From Backwater to Mainstream: the Paradigm Shift in Adult Continuing Education

From backwater to mainstream: the paradigm shift in adult continuing education[1]

William Hampton

University of Sheffield

When I graduated with a good degree in the early 1960s, I was offered three university appointments: two in ‘internal’ politics departments and one in an extramural department. I chose the extramural department to the surprise - and in some cases dismay - of my former tutors. I was warned that I would not gain academic recognition unless I entered a ‘mainstream’ department. In subsequent years, as I refused offers to move to internal departments, I was advised that a social conscience was a good thing to follow for a while, but I should not leave it ‘too late’ if I wanted to further my academic career.

I repeat this anecdote as an illustration of the atmosphere that existed thirty-five years ago. The department I joined was not headed by a Professor: ‘what’, demanded his mainstream colleagues, ‘would he profess?’ He had, in their view, no academic discipline, simply an administrative role to organise ‘evening classes’. Of course, we could quote - frequently! - names such as Hoggart, Thompson and Williams, although these three, and many others, moved from extramural departments once their ‘big book’ was published. Research was not perceived as a part of most extramural provision, even though individual tutors might publish in their own discipline. Extramural departments were pleasant backwaters affording the leisure, particularly in the summer months, to pursue scholarly - or other! - interests.

Metaphors such as backwater, with its negative overtones, or mainstream and its more positive image, have a ‘capacity to persuade, seduce, and socialize us to their selected perspectives’ (Deshler 1990, 310). Metaphors are linked to our biography, they are the social expression of the intellectual concepts that name our world. These concepts form a model that has a crucial effect on our actions until the conflict with observed reality forces a ‘paradigm shift’ (Kuhn 1970) to a new model with its own metaphors. This is now happening in adult continuing education (ACE). The shift is from a model based on distinctions to one based on integration. These analytical categories need to be developed before the implications of the shift can be explored.

Distinctions

The provision of adult continuing education in Britain has developed within a system which has more subdivisions than in many other countries. These distinctions affect all aspects of the provision: the definition of provider; those for whom it is provided; for what purpose; and in what manner. Providers of education for adults, as distinct from adult continuing education with capital letters, include universities, further education, local government, TECs, voluntary organisations and private agencies. Both the public and the private sectors are, and always have been, providers of education for adults. These various providers supply learners from every adult age group and from every social and educational background. They include many from overseas. The purposes include individual or social development; academic qualifications; recreational activities - intellectual, physical or artistic; and vocational education and training. The manner in which education is provided for adults varies through informal groupings, full-time or part-time courses, and distance learning packages in various media. Adult continuing education in British terms has been a distinct aspect of the education of adults. Heavily influenced by the Great Tradition developed by academics from the older universities, adult continuing education has been constructed from a particular configuration of the distinctions already mentioned. This configuration has excluded, to a major extent, FE, vocational education or training, qualification courses, distance learning, and private provision. Adult continuing education has also excluded, by its prevailing hegemony, overseas students and others whose family origins are from non-European cultures. The Great Tradition has been reflected in the past in the proceedings of SCUTREA although in the last few years, as recognised by the proceedings of this conference, we have become more self-conscious about our constraining traditions and metaphors.

Integration

The narrow definition of adult continuing education led to marginalisation - relegation to a backwater; adult continuing education was important to those involved, but often seen as irrelevant to both government policies and many prospective students. In the past few years the traditional model has been challenged by both the government and technical change. Government policy has emphasised the economic significance of the education of adults through improved qualifications and vocational training. Fang (1996) argues that this emphasis in government policy is moving decisions about the education of adults away from the academic sphere towards market considerations. These considerations affect both supply and demand. From the supply side, government funding is no longer available to support the type of adult education that adult educators might wish to provide; the provision must follow government requirements to improve the level of qualifications within the country as a strategic objective of economic policy. Even the apparent exceptions to this generalisation can be interpreted as bringing people into the educational system as a way of making them more employable. From the demand side, the establishment of output measures rather than inputs as a basis for funding has moved the public providers of the education of adults into the market in competition both with each other and with the private sector. Funding follows the students; their preferences, within the structure decided by government policy, have become even more important than in the past.

