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Final Report: Enduring Tensions

 

From the timelines and the accompanying stories we have identified a number of enduring tensions which have had to be managed by policy actors, practitioners and learners alike and shown how these are exemplified in local contentious practice (Holland and Lave, 2001). W e have re-framed the idea of disjunctures between policy and practice to think more in terms of these long-term tensions and how the different stakeholder groups manage them from their own lived experience and understandings. We used our social practice perspective and a “deliberative policy analysis” to interrogate this idea.

The gaps we expected to find between policy and practice we now understand as being more complex issues of local versus national awareness of policy. Policy is typically apprehended in extremely local ways, not only by learners and practitioners, but also by many policy actors who necessarily move in limited circles and refer to selected publications and sources of evidence. We have clear examples of national policy impacting forcefully on local contexts and on individuals, especially in the late 1980s/early 90s with introduction of a contract culture and incorporation of the further education colleges.

Global influences are detectable in the introduction of performance indicators and other measures of outcome required by funding mechanisms. These governing technologies come with their own discourses and social relations, re-organizing teachers’ (and managers’) work and learners’ experience of learning. During the 1980s, ALBSU through its training events, newsletters and teaching materials provided the only national reference point for the field. Its importance, though was diminished by local factors, especially in areas where there was strong leadership from an LEA (as in several of our case study sites).

We have tracked the way people have responded to and developed strategies related to these tensions. Some of these tensions reflect enduring struggles (e.g professionalisation), some were created by the outside forces that impacted on it at particular moments (e.g. marketisation).

Professionalisation in a field that developed from a volunteer and part-time hourly paid workforce is extremely contentious. Practitioners entered the field in the mid-1970s when there was heightened awareness of civil rights and social justice issues in a range of social policy areas. This movement found expression in adult education as a key site for exercising a cultural politics of access – access to learning opportunities for disenfranchised groups. The abundance of voluntary and part-time paid work in adult literacy within the institutions of adult education at the time, attracted women with young families.

People brought a set of ideals and networks from the early 1970s that entailed a particular view of social relations between tutors and learners. These are perceived by many as being distorted by new market-oriented and standardising regimes. These regimes - not specifically designed for the pedagogical benefit of ABE learners, but resulting from wider changes in post compulsory education and training - have led to contradictory demands on practitioners. Interestingly, these are often expressed in terms of ethical discomfort rather than political resistance.

New regimes also interrupted earlier networks that were prime carriers of such fragile professional identities as have existed within this fragmented and vulnerable field. Working conditions have affected who enters the field, who stays and how the professional body was shaped, trained and supported. Stability is still missing in the sector. The issue here is the impossibility of having a real career in basic skills and we have many comments on this from the interviews.

Other tensions relate to the underlying ideologies influencing the field of ALLN, how the teaching and learning practices arise from the structures of provision and the norms of working with learners. These include:

  • Nomenclature of the field and its participants: the tension around discourse but also the deeper ideological debates; tensions between different stakeholders and a search for a non-discriminatory vocabulary for talking about a stigmatised aspect of difference. Diversity v normalisation: how to recognise and respond to the diversity among learners whilst working towards a mainstreamed, systematised field of provision.
  • Different groupings in the field of adult continuing education: eg literacy, numeracy and ESOL; private trainers v college v community-based tutors; voluntary and statutory.
  • Pressures toward accountability that are shaping what counts as “good practice” in the field. Marketisation v collaboration: not an enduring tension but a very clear example of a force which originated outside the field and threw the prevailing cultural assumptions into relief.
  • Rights v obligations: the changing view of the student as citizen and the “learning polity”: compulsion/voluntary participation in learning; modelling democratic practice and relations within learning programmes; student autonomy.
  • Boundary issues about what counts as ALLN. These are currently especially sharp around ICT and around notions of “key skills” and “basic skills”.
  • Language, Literacy and Numeracy in Context: debates about embedded versus stand alone provision for ALN relate to a core issue of whether ALLN can be or should taught in a decontextualised way.

 

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