As part of ongoing research into the lost spaces of adult education within the UK, Sharon had the honour of interviewing Derek Tatton in 2021. The video of this interview is available online and the following blog post provides Sharon’s initial thinking and reflections. As a former adult educator and teacher, Derek first encountered the
With the ongoing COVID-19 enquiry publishing new findings via several units of societal enquiry, it helps to emphasise the importance of taking time to think about past pandemic experiences for the future. Consequently, the following blog repost from Alex Dunedin @ Ragged University provides a reflective retrospective on necessary adaptations to practice during lockdown. The
This is a write up of Sharon and Iain’s provocation that was delivered at Fircroft’s Summer Symposium on the 3rd of July 2026. This provocation allowed for discussion on the decline of adult education and the importance of creating dialogic learning spaces. Sharon and Iain’s work within the Research Circle over the past 5-6 years
Melanie Lenehan who has been involved with the Research Circle has provided details of an event which may be of interest. Re-imagining a sustainable future for adult education: Learning to create a better world Within the multiple global crises that we see and hear about daily, adult education in England is also in crisis. We
The Raymond Williams Foundation and Red Pepper have now entered into a partnership to share articles and content relating to adult education. This partnership has been announced in the latest Red Pepper magazine (#248) (spring 2026), and Sharon along with Nick Mahony have provided an article to mark this new relationship. The article considers the vital role that adult education can play in pushing back against the far right and building community-based democracies…
RWF has entered into a partnership with Red Pepper magazine. In the new partnership the Red Pepper website will host a ‘Raymond Williams’ section that brings together the Keywords series and other articles, links to the RWF’s website, and updates with details of the RWF grant cycle. In the next print edition of RP coming out shortly (Spring 2026) there will be an announcement of the partnership, background on RP’s links with Raymond Williams, and some context/introduction to RWF’s work and this will be supported by an initial scene-setting article on the current state of adult learning,
My research will explore the meanings and memories associated with former places and spaces of adult education in the UK, particularly residential adult education. By ‘lost spaces’, I refer to physical sites or locations which were used for pioneering adult education purposes in the past but are no longer in existence or have been repurposed. Nonetheless, such spaces provide a focus for the memories, experiences and voices of those who benefited from them, and many sites have stimulated educational developments beyond their life span. These elements are what I want to explore in my research.
Over the summer Shirley Walters and I worked together to draft a dialogue paper for a new International Handbook on Adult Education which will come out in spring 2024. This process of conversation was a source of great learning for me as Shirley talked to me about her powerful and visceral experience of ‘unlearning separation’ and reclaiming relationality through an immersion on the Imfolozi Wilderness Wild Self Trail in June 2023. At the same time, I was wrestling with my own conception of kinship and my relationship with my own past which I was exploring chiefly through poetry writing, which seemed to reach a deep imaginative space in the “psychosocial, historical and educational imagination” (West, 2016, p.37) which other writing did not.
Since Spring 2021, we have convened a research circle on ‘Building community, democracy and dialogue through adult lifelong education’ and organised a series of events to challenge dominant perspectives on lifelong learning. The Circle is made up of around 10 active members, drawn from backgrounds in adult, further and higher education, the voluntary and community sector and trade union education in different regions of the UK. We all have a deep commitment to social purpose education and our objective has been the sharing of experience and critical engagement, designed to explore and generate new and existing forms of practice in the generation of hope. Our activities form part of the continuing work of The Centenary Commission on Adult Education in the UK.
The first of the Centenary Commission Research Circle’s conferences on ‘Building community, democracy & dialogue through adult lifelong education‘ was held on 7 May, focussing on the theme of ‘Community, democracy and dialogue through adult lifelong education: Celebrating Resources of Hope’.
Organised by Sharon Clancy, Iain Jones, and other members of the research circle on fostering community, democracy and dialogue, it was the first in a series of three events which provide opportunities to learn about existing practices, and to meet and think about different forms of democratic adult education and imagine new forms of critical engagement.