The ending of Responsible Body status and the establishment of the Higher Education Funding Council and Further Education Funding Council has moved adult continuing education funding into the mainstream. Of course, much of the funding of the education of adults was in the mainstream already. The funding for the Open University, for example, was never perceived as a part of adult continuing education. Indeed, some ‘Adult Education Directors in the late 1960s feared the Open University, thinking they would lose students’ (Cameron 1996). The success of the Open University and the rapidly developing polytechnics led to a redefinition of the typical undergraduate: ‘In September 1990, for the first time, the majority of entrants to higher education were “mature” ‘ (McNair 1994, 264). Moreover, even in the ‘old’ university sector a survey showed continuing professional education ‘to be a significant university activity’ (Tovey 1992, 127). The universities concerned stressed the benefit for society as a whole of improved professional practice and the benefit to the universities both of links with industry and in income generation (ibid, 129).

A further unacknowledged source of adult students followed the government policy of increasing the fees for overseas students. This, together with a general reduction in the per capita unit of resource available to educational institutions has, as one of its consequences, led both higher education and further education to join the market for overseas students. These students, for example, now account for 35% of the research students in my own university. They are usually much older than home-based students, frequently they are married with young children (Felix-Corral 1996). They have more in common with students on continuing professional development courses than with traditional university students.

The traditional model of adult continuing education is being challenged not only by government policies, but also by technical changes linked to the development of computers. At first these were used as a surrogate for telephones and text-based distance learning material. This led to criticisms from tutors who stressed the importance of interactive adult learning and the significance of the ‘self-educative process’ (Dominice 1990, 210). More recently, telematics have countered these criticisms by the development of computer supported co-operative learning (CSCL). CSCL makes ‘it possible to retain many of those values [of adult learning] while offering a flexible, humane and effective form of distance learning’ (McConnell 1995, 124). The distinction between attendance and distance learning or, indeed, between home and overseas students is becoming attenuated.

Many of the points made in the previous few paragraphs are finding expression in the development of the Dearne Valley College which can stand as an exemplar of the integrative model. Based on Rockingham Further Education College, the Dearne Valley College will offer everything from basic skills to postgraduate qualifications. It will cooperate with other further education colleges, the Workers’ Educational Association, and the University of Sheffield. The curriculum will be heavily influenced by the need for economic development in the area and funds have been attracted from the Dearne Valley Partnership City Challenge and the European Regional Development Fund as well as from educational sources. The College will incorporate computer assisted learning at the heart of its pedagogy and will exploit computer links with the University of Sheffield for some of its teaching.

Discussion

The reaction by professionals to the changes discussed above has been either a regret for the past or the espousal of a new realism. The regret for the past takes two forms. There are those who continue to argue for the values of liberal adult education, echoing the great inaugural lecture of R S Peters:

Education, then, can have no ends beyond itself. Its value derives from principles and standards implicit in it. To be educated is not to have arrived at a destination: it is to travel with a different view (Peters 1963, 47)

Others, including Jane Thompson, regret what they perceive as the loss of a warm comradeship in pursuit of socio-political objectives. She writes ‘an open letter to whoever’s left’ (perhaps a deliberately ambiguous word); while Keith Jackson perceives a ‘crippling loss of resources’ (Yeo 1996, 107). Such a phrase does not take account of the great increase in the number of adults studying outside the ACE tradition.

The new realists often start with a critique of the Great Tradition represented by liberal adult education. Duke argues

. . . that the scholar-serf, grammar-technical dichotomies of the Greeks and the Victorians lived on into the liberal tradition. If we need liberal (adult) education today then we need also to confront this class shadow; and along with it the neutering effect of the passionless, essentially cerebral, inevitably exclusivist, meaning and connotations that liberal adult education still carries (Duke 1990, 242)

Cameron maintains that the tradition of tutorial classes ‘died because students did not want it’ while a later emphasis on short courses in high culture failed to meet its aims (Cameron 1996). The students were overwhelmingly drawn from a restricted, already educated, sector of society. The syllabus continued along well-worn paths that seldom strayed outside the male, European hegemony. While many older white women students accepted this syllabus, younger people and people from minority ethnic groups were under-represented in the classes. Women’s Studies and the emerging claims for a syllabus that takes account of Africentricity (Mashengele 1996) are now enlarging our understanding of the world in ways that liberal adult education failed to accommodate.

The new realists point, also, to the growing resources attracted to ACE in the 1990s and to the great growth in both academic and vocational post-18 education (McNair 1994; Duke and Taylor 1994). They stress the need for new partnerships with vocational concerns (Duke 1991). From the vocational side a welcoming hand is outstretched on behalf of the TECs: ‘we are committed to adult learning because it is the essential component of the modern economy we seek to create’ (Howell 1995, 201). The integrative model begins to harden into a new paradigm.

