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‘Tribes’ and ‘tribulations’: narratives and the multiple identities of adult educators
Richard Edwards, Open University
Robin Usher, University of Southampton
In this paper we explore the interaction between the impact of contestation and change in the world of adult education/adult learning, its narratives or story-telling practices, and the process by which the identities of adult educators are formed. We will examine the significance of this interaction by drawing on two inter-related themes - one being the so-called ‘turn to textuality’ and the other, the contemporary debates over (post)modern identities[1]. In this way, we hope to demonstrate the significance of new theoretical perspectives in providing insights into the contemporary condition of adult educators.
The ‘turn to textuality’ is the position that the social world is made present, ‘storied’ or narrated into being through discursive practices which make our experience of the world meaningful. These practices can be seen as texts which can be ‘read’, i.e. interpreted or made sense of. Thus the notion of textuality foregrounds the place and function of narrative or story-telling as a ‘world-making’ practice. Adult education and adult learning can thus be seen as texts, discursive practices where a ‘world’ is defined, delimited or constituted in the process of story-telling.
Narratives order and compose life-course experiences. It is possible therefore to see practitioners as story-telling and story-receiving beings - as narrators of and narrated by the stories that define adult education ‘worlds’. Practitioners ‘live’ stories, relate to others and construct themselves as meaningful, knowable subjects doing meaningful, knowable things through them. Most significantly, the identity of practitioners is forged through narratives - dominantly through their location in a single narrative which provides a stable, centred identity.
The ‘storying’ or discursive construction of worlds is not a directly observable phenomenon because every narrative conceals its own being as a narrative. It constructs or ‘presents’ a world but also ‘represents’ it and in so doing effectively conceals the ‘world-making’ taking place. Consequently, the place and function of narratives can only be understood indirectly. We will proceed therefore by considering typologies rather than narratives - in particular, the way in which a typology is used as a classificatory device describing sets of mutually exclusive or bounded practice. Typologies are a common feature of all educational discourse and adult education is no exception. One well-known typology[2] classifies adult educators by using the metaphor of ‘tribes’. This typology presents five ‘tribes’ of adult education - traditionalists, self actualisers, progressives, guerrillas, organisational maintainers - each with its own distinct aims, concerns and pedagogic style.
On the face of it, this typology appears to be simply a classificatory device for systematically describing a pre-existing world of adult education. However, it is also possible to ‘read’ the typology as unintentionally foregrounding the various narratives which constitute the world of adult education. In other words, it can be seen as itself telling a story, in terms of ‘tribes’, about adult education. However, this story can also be read in a different way, in terms of the various and different stories told by and through adult educators - stories which define worlds, influence practice and shape identity.
What this ‘tribal’ story is telling us, then, is that the identity of adult educators is forged through the identification with a ‘tribe’ or, to put it another way, through their location in a particular narrative. Unlike the tribes of ethnographic studies with their ascribed and tightly controlled membership, these ‘tribes’ ‘exist solely by individual decisions to support the symbolic traits of tribal allegiance’[3]. It is self-identification therefore which establishes the ‘tribe’. Stories have to be ‘lived’, so through membership of a ‘tribe’, one accepts and tells a story with which one feels comfortable, which one feels is a ‘good’ story. Thus the adult educator identifies with a particular story and equally is identified by it. ‘Tribal’ allegiance, although chosen, is no casual or easily changed commitment. To become a ‘member’ of a particular ‘tribe’ is to be provided with clear and secure definitions, bounded ways of practising (a way of doing) and a clear and unambiguous identity (a way of being).
However, in the contemporary field of adult learning there is much to suggest that the boundaries between ‘tribes’ have broken down as the structure, organisation and values of adult education change and the very meaning of adult education, the ‘lived reality’ of the stories adult educators tell about themselves and what they are doing, becomes unsettled, ambiguous and unclear. When adults increasingly participate in sectors of education and training more traditionally associated with young people and when adult education is increasingly concerned with provision aimed at enhancing labour market opportunity, what then is distinctive about adult education? When a wide range of practitioners both inside and outside the traditionally defined field of education and training are engaged in working with adults, who then are adult educators? What narratives and metaphors ‘make sense’ of this confusion and complexity? Or is the sense that is made, the ‘reality’ that is lived, simply that of confusion and complexity?
