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.
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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 everpresent 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.
Typically, faculty in British higher education constructed their identities around their subject.
Lecturers would see themselves as chemists, biologists, historians, sociologists and so on. Quality
assurance procedures and research assessment are still organised around disciplines, even though this
marginalises and creates difficulties for those teaching and researching issues that are inter-disciplinary.
When I first went to the United States in 1984 and visited postgraduate adult education programmes
in two universities, I became aware of different ways of organising teaching and research in the
education of adults. Perhaps naively, I characterised these alternatives as a theoretical, because of the
apparent lack of theoretical bases. Up to that point, the handbook series had no explicit reference to the
sociology of adult education. It was not until 1989 when Kjell Rubenson (a European working in Canada)
contributed a discussion under this heading. In the current edition, this has been taken on by Phyllis
Cunningham, a joint editor of the 1989 edition. Whereas Rubenson had the confidence to write about
'The sociology of adult education', Cunningham wisely heads her contribution 'A S'. This reflects the fact
that in postmodernity there is more than one sociology, if there are any sociologies at all. Cunningham
uses sociology to reflect the shift of focus from the individual to social structure - the traditional response
to dominant psychological perspectives in the field. In 1984 the relationship between agency and
structure was being problematised (Giddens, 1984). Cunningham's contribution encompasses the role
of the state, civil society, the market, power, and identity politics. Importantly, she is able to remain
faithful to her commitment to transformation through social movements and communitarian action.
There is a brief skirmish with postmodernism. But what is interesting is how this contribution is
positioned in Part 4, 'Reflecting on the Profession', among discussions of communities of practice, the
establishing and blurring of boundaries, the shift from transformation to techniques, visions, voices and
values, professionalisation, the learning society, and the politics of knowledge construction. In these
postmodern times we are left to reflect how far 'A sociology of adult education' is archaic, itself a social
and political construction, and how paradoxical a disciplined-bound contribution now is.
Notes from the land of learning gone wild
Miriam Zukas
I have had contact with colleagues from North America working in and researching adult education
for the last seventeen years. I edited the proceedings of the first joint AERC/CASAE/SCUTREA
conference in 1988 which provided me with a particular view of the field of North American adult
education at that time (Zukas, 1988). What a contrast with this handbook! I had, of course, noticed that
the field was changing as, over the years, I interacted with North American colleagues' ideas in person
or in print.
This handbook highlights a shift that I had noticed from the predominantly positivist, uncritical and
relatively untheorised field (albeit with notable exceptions) that I saw in the 1980s, to a much more selfconsciously reflexive, theoretically articulate and critical collection. Some of us working in Britain would, I
am sure, like to argue that this was, in part, due to the transatlantic exchanges in which we were
personally involved and from which we learned so much. There are of course competing explanations,
but this is not the place for them.
The notion that there is a 'field' of adult and continuing education is one that the editors, being
critically reflexive, challenge almost immediately, whilst recognising their role in actually defining what it
constitutes. To me, their exploration of the historical positioning of the handbooks, their awareness of
the epistemological issues with such a text and their attempts to tell a story (and make explicit) of the
process and politics of putting together a 'handbook' symbolise the arrival of post-modern influences in
the field.
However, in case one is lured into thinking that these influences are ubiquitous, the handbook shows
how divided the field is in terms of theorisation. The chapters in the section on the profession's common
concerns are dominated by a wide range of inter disciplinary influences, situating the field in a broader
range of critical issues for educators.
Despite the fact that most of the authors are North American (again, with a few notable exceptions),
the gap between North American structures and institutions and those in the UK do not matter so much
here - the authors frequently discuss issues that are close to home, citing the same texts and working
their ways through the same problems as many of us do here. Indeed, one of the exciting features of the
handbook was that I could envisage using some of the chapters which grapple with problems of identity
(Clark and Dirkx, Tisdell, Hanley and Taylor, Johnson-Bailey and Cervero to name but three) with my
students with little cultural translation.
But many of the chapters in the section on the profession in practice seemed much less relevant.
The most difficult were those which are bound by time and place (although these limitations were not
always acknowledged), modes of delivery, target audiences, and so on. The editors' encouragement to
contributors to 'engage topics from a reflective practice approach rather than an applied science
viewpoint'(Wilson and Hayes, 2000: 30) was clearly difficult for some to manage.
Perhaps my strongest feeling on using the handbook is one of envy. Oh - to be so confident and sure
as to be able to put together a handbook on adult and continuing education! To feel that this is a
recognisable field! Here, in the land of lifelong learning gone wild, what place do we have for such a
text? And what publisher would show such confidence in the sales of such an expensive book?
Congratulations to the editors for their success in playing what they must think of as a confidence trick
(claiming to represent the 'field') and to the authors for their participation in what sounds like a
challenging journey. We are all able to benefit from the existence of such a construction.