Conclusions

At this point we need to return to our metaphor analysis. We need to question the metaphors that are being used. We need to ask whose content is being placed within the emerging pattern of images: ‘When we accept without critical reflection others’ definitions of the world, we have not exerted our own power’ (Deshler 1990, 311). The new paradigm uses concepts such as student (customer) choice, added value, quality provision, measured outcomes and accountability; and who, as Emsley asks rhetorically, could be against such things? He goes on to argue that although the language frequently appears congruous with ACE traditions, the discourse leads to an evaluation of ACE that ignores its longer-term moral purpose and replaces this purpose with a short-term market justification; the practitioner, in the terminology of Habermas, becomes technician (Emsley 1996).

What then is this moral purpose? Carmen Morales-Guarda, in a seminar on the abstract of this paper, suggested that

education is important not only for the market but for social and political consensus; for social coherence. Neo-liberalism often uses the language of the left - for example, choice and democracy; what is missing is education for reflection: teaching people to think.

Such an education was at the heart of the Great Tradition (McIlroy 1991, 16); it does not necessarily fall into the trap of proselytising for a particular view on social issues (for an example of this trap see Mezirow 1990, 375); but it ‘is about providing the intellectual and educational context in which students can work their own way to their own conclusions’ (Taylor 1990, 244). We should continue to argue for this core value of adult continuing education in the present context of mass adult higher education and the new vocationalism. This is why, in Duke’s phrase, we should see ourselves as ‘change-agents’ in universities despite Cameron’s reservations (Cameron 1996); it is the reason why some of us stayed in adult continuing education and declined invitations to join mainstream departments. We now enter the mainstream at a time when ‘a large part of the immediate future agenda of higher education relates closely to continuing education objectives’ (Duke and Taylor 1994, 94); that agenda also relates closely to students who are mature enough to welcome adult continuing education approaches to education. We have something to offer to overseas students, to the broadening of the curriculum, and to a critique of existing academic and vocational education. We will not make that contribution if we continue to regret the past, nor if we accept the new metaphors from the market as a firm paradigm for future developments.

References

Cameron, R (1996) ‘The evolution of adult education: a case of unnatural selection?’ Inaugural lecture delivered in the University of Sheffield, 21 February.

Deshler, D (1990) ‘Metaphor analysis: exorcising social ghosts’ in J Mezirow and Associates, Fostering critical reflection in adulthood, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass, 296-313.

Dominice, P F (1990) ‘Composing education biographies: group reflection through life histories’ in J Mezirow and Associates, op. cit., 194-212.

Duke, C (1990) ‘Liberal adult education’, Adults learning, 1, 9, 241-242.

Duke, C (1991) ‘Post-16 partnerships’, Adults learning, 2, 8, 233-235.

Duke C and R Taylor (1994) ‘The HEFCE review and the funding of continuing education’, Studies in the education of adults, 26, 1, 86-94.

Emsley, P (1996) ‘Performance, quality and community in adult continuing education’, in the present volume.

Fang, X (1996) ‘Change in British university adult education’, in the present volume.

Felix-Corral, M C (1996) ‘The academic experience of overseas female PhD candidates: a case study in one university’, paper presented at the Women in Higher Education Network (WHEN) Conference, University of Central Lancashire, 16 March.

Howell, J (1995) ‘Adult learning and the changing workforce: a TEC viewpoint’, Adults learning, 6, 7, 201-203.

Kuhn, T S (1970) ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’, second edition enlarged, first edition 1962, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press.

Mashengele, D (1996) ‘Africentricity: new context: new challenges’, in the present volume.

McConnell, D (1995) ‘From distance learning to computer supported cooperative learning - a new paradigm for distance learning’ in I Bryant (ed) Vision, invention, intervention: celebrating adult education: papers from the 25th SCUTREA annual conference, Southampton, SCUTREA.

McNair, S (1994) ‘An adult higher education’, Adults learning, 5, 10, 264-265.

McIlroy, J (1991) ‘Border country: Raymond Williams in adult education - II’, Studies in the Education of Adults, 23, 1, 1-23.

Mezirow, J (1990) ‘Conclusion: toward transformative learning and emancipatory education’ in J Mezirow and Associates, op. cit., 354-376.

Peters, R S (1963) ‘Education as Initiation’, London, Evans Brothers for the University of London Institute of Education.

Taylor, R (1990) ‘University liberal education’, Adults learning, 1, 9, 243-245.

Tovey, P (1992) ‘Assuring quality: current practice and future directions in continuing professional education’, Studies in the Education of Adults, 24, 2, 125-142.

Yeo, S (1996) ‘Learning materialism’, Adults learning, 7, 5, 107-110.

[1] I am grat