Adult education has always been characterised by more than one story (in terms of the typology, at least five). Historically some stories have declined in their impact (a story has to be told and re-told to maintain its significatory and ‘creative’ power) and some have been replaced by others - for example, stories about economic decline, competences, efficiency and the market as ‘hero’[4]. At the same time, each of these modern stories has been influentially shaped by the underpinning meta-narratives or ‘grand stories’[5] of the Enlightenment project which ‘subordinate, organise and account for other narratives’[6]. These grand stories, for example of the progress of humanity towards emancipation through the application of scientific rationality, are no longer so influential. What is significant in the contemporary period is their loss of power, thus rendering self-identification with a particular ‘tribe’, the narration of one story, more tenuous. If adult educators can no longer have such a strong faith in the emancipatory consequences of their practices in a market-led provision of opportunities how can allegiance to a particular ‘tribe’, to one story, remain ‘sensible’?
In this situation, we would argue that the possibilities for self-identification with and through a ‘tribe’ are undermined as the conditions upon which the latter develop now require of practitioners a capacity to shift across boundaries to better enable them to deal with the complexities of change. For ‘adult educators’- and perhaps for all education and training practitioners- who they are, what they stand for, and what they do - becomes complex and ambiguous. The closure entailed by self-identification with a ‘tribe’ becomes open to uncertainty and ambivalence[7].
For some, all this is a disturbing pleasure, opening up the possibility of re-writing the field of adult learning to encompass and encourage a greater heterogeneity of practices and practitioners and a multiplicity of local or ‘micro’ narratives many of which provide a voice for the first time to subjugated knowledge and oppressed, marginalised groups. Here the loss of ‘tribal’ allegiances can be seen as producing new possibilities, where the loss of a fixed self-identification and an opening-up to the ambivalence of multiple, perhaps disjunctive, identities can be stimulating, if uncertain. For many, however, this breaking down of tribal boundaries is a painful experience, a form of ‘tribulation’, which can result in personal breakdown and the need for counselling and/or the ever more strident but ‘doomed’ assertion of tribal affiliation, the clinging to a single, confirmatory and ‘liveable’ narrative - Bauman, for example, has suggested that one aspect of the contemporary scene is a ‘neo-tribalism’ characterised by a search for community and a single fixed identity which is however doomed to failure. Yet for all, the grounding and fixing of identity in and through membership of a ‘tribe’, through location in one story, is undermined and replaced by multiple and shifting identities in which what it means to be an ‘adult educator’ is constantly re-configured. We now ‘live’ and contribute to many stories. Our identity may embrace many aspects of the metaphorical ‘tribes’ and include many new stories.
It is at this point that our second theme can be introduced for we would argue that practitioners and the ways in which their identities are ‘storied’ into being can be seen as interacting with processes endemic in the wider social formation. While the significance of these changes is much debated[8], a certain commonality exists in the view that ‘responsibility’ for dealing with the complexity and speed of change is increasingly placed back on individuals, wherein identity becomes a constantly changing reflexive project, constructed and manifested through images, consumption choices and lifestyles. The ‘tribulations’ of adult educators are therefore part of a wider anxiety about the insecurity and instability of identity in what is argued to be a late modern[9] or post-modern[10] condition[11].
Giddens[12] argues that in the contemporary context of ‘a post-traditional order...the self becomes a reflexive project’. In modernity there is a reflexive process at work, a reflexivity radicalised by the amount of information available, the media through which it is constituted and disseminated and the range of options over which certain choices can and indeed have to be made. Self-identity therefore becomes conditional upon a choice of lifestyles that is existentially troubling as the very uncertainty and reflexivity upon which modernity is grounded means that making choices becomes ambiguous and insecure. In the condition of late modernity the options available are many and puzzling, necessitating risk yet demanding trust in others and ourselves.