A view from an educational developer
David Gosling
I will respond to the Handbook of Adult and Continuing Education from the perspective of what have
been called by two adult educators, Malcom and Zukas, 'a new breed of specialists called "educational
developers"'. According to
5 these writers the new discourse emerging from educational development has 'gained ascendancy
in higher education' in the UK (Malcolm and Zukas, 2000: 8). I think this overstates the current situation
in which, from my perspective, the 'scholarship of teaching and learning' remains highly contested and is
still struggling for academic respectability.
It is therefore of considerable interest to me to engage with the related, but distinctive, literature of
adult and continuing education. The use of 'adult' learners as a marker of difference is in itself significant
in the presumptions it betrays about mainstream students in higher education. This separation of 'adults'
from other 'students', for someone working in a university with a strong commitment to widening
participation and which has approximately 60% of its students classified as 'mature', must be
questionable.
But this handbook suggests some reasons why this discourse remains distinct and distinctive. Of the
authors cited in the Handbook only a few are commonly found in the educational development literature.
If we exclude major theorists such as Habermas and Foucault , only Boud, Kolb, Knowles, Schon and
possibly Brookfield feature significantly in educational development.
In educational development influential theories have been the 'approaches to study' work undertaken
by Marton and Saljo (Martonet al, 1997, Marton and Booth, 1997) and translated into a more popular
form through the work of Gibbs (1992) which has made familiar the distinctions between 'deep' and
'surface' approaches to learning. The work of Entwistle (2000) looking at student study behaviours and
identifying students at risk has also been influential. Because the dominant model for educational
development has been psychologically based, it is not surprising that wider social and contextual factors
have received less attention, as Zukas and Malcolm suggest. They are that 'Within the literature of
teaching and learning in higher education, despite its frequent focus on "the learner", there is little
recognition of the socio-cultural situatedness of the individual. The learner frequently appears as an
anonymous, decontextualized, degendered being whose principal distinguishing characteristics are
"personality"; and "learning style"' (2000: 8).
Although this generalisation is not applicable to all the teaching andl earning literature or the practice
of all Educational Development Units, it is the case that political and ideological commitments have been
under-theorised compared to the 'adult' education literature. Educational development is a growing field
and like adult education is still defining the identifying and organising concepts to describe and explain a
field of professional practice (Gosling and D'Andrea, 2000). More cross fertilisation with theorising in
adult education would, in my view, help us to undertake a closer examination of our social goals and
promote a more wide-ranging research agenda to address important questions about the guiding values
of higher education (Gosling, 2000).
In this respect the literature represented in the Handbook provides a very useful map of the
intellectual territory in adult education. In particular chapters on criticality (Brookfield), experiential
learning (Miller),cultures of teaching (Pratt and Nesbit), and workplace learning (Fenwick) would all
provide insights from which educational developers working with mainstream students could learn.
Reading the postmodern
Richard Edwards
In their introduction to this monumental to me, Wilson and Hayes state that 'we have remained
unreflective about how we know, and importantly, how such knowing is linked to our acting' (2000: 12)
and that this is the central problematic for the handbook. Critically reflecting on the various dimensions
of adult and continuing education becomes the task for each of the contributors. I do not wish to
comment on the overall successor otherwise of the contributions. To do so would involve reading the
whole book, and I am not sure I have the time, energy or interest so to do - which does raise questions
of who this is for and how it will be read.
I want to reflect on my own journey through the book guided by a particular focus - postmodernism and a specific guide - the index. Given my own interest in debates in and around postmodernism, this
may not be surprising.
To my mind one cannot avoid engaging with writings about the postmodern if one is to make a claim
to critically reflect on the contemporary state of adult education. So my interest is in the extent to which
the postmodern is to be found in this text and the ways in which it is 'worked' (Farell, 2000).
First, I have to comment on the relative absence of the postmodern from the 42 chapters in this book.
Second, it is intriguing where it crops up. While there are passing references here and there, it is in
relation to identity, theology, leadership and human resource development that the postmodern is
elaborated more fully. Yet even here there is a depthlessness to what is sketched and a characturing of
positions that make the postmodern perhaps the most obvious reflexive example of a simulacrum
(Baudrillard 1996). This is not helped by the use of the notion of the postmodern to lump together many
different ideas and writers as thought they were one. Derrida (1978) on language, Foucault (1977) on
discipline and confession and Lyotard (1984) on education are very different writers and drawing on
their work offers many critical insights, but they are not the same ones.
Even where specific ideas are drawn upon, they are almost unrecognisable to this reader. Brookfield
suggests that for postmodernists belief in progress is a modernist illusion, yet for Lyotard progress is a
language game about which there is increasing incredulity. Donaldson and Edelson use the notion of
difference in a form more like are statement of liberal pluralism than the concern with the deferral of
meaning that there is in Derrida. This is in tune with Cunnnningham's view that post-modernism creates
a politics of identity, when it is closer to suggesting a politics of identification. There is also the view that
the postmodern is simply the reversal of the modern, a reversing rather than deconstruction of the
binary, a position that is hard to reconcile with the writers I would suggest need to be engaged with if a
more adequate critical reflection is to be developed. Brookfield suggests a healthy irony is part of a
postmodern critical reflectiveness. What is ironic in the handbook is the studious avoidance of many
themes and issues that would help to inform that practice. But that would involve other language games
and different players.
