Globalisation and pedagogy: mapping and translating lifelong learning practices

Richard Edwards, University of Stirling, Scotland

Robin Usher, RMIT University, Australia

Paper presented at SCUTREA, 31st Annual Conference, 3-5 July 2001, University of East London

IN a range of subject areas, the issue of globalisation - its nature, extent and significance - has become a matter of considerable debate. However, there has been little consideration of the pedagogical implications of globalising processes in general. Where there has been exploration, it has largely been in the fields of literacy studies and open and distance education. In previous work (Edwards and Usher, 1997 and 2000), we have suggested that notions of mapping and translating are helpful in enabling us to engage with the issues raised for pedagogical work by globalising processes. In this paper we seek to develop that argument further by providing a mapping of lifelong learning, a term which increasingly challenges more conventional discourses, such as that of adult education or the education of adults.

First, we will outline what we understand by mapping and translating and their significance for globalising processes, each of which we consider to be a condition of the other.

Second, we will use these notions to examine some of the significance of the contemporary shift to discourses of lifelong learning, which itself involves an unsettling of established maps of the territory of adult education.

Mapping and translating

Historically, the production of maps has been closely tied to colonising practices and other forms of control (Blunt and Rose, 1994). With globalisation and the associated reconfiguration of space, different forms of maps and mapping have developed, in the process creating new senses and understandings of territory. Within these new practices, there are also increasingly attempts to deterritorialise, to map in ways which do not reproduce established dominant exercises of power. This in itself produces different reterritorialisation. Thus different forms of maps and mapping can disrupt the pre-existing workings and positionings of power and create fresh ones en route. These reconceptualisations of what constitutes a 'map' have sought to problematise the relationship between the politics of representation and the politics of location, thus bringing to the fore the reflexivity of mapping practices that question their own exercises of power.

What forms of mapping are possible and productive? Jameson (1984: 54) has argued that postmodernism 'will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping'. Such a mapping is of course itself problematic since it might involve the production of a totalising vision and universal map for all. However, for us, a more productive way of understanding this is that mapping might be global as a practice, but its strategies, destinations and outcomes will be different, as each practice of mapping is itself marked by its own (dis)location. Thus, as Leitch (1997: 147) suggests, such a mapping calls for 'critically linking our bewildered selves, however incompletely, to networks of global forces operating through local habitations'. This is a reflexive, open and ongoing practice that keeps the dynamism of bewilderment and mastery in play rather than the one being overwhelmed by the other.

It is a mapping that involves glimpsing rather than staring.

We would argue that there is a diversity of mapping practices emerging through globalising processes and the differing possibilities arising from the global-local nexus - of which the argument in this paper is only one. There are possibilities also for locating oneself and others pedagogically and politically, where location is a 'space that is fragmented, multi-dimensional, contradictory and provisional' (Blunt and Rose, 1994: 7). Here mapping is less to do with representation than with forms of way finding (Pile and Thrift, 1995). Pile (1997: 30) suggests that, 'we occupy many places on many maps, with different scales, with different cartographies, and it is because we both occupy highly circumscribed places on maps drawn through power cartographies and also exceed these confinements, that it is possible to imagine new places, new histories... '

In their earlier work, Pile and Thrift (1995) draw upon Deleuze and Guattari's (1988) distinction between mapping and tracing. The latter attempts to 'read off' a true representation from the real. The former 'is entirely orientated towards an experimentation in contact with the real ... The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, and susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual group or social formation' (Deleuze and Guatttari, 1988: 12). Within this conception of mapping, rather than representation and closure there are possibilities for maps to be subject to 'continual renaming and remapping in order to prevent... closure around one dominant cartography of meaning and power' (Pile and Thrift,1995: 5). Meaning is made though mapping rather than found. Of course, this does not mean that closures will or should not be attempted and locations founded, even if their possibilities for success are reduced by the globalising processes and the reflexivity of mapping practices.

