NALL Working Paper #15-2000
THE COMMUNAL ‘WE’?
A Conversation Piece
on the Richness of Being a Network
Prepared for the NALL Steering Committee
By Kathryn Church PhD
Independent Researcher
October 2000
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This document was written at the request of the Steering Committee of the
Network for New Approaches to Lifelong Learning (NALL). It is intended to
articulate the richness of academics and their community/union partners working
in an SSHRC-funded network, especially the cross-over between NALL’s core
groups and projects. It is written to focus on the Network’s core debates of
the past four years. There are five.
1. Creating spaces in which to work against the typical social relations
of academia.
Large and inter-disciplinary, NALL represents an opportunity for its members
to work across differences in language and concepts, theory and practice as well
as policy questions. In spite of the inherent complexities, principal
investigators indicated that collaboration has been the best part of their
participation. The Network was perceived as a way to break down (at least
temporarily) the kinds of separations that are characteristic of academic
work/life. That said, research teams were often limited to traditional
academic/student combinations. The intermediate (1-6) groupings were
difficult to orchestrate, and depended heavily on the time and initiative of
decentralized leaders. Most difficulties with the Network as a whole
pertained to money (not enough), and reporting (far too much).
Difficulties were most effectively dealt with through face to face meetings
(e.g. annual conferences) while email facilitated day to day “business.”
2. Furthering collaborative relationships between academics, labor and
community groups/organizations outside of university and other institutional
settings.
The Network’s community partners (as collaborators and research sites)
include co-ops, unions, corporate and community organizations. Unions
predominate within this category. With their history of union/worker/labor
education, they are better understood as learning environments and producers of
knowledge than are community organizations. However, both force
researchers to attend to the needs and priorities of people outside
universities, including writing and representing issues in terms other than
those valued by academic journals and textbooks. NALL researchers have
been challenged by the demands of their sites, by the unsettling process and
unexpected outcomes of the university/ community relationship. Members
have also had to defend a commitment to participatory action research principles
and methods against an SSHRC critique that they undermined the development of
“rigorous systematic research.”
3. Making ‘common sense’ of informal learning using divergent methods
NALL members responded differentially to the conceptual framework established
by “NALL Central” in both fleeting (e-mail) and focused ways (annotated
bibliography, core readings). Although this characterization is somewhat
polarized, some went out and “discovered” informal learning as it exists
“out there” while others saw themselves as “constructing” informal
learning conceptually as a function of academic practice. Some built on
the existing literature while others “read against” it. Only some of
this tension is methodological. A question the Network now faces is
whether it is possible to integrate or make “common sense” out of results
generated from different sites, standpoints and methods. If not, what are
the alternatives for presenting what we have learned?
4. Clarifying, augmenting and/or challenging the dominant definition of
informal learning.
Network members have been successful in exploring the nature and extent of
informal learning with new actors and organizational environments.
Potentially rich, their work puts serious pressure on existing definitions in a
field already troubled by boundary problems. One of the biggest challenges
comes from First Nations/Aboriginal communities in which the existing
conceptualization is actually reversed. Other projects make a case for
“seamless: informal learning, one that recognizes the tacit qualities of the
process and the various ways it is embedded in daily life (including formal
education). Network researchers continue to struggle with the relationship
between learning and experience, perhaps especially between learning and
collective (social/political) experience and interaction.
5. Formulating strategies that would appropriately address the tendency of
dominant groups and discourses to regulate and appropriate informal knowledge.
NALL is characterized by ongoing debates over formal/institutional
“recognition.” The primary tension is between members who view
informal learning as a powerful strategy for validation of untapped or
de-legitimized knowledge, and members who view it as a way of regulating and
appropriating this knowledge. PLAR is the most specific programmatic
example of recognition. Some researchers call for its equivalent in their
particular setting. Others are concerned with practices of governance, for
example, with the ways that individuals (informally) learn to take
responsibility for re/making and regulating their own conduct. Invoked here are
complex relations of power/knowledge, as well as the contradictions of
“empowerment.”