The 'subject' of adult learning
Linden West
This handbook is published at a time of epistemological flux and postmodern uncertainty in the
theory and practice of adult and continuing education. The editors, in considering these uncertainties
recall earlier struggles, at least in North America, to establish the subject of adult education as science,
in the sense of an empirically verified body of practice. This was seen as providing a basis for
professionalism as well as academic legitimacy. Here was an Enlightenment dream writ small, which
turned out to be illusory and even dangerously reductionist. The dream of a scientific adult education
turned, instead, into an 'iron cage' of technical rationality.
The cage retains its normalising power. As Tara Fenwick makes clear, human resource
development, for instance, is permeated with a technical rationality as well as neo-liberal assumptions of
worker/subjects as knowable objects, defined by productivity. She searches for a theory and practice of
learning to facilitate workers' dignity, growth and meaningful participation in ethical work communities
and turns, in part, to different ontologies of self and identity in which to anchor her reflections. The
'subject' of adult education becomes, in this and other essays, a consideration of the learner and her
subjectivity in its entire social, psychological, existential and discursive complexity.
There are, as a number of contributors say, implicit assumptions about the 'subject' in all our practice
and theorising. Carolyn Clarke insists some theory of the self underlies how we think and act: the
autonomous self, for example - authentic, rational and capable of taking action - underlines notions of
self-directed learning; or, as I see it, the self of some radical adult education writing is an oversocialised,
over-rational self, in which psyche is reduced to the status of the epiphenominal, and human motivation
to a disembodied cognition.
Some, of course- like the poststructuralists - question the need for a self at all. The concept is seen
as a constraining, modernist fiction of inner unity, detached from history and the sense of our selves as
diverse. We are offered instead a shifting play of subjectivities, using diverse images, consumption
choices and lifestyles, which provide escape from an iron cage of fixedness. On the other hand, as Tara
Fenwick points out, the poststructuralist dissolution of self can take us dangerously near to the psychotic
subject, where there is little or no psychological cohesion, and boundaries between self and others
disintegrate. This subject is, metaphorically, split into fragments, and the most unacceptable parts of the
ego are projected into otherness; curiosity, learning and relationship become, for the psychotic, a source
of terror. Those who most celebrate the dissolution of self easily forget, or are simply unaware of, the
subjective cohesion that makes their poststructuralist play possible. And adult education may also be
left, dangerously, without a human core.
But multiplicity and diversity - in culture and psyche - remain important and liberating ideas. Mark
Tennant opts for a relational self in which a 'multiplicity of self-accounts is invited', but with 'a
commitment to none'. Clarke and Dirkx similarly celebrate multiplicity, using Jungian and feminist
perspectives. In Jungian terms the persona, ego and shadow represent a range of psychic characters
that enter and influence our lives in various ways. This reminds me of feminist object relations theory, in
which the subject's psyche is also seen, symbolically, as a cast of characters - people and interactions
in the social world - which become part of an intra-psychic drama. The cast and drama can change as
new characters (significant others, such as teachers, students, or inspirational objects with whom we
can identify) enter the stage. This theory, however, like the Jungian, retains a notion of self: a socially
situated, culturally moulded, highly contingent as well as developmental self, but a self nonetheless,
albeit one that is produced rather than 'discovered'.
We need, in our work, to consider more of what is involved in its production. Adult learning is often
associated with and implicated in life changes. Experiences of change, trauma and loss remind us we
are emotional as well as rational beings and that in articulacy is emotionally rooted.
We need others to transcend it. We never lose, as adults, the primitive need, most obviously at times
of dislocation, for support and affirmation. This touches on the emotional, relational (and
spiritual)conditions - alongside the material, cultural, political, cognitive, discursive and pedagogic - in
which a self can become more of an agent in creation. The Handbook reminded me that the 'subject' of
our work is the whole human being, who needs acceptance alongside challenge, and needs to play,
dream, feel and imagine, as well as to think and reflect critically; and, fundamentally, to make and find
meaning and connectedness, in a process of production.
References
Armstrong, P. (1989) 'Right for the wrong reasons: a critique of sociology in professional adult
education' in B. P. Bright (ed.)Theory and Practice in the Study of Adult Education: The Epistemological
Debate. London: Routledge
Baudrillard, J. (1996) Selected Writings. Cambridge: Polity Press
Derrida, J. (1978) Writing and Difference, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul
Entwistle, N. (2000) Promoting deep learning through teaching and assessment: conceptual frameworks
and educational contexts, ESRC Teaching and Learning Programme, Conference 2000, Leicester
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