a line from a song, this time by Bill Withers. It may also be that in giving such prominence to this image, the group are expressing its ‘friendly face of feminism’ metaphor, although this is not explicit. The image as a whole, with its central use of an elephant, has connotations of an animal with diverse and ill-fitting constituent elements, conceivably designed by a committee.
For members of Group D the task of putting the image together concretised certain aspects of the identity they adopted. Drawing the elephant involved the person concerned in reconceptualising herself as ‘an artist’. Risk-taking was involved in this enterprise, but there was also a lot of fun and laughter. There is a tension here, as risk-taking is often constructed as a ‘serious’ business, rather than being associated with enjoyment. One member of the group remarked on the difficulty of trying to convey an adequate image of adult education and of trying to fashion something new while having to borrow images from elsewhere. This observation aptly illustrates the inter-textuality and cultural locatedness of self-identity, image and metaphor. There are no entirely new songs.
Group D’s elephant poster
Diversity and development in SCUTREA
Two aspects of diversity and development in the constituency represented by SCUTREA are worth mentioning in addition; these are the move away from affiliations of subject or discipline amongst members, and the move towards greater gender balance in the organisation.
Our observations from the 1995 workshop reflect a professional world which contrasts strongly with that which existed at the time when many current practitioners (including some of those who took part in the workshop) entered the field. Much of SCUTREA’s activity in the 1970s and early 1980s was carried out in the context of discipline-based interest groups such as those groups which dealt with the sociology, psychology and history of adult education respectively. In 1995, as we have noted, no-one present identified primarily as sociologist, psychologist or historian. A further contrast with the past is to be found in the use of the label ‘friendly face of feminism’ by a group which was made up of four women and three men. As Zukas[12] points out, women were scarcely present and largely invisible in early SCUTREA gatherings; as late as 1982, SCUTREA was seen by those women who attended its conferences as a male-dominated, patriarchal organisation. The photographs taken in the 1995 workshop depict a population that is at least as diverse as the adult education community at large.
Conclusion
From the explorations reported in this paper, it seems that the changes and uncertainties faced by adult educators are reflected in the range of metaphors and images which participants in the 1995 workshop used to describe themselves. Uncertainty is further illustrated by the fact that no single metaphor or image arose which adequately embraced their sense of identity. With the proliferation and diversification of forms of adult education and with confusion as to its direction, the roles, values and feelings expressed in adult educators’ metaphors and images of self-identity are themselves increasingly ambiguous. Attempts to place boundaries around the field of adult education and the identity of the adult educator therefore appear increasingly misplaced. The future is unclear, and there may be a greater diversity which carries a sense of loss as well as of possibility. Leonard Cohen’s plaintive lyric, ‘I have tried in my way to be free’, seems somehow appropriate.
Further reference
Kellner, D (1993) Popular culture and the construction of postmodern identities. In S Lash and J Friedman (eds) Modernity and identity. Oxford, Blackwell.
[1] Miller, N (1994a) The formation of academic identities: relationships, reference groups and networks in the adult education community.