Mapping one's own position and that of others becomes central to pedagogy and such mapping must also entail an engagement with the other, that which is not oneself and that which is not one's location. Thus we need to view locating and mapping as relational practices. However, in doing this the criteria by which these practices are established as 'standard', the ground upon which one stands, itself becomes problematic. The New London Group (NLG) (1995: 9) argue in relation to what they term a pedagogy of multiliteracies for globalisation, that 'local diversity and global connectedness not only mean that there can be no standard; they mean that the most important skill students need to learn is to negotiate dialect differences, register differences, code switching, inter-languages and hybrid cross-cultural discourses'. Although we prefer to think of these as practices rather than skills and are concerned with more than literacy, this is nonetheless suggestive of the forms of translating inherent in mapping. Rather than rest within the enclosed space of one's 'mother tongue', there is a movement between tongues, a relationality and movement of many different sorts which one can see intensified in contemporary globalisation. Thus, 'the state of translation is the common condition of all thinking beings' (Julia Kristeva, quoted in Jokinen and Veijola, 1997: 44).

Practices of translating are being brought to the fore as necessary for engaging with and being part of globalised conditions where one's (en)counters are diversified and intensified. Within globalising processes diasporic identities are at once local and global. They are networks of transnational identifications encompassing "imagined" and "encountered" communities' (Brah 1996: 196). The intensifying set of interconnections (Tomlinson, 1999) that mark globalising processes result in pedagogy becoming a process of constant engagement, negotiation and (en)counter, where the latter signifies the relatedness of a position and the diverse modes of investment in it.

Encounters can be countered, a useful notion, although one which should not be read as a binary of power and struggle, but rather attempts to work beyond that in the complex spaces of engagement. This requires the ability to map different locations and translate between them, to shift, move and negotiate the uncertainties and ambivalences of the contemporary condition, an aspect of which is the very uncertainty of identity and location.

Here one occupies the spaces 'in-between' (Bhabha, 1994) rather than seeking to translate others into one's own terms or 'go native' oneself, although the latter remains a powerful practice. These in-between spaces are ones of uncertainty and questioning rather than of certainty and mastery, as 'in the attempt to mediate between different cultures, languages and societies, there is always the threat of mis-translation, confusion and fear' (Bhabha, 1989:35).

Indeed it may not be possible to escape such practices and feelings for translating cannot be transparent - 'there is a sense in which no culture is fully translatable; translation is not a transparent transfer of meaning; it is always an interpretation and as such, operates as a mode of resignification.

But the act of translation as are-signifying practice is the very condition of communicative practice between individuals and collectivities' (Brah, 1996:246).

As with mapping therefore, translating is a provisional and ongoing practice.

Mapping and translating are central practices in certain framings of contemporary globalisation. As we have illustrated, they are referred to extensively in the literature of feminism, postcolonialism and cultural geography. Within these literatures, a politics of location, of space and place, the margin and the centre, is played out. Here globalising processes are seen as disruptive and dislocating, with notions of flow and movement to the fore, even as people attempt to create more secure places for themselves. Consequently, we have used the notion of (dis)location as a way of framing the complex interplay of locating and dislocating practices, of absent-presence and the margin which makes any centre possible. A complex interplay of processes and practices mark particular spaces and places. (Dis)locating practices are double edged. Mapping and translating are practices of (dis)location that also seek to (dis)locate practices; in other words, they are both an aspect of (dis)location and themselves have the effect of (dis)locating. Furthermore, these practices, reflexively, are subject to the practices they promote. This implies that mapping and translating are not de-contextualised - they have themselves to be mapped and translated. Further, mapping and translating are active and ongoing practices - hence the use of the '-ing' form - and hence why they can be understood as practices of contemporary forms of lifelong learning within globalisation. Producing maps and translations is therefore only part of the story, although such productions can be temporary and powerful points of rest. Our concern rather is with the more active and powerful processes through which maps and translations are made and re-made and the different forms they can take in this process.

Lifelong learning is one such setof (dis)locating practices through which there are many reterritorialisations of the education of adults. It is also subject itself to much mapping and translating. It is one small rendition of that which we offer here. Our contention is that mapping and translating have become important pedagogic practices that shape and define lifelong learning in globalised conditions, even as they too, like lifelong learning, are subject to mapping and translating.

Mapping and translating lifelong learning

At one level, the 'lifelong learning' required by globalising processes is a meta-discourse as well as encompassing a range of practices. The meta-discourse brings to the fore the possible positioning of learners in relation to the possible positions made available in those practices. These are neither homogeneous nor static. We recognise that the spatialising of lifelong learning provides 'a field of metaphors wherein multiple and dynamic possibilities for meaning may be generated' (Stronach and MacLure, 1997: 28). These dynamics both refuse an inherent privileging of particular locations and voices and accept the inherent power/ knowledge dynamics of all pedagogic situations. This is also a (dis)location of multiple and conflicting identities, with an ensemble of diverse discourses through which identity is narrated (Usher,et al, 1997). Here 'identities have multiple layers, each layer in complex relationship to the others' (New London Group, 1995: 12). Leitch (1996: 137) argues that 'the multiple subject positions constituting subjectivity casts the selfas neither unified nor fixed, but as a layered site of conflict and contradiction, where submission as well as resistance to socio-historical representations are negotiated'.

