Session 4: the study of continuing education
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Session 4: The study of continuing education
This session demonstrates the unforeseen difficulties that arise in carefully designed workshops when one of the contributors is unavailable and it also demonstrates the flexibility of such workshops to include relevant material from participants which come to light - in traditional adult education language, it allowed us to include the experience of participants.
We had asked Richard Taylor and Gareth Parry to consider the academic base for research in continuing education, before the group moved on to discuss a potential research agenda. Unfortunately, Gareth Parry was unable to present his paper because he was ill, although several points from it were raised which contributed to the group’s later discussions and brainstorming. These are summarised below.
After Richard Taylor’s presentation and a summary of Gareth’s paper, the group also asked Tom Schuller to present a short unprepared paper on the Scottish research agenda which was based on an agenda of research in continuing education, put together by a network of continuing education professionals in Scotland. This is also summarised below.
The group spent the last period of the session participating in a brainstorming exercise to generate a research agenda for continuing education. This is discussed more formally in the commentary on Session Five.
Richard Taylor argued that the status of continuing education as a discipline rather than an area of teaching provision depended on it being seen as an ‘area study’. He contrasted single disciplines such as physics and English literature with area studies such as industrial relations, peace studies and continuing education, arguing that CE fell into the latter because it focused on processes and structures. He also argued that interdisciplinary studies were much more likely to become dominant in academe in the future, putting continuing education in the vanguard.
He analysed some of the consequences of continuing education being an area study such as where did the staff belong? How was research counted? What about the relationship between researchers and practitioners? In the following discussion, it was argued that continuing education could be compared to professions such as medicine and engineering because all three were practice-related. However, if this were the case, where were our ‘interlocutors from outside’ such as sociologists of medicine? Did we not need an external and independent assessment of our practice?
Gareth Parry’s paper implicitly accepted that continuing education was a- field of study and focused on access and participation in higher education as an example of this. The discussion was based on four main points raised in Gareth’s paper. Using the field of study of access and participation in higher education, he drew attention to the gaps in empirical coverage in the field and the reluctance to take account of conceptual, theoretical and methodological questions; the fact that we know little about liberal adult education, associate and occasional students and what motivates them and the glaring gaps in coverage of the ‘contents, codes and conventions of learning’ as they might affect race, gender and class relations. He also mentioned the omission of grounded theory as a methodology for examining the experiences of non-traditional learners in higher education. His conclusion, that so much existing work is highly localised and highly particular, provided the background for Tom Schuller’s contribution.
Tom described the research agenda that the Scottish research network in continuing education had set for itself. The idea behind the network was to allow individuals working in similar areas to make contact with each other in the belief that informal contacts are a better underpinning for research and to enable empirical evidence in particular research areas to be accumulated. The six areas on the research agenda were gender, evaluation and outcomes of continuing education, training adult educators, successful learning conditions, access and education and lifecycle research (ages and stages). Tom noted that the areas have nothing in common conceptually but provided an agenda for the research group to develop.
Reproduced from 1991 Conference Proceedings, p. 104 SCUTREA 1997