5th July 2024 – The unknown EP Thompson and Raymond Williams and roles of imagination in the education of adults and re-imagining our futures.

This research circle event is split into two main contributions:

• Sharon Clancy and Liz Hoult – Voice, Memory and Storytelling: the place of Imagination in Adult Education.
  Dr Sharon Clancy and Professor Liz Hoult met, in conversation, and focused on the role of the imagination in the education of adults and its centrality in helping us to re-imagine our futures.  They suggest that the precarity and complexity of the contemporary world in which we operate means that we should replace the metaphors of progress, growth and expansion with the metaphors of holding, stillness and renewed self-generation. This time to pause allows us to find ways of remembering forgotten and less celebrated models of education and intellectual traditions, such as adult residential spaces and community learning, as well as looking for inspiration from thinkers who acknowledge loss, pain and vulnerability as a means of transformation for a sustainable future. They will be thinking about the stories we tell about adult learning on the one hand, and the way it does and does not feature in histories of education. They will also be thinking about the place of storytelling and poetry as adult education.  In particular, Sharon and Liz reflect on the role of working-class women, their voices, memories and capacity for storytelling, as central to finding a means of standing, still, in our own power.
• Tom Woodin – Listening in adult education: A useable past?
  Professor Tom Woodin considered the neglect of EP Thompson and Raymond Williams’ role in workers’ education and extramural commitments. He argued that for most of the twentieth century educators could write about an ‘adult education movement’, but no more. In the twentieth century adult education gradually extended through public funding and ‘responsible bodies’ – local authorities, universities and voluntary organisations. Later, further education colleges would play a role. Adult education was part of the expansion of public life, what Raymond Williams termed the Long Revolution. One aspect of this work was the way that educators and learners listened to, and learned from, one another. Key moments include the First World War and its aftermath when workers and officers encountered one another at close quarters; the interwar period when professionals worked closely with workers’ organisations; the post war period when educators like Williams, E.P. Thompson, Richard Hoggart and others initiated cultural studies; and the 1970s when worker writer groups took control of writing and publishing. Tom used these examples to think about how a useable past might contribute to the process of listening and learning today as part of a potential renewal in adult education.

Finally, in an open discussion, the event drew together threads and reflections on contributions.