Here there is an endlessness to the processes of teaching and learning (Elam 1994) of which the increasing calls for lifelong learning are a signifier (Edwards 1997). Globalisation and the spatialisation of pedagogies provides an impetus for lifelong learning and pedagogies of spatialisation. Thus as education and training become more central in response to processes of globalisation, they are reconfigured as lifelong learning. This in itself introduces new texts and new ways of meaning-making which, in particular, can be argued to challenge traditional conceptions of the role, values and purposes of adult education. With new settings and wider groups of practitioners entering the terrain of pedagogical work, education itself becomes a diasporan rather than a disciplinary space. The very notion of a 'course' that takes place at a fixed time with pre-defined starting and end points and within fixed designated spaces is significant. Its inscription in timetables can in some ways be said to be critical to establishing a space as specifically a pedagogical space, one where teaching and learning takes place. It provides the basis for the institutionalising of learning within specific organisations and frameworks - colleges, universities, etc. - locations which have in the past then become the privileged sites from which has been engendered specific forms of educational discourse. This in itself has been disrupted and (dis)located in contemporary times as learning brings to the fore different learning settings - for example the workplace and the home -pedagogical practices and practitioners. The very notion of a'course' that takes place at a fixed time with pre-defined starting and end points and within fixed designated spaces is significantly and increasingly problematic as space is restructured and time transformed under the impact of globalising processes.

There is a de-differentiating of borders and opening up of possibilities as well as new constraints. Here people are seen more aptly as de-territorialised 'learners' rather than firmly located 'students'. Lifelong learning can be said to transform the possibilities for educational communities and with that, what it means to be a 'student'. For the latter, there is a clear location, role and identity. If we are astudent, we are part of something, we belong within aninstitution.

That sense of belonging is important in establishing a boundary and sense of identity. It provides a certain status that is important to ourselves and in negotiating boundaries with others. This is dependent partly on the value given to education and training and different forms of these within a culture. Nonetheless, being a student provides a boundary against which other demands can be defended. It is a 'serious' role, which although capable of being a threat to our sense of self and our relations with others, nonetheless provides the grounds for affirming a particular identity.

This notion of the student is very much linked to a certain conception of education and training in which canons of knowledge, skills and understanding are transmitted to the participants. It is a serious and disciplined process of development and deepening, in which the relative institutional stability is reflected in the relative stability of the canon and its ordering, and with that acertain stability in the identity of the student. In many ways this conception of education and training continued and extended the monastic tradition of initiation, order and stability, replacing the religious elite and vocation with the secular elite of the modern nation state, also often with a strong sense of vocation. Locations here are bounded and strong and spatialised in particular ways, structured within a binary of the inside and outside, where the role of one is to keep each discrete and separate. It is a view of education and training which for many is disappearing slowly in the contemporary period with the emergence of lifelong learning as a central goal. With it goes the relative stability of education and training institutions, the canon and the boundedness of student identity.

As the range of opportunities for learning have grown and diversified in many parts of the globe, and as those opportunities become subject to globalisation in practice and analysis thereof, so the very notion of what constitutes an education and/or training is reconstituted. In many areas learning opportunities increasingly are packaged, commodified, consumable, their sources more diverse and more open. In the process, the notion of a canon to be imparted itself is undermined as modularisation, new delivery mechanisms and consumer 'choice' are given greater play. The sense of trust invested in educational institutions to impart the canon to students is undermined as more individuals are given greater opportunity to negotiate their own ways flexibly through the range of learning opportunities available to them, invest their own meanings within the learning process and negotiate the relationship between learning and other activities. Indeed there are significant migrations of learners across local, national and institutional boundaries and much learning undertaken through the de-territorialising practices of open and distance learning. As a result, the bounded sense of identity associatedwith being a student is challenged. The focus shifts from being a member of an institution to being an individualised lifelong learner engaging in learning practices. The choices available and the conditions under which they are exercised thereby create situations of less certainty and a more unstable sense of identity (Shah, 2001).