To a certain degree, Giddens’ view of identity is shared by writers on postmodernity, but there are differences of emphasis and explanation. For postmodernists, the notion of ‘lifestyle’ and ‘image’ and the proliferation and circulation of the latter through the media are the means by which an identity, a self-image, is constructed. Life itself is said to have become subject to aestheticisation - a ‘playfulness’ where identity is formed and re-formed by constantly unfolding desires expressed in lifestyle choices. Postmodernity is therefore a condition where the increased volatility of image results in an increased volatility of identity - ‘as the pace, extension and complexity of modern societies accelerate, identity becomes more and more unstable, more and more fragile’[13].
The particular emphasis on consumption, lifestyle and image associated with the electronic media and post-Fordist forms of production, distribution and consumption engender new forms and possibilities for identity which are specifically post-modern. The image gains greater cultural significance even as images are commodified and consumed - ‘the effect is to make it seem as if we are living in a world of ephemeral, created images’[14]. Thus while post-modern identity shares the reflexivity of modern identity, the former ‘tends more to be constructed from the images of leisure and consumption and tends to be more unstable and subject to change’[15]. Here, the uncertainties and anxieties of troubling identity give way to an excitement and a disturbing pleasure in the constant forming and re-forming of multiple identities.
The relative merits of modern and post-modern conceptions of identity cannot be explored here. However, there is clearly a radical difference between the modern view of the reflexive yet transcendental self for whom the finding of a stable identity is a normative goal and the post-modern perspective of the self as subject to image and images in which there is a ‘playful’ construction of multiple identities. Postmodernity is a world where people have to make their way without fixed references and traditional anchoring points. It is a world of hyper-reality, of ‘simulations’ that have replaced reality[16], of rapid change and bewildering instability where a proliferation of micro-narratives and localised knowledges creates conditions where meaning ‘floats’. But all this is seen as something to be celebrated rather than regretted, a form of opportunity rather than loss.
Thus it is through the acceptance of location in a multiplicity of narratives and hence of multiple identities rather than ‘tribal’ affiliation and location in an underpinning ‘grand’ story which marks the degree to which adult educators are best able to negotiate the openness and ambivalence of contemporary times.
Of course, there is a much greater complexity in the contemporary situation than can be portrayed here. For example, while ‘tribes’ as a condition for fixing identity may be breaking down, a wish for tribal affiliation, a need to tell the one ‘grand’ story, continues. As a form of denial, an attempt to maintain or re-create a single, simple and unambiguous narrative and a ‘liveable’ identity, it is itself a contemporary ‘tribulation’ experienced by adult educators. Yet it may be the only strategy available to deal with those other contemporary tribulations of individuated responsibility, reflexivity and the fragmentation of hyper-reality that characterise the post-modern moment.
The implications of this for adult educators remain uncertain. While the loss of bounded, ‘tribal’, identity may be personally troubling, we would want to suggest that in occupying the space of many narratives and multiple identities a greater range of practices and possibilities is correspondingly opened up. Greater diversity may then be achieved even if the significance of the achievement remains uncertain as the ‘empowerment’ consequent on opening up may also ‘disempower’ in relation to a more unified intervention by, for instance, the state. Professionalism and management competence may become the most powerful story, even as adult educators explore the possibilities and tribulations of multiple identities. There is no single secure reading in/of the contemporary moment.
In examining the issue of identity by means of the ‘turn to textuality’ and of reflexivity in the hyper-real, it is noteworthy that new metaphors are being constituted for new times. Metaphors of ‘border crossers’[17] and ‘in-between spaces’[18] are being put forward which open up the spaces of troubling and troubled identity, where it is the very spaces themselves which have increased significance in the formation and re-formation of identity. How powerful such metaphors are or can be, and how by telling new stories we can move to new positions, remains to be seen.
[1] Z Bauman (1991) Modernity and ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press; D Harvey (1991) The condition of