17th September 2021 – Building Community Democracy and Dialogue: Adult Education for Change (Part 1: Adult Education on the Edge)
This was the first event in 2021 that followed the theme within the difficulties introduced during COVID:
Resources for Hope
Events in 2021 provided an opportunity to learn about existing practices, meet and think about different forms of democratic adult education and imagine new forms of critical engagement. 50 adult educators, from across the UK, Italy, Bulgaria and Canada, joined together to listen to presentations and discuss key questions and emerging themes in small and large groups. During, and after, this first event series participants highlighted the power of learning about existing practices and ways of re-shaping new forms of adult lifelong education with an explicit social purpose.
This event is split into three different parts, all of which can be accessed using the menu on the left:
- Part 1: Adult Education on the Edge
- Part 2: Inclusion, Life Stories and Life Histories
- Part 3: Higher Education, Partnership and Voice
Part 1 is split into 3 videos, which can be found below.
Adult Education on the Edge? A Northern Perspective.
In her presentation, Edna Robinson outlines how The People’s Powerhouse was formed and what its operating principles are. She covers the emerging democratic structure in the North and some key issues regarding health, prosperity and well-being. The presentation then explores how the role of education in adulthood can positively contribute the growth of self-worth in the people that make up the diverse communities in the North.
Edna is a successful and experienced Public Sector leader. She has held several CEO positions in the NHS and is currently advising on the latest NHS reforms. Edna was a policy advisor in the last Labour government and she is Chair of The People’s Powerhouse, a platform and support system that helps to represent the real voice of northern people. It is driving the debate with leading politicians about a truly inclusive vision to create long term prosperity for the North of England.
The Neo Liberalisation of the Education System and Possible Options for Political and Adult Education.
Dave Berry’s presentation looks at all aspects of the education and training system and how it has become infiltrated and shaped in the service of the neoliberal economic system. From the earliest years of nursery and primary education, through the secondary and HE system the changes over the last forty years has damaged the collective aims of society to an individualised market exchange. The same changes in vocational training and trade union education have seen similar experiences driven by employer needs and over dependence on State funding. Where alternative pedagogy and recognition of collective working class experience has continued it has been hit by withdrawal of funding and establishment disdain. The presentation finishes by asking what are the options for practitioners and activists who believe that education should be an extension of our participatory democracy aimed at strengthening social relations and building an equitable society rather than a market exchange serving an individualised neoliberal economy.
Dave is a retired trade unionist and activist living in Sheffield, who has been involved with education and training for over 40 years. He has acted as a trade union convenor in the gas industry during the privatisation process, which involved shifting nationalised industry to a profit driven corporate enterprise. This also involved conversion from an internal training programme to a commercial based training aimed at a competitive market. This was completed by engaging the workforce in a return to education and training agenda and also using workers as assessors and mentors to their fellow workers. He has also worked for 5 years on a secondment to the GMB as a Union Learning Project Worker. As a community activist, Dave served as a school governor for 40 years and as a Labour councillor for 16 years. In his final years of employment, he worked for a social enterprise gaining insight into the workings of this and the charity sector. He now delivers political education with the Independent Working Class Education Network and supports the local community centre with a children’s homework club.
Adult education: Things We Can Learn from Blake
Colin Waugh’s presentation and associated paper focuses on two documents produced by William Blake: the title page of his prophetic book Milton, probably started in 1803 (this includes the verses that begin ‘And did those feet in ancient time . . .’), and the section of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) (MHH) that begins ‘The ancient poets . . .’. The later document centres on two concepts – : ‘prophecy’ and ‘mental fight’ – that he argues are crucial to rebuilding collective working-class adult education. The earlier document allows us to see how Blake arrived at these concepts. In the MHH passage, Blake synthesises Enlightenment criticism of the Old Testament with Romantic interest in Celtic ‘bards’, thus generating the idea that class society originated when an emergent priesthood bureaucratised the bards’ insights, thereby ‘enslaving’ ordinary people and causing them to ‘forget that all deities reside in the human breast’. In the title page of Milton, he maintains that for us to build ‘Jerusalem’ (i.e. a just society) we must engage in ‘mental fight’ – i.e. collectively recover and use the prophetic and imaginative capacity of ‘the ancient poets’. Colin aims to show that what Blake had to say in 1790 and 1803 has the same sort of relevance to rebuilding adult education now as, say, Gramsci’s discussion of the Popular University in Turin, or Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Colin Waugh was an FE teacher from 1969 to 2013, since 1988 has edited the magazine Post-16 Educator, and in 2009 wrote the pamphlet ‘Plebs’: The Lost Legacy of Independent Working-Class Education.