Thus, we arrive at the theme for the October 2000 NALL conference: Contested
Terrain: The boundaries and practical impact of informal learning.
Through this document, a background reading for that event, I hope that the
general areas for debate and possibilities for action (research, program,
policy) have become more clear.
Introduction
In December 1999, the Network for New Approaches to
Lifelong Learning (NALL) received its mid-term evaluation report from the site
visit committee for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada (SSHRC). The committee found that NALL showed great potential as a
model for researchers working in a network relationship. It recommended
funding maintenance through to the end of the grant period. At the same
time, reviewers were concerned about certain “weaknesses,” most of which
reflected their desire for better “integration” of the Network.
Although it took a different view, the NALL Steering
Committee agreed that it would be wise if someone fleshed out the depth of the
work that has been done across NALL’s six groups over the past few years.
Members wanted to understand the dimensions of cross-over between groups and
especially to highlight learning within/across different populations. Related to
this was the need to identify and articulate the richness of working as a
network. What do we know because we are/have been more than isolated
projects? What more can we say as a result? Members of the Steering
Committee felt it important to capture findings that were not anticipated and
surprises that arose out of participation at both project and more collective
levels.
I took on the task of addressing at least some of these
questions and concerns. I’ll tell you straight out that I thought my
chances of becoming the “goat” on this one were pretty high. As
I have experienced it, the Network is a complex, often elusive and shifting
construction. When I started out, I had only a passing familiarity with
the literature that shaped its activities and sometimes found the debates
obscure. However, I reasoned, if a woman of intelligence and good will
can’t make some sense out of NALL’s materials and its emergent conversation,
there are problems here that are considerably larger than my ego. And
this, the Steering Committee would want to know.
In the final chapter of his book The Corrosion of Character,
sociologist Richard Sennett argues for a view of community as a space where
people “are bound together more by verbal conflict than by verbal agreement,
at least immediate agreement. This view of the communal ‘we’ is far deeper
than the often superficial sharing of common values such as appears in modern
communitarianism.” He goes on to argue that “there is no community
until differences are acknowledged within it.” And he references the
view of political scientists Gutmann and Thompson that “the evolving
expression of disagreement is taken to bind people more than the sheer
declaration of ‘correct’ principles. … The sociologists of dispute and
confrontation do not believe sustained verbal conflict is uncivilized; instead
it forms a more realistic basis for the connections between people of unequal
power or with differing interests” (Sennett, 1998:143).
I have found this perspective useful in writing this
document. The more I have worked with material from the Network, the less
able I have become to represent it in any simple way. In my own mind, I
have shifted from thinking about “cross-links” to thinking about core
debates. As Sheila Neysmith notes in Restructuring Caring Labour, for feminist
scholars who constituted the Caring Network, the “process and change that we
all underwent was instructive in underlining the importance of debate to
developing an analysis. Analysis does not occur in isolation”(2000: 3).
My focus is on those four or five places where NALL’s
conversations over the past few years have coalesced. They include our
struggles to:
- Create spaces in which to work against the typical social relations of
academic work;
- Maintain and extend collaborative working relationships between academics,
labor and community groups/organizations outside of university and other
institutional settings;
- Make “common sense” of informal learning using divergent methods;
- Clarify, augment or challenge the dominant definition of informal
learning;
- Formulate strategies that would appropriately address the tendency of
dominant groups and discourses to regulate and appropriate informal
knowledge.
Although not necessarily places of agreement or commonality, these are powerful
places in the life of the Network and for its potential to contribute to a
variety of publics.
The limitations of this document are many. The most
pronounced are the limits of my source materials and on my time to better
understand the extent and nature of our collective research.
1
I deal to some extent with conceptual issues but this is not a document about
“theoretical foundations.”
2 I pay particular
attention to the small case studies primarily because they are the most latent
piece of NALL’s work. Unfortunately, as I write, some of these projects are
still in the data-gathering and analysis stages; I have a limited sense of their
emergent results. These frustrations, hopefully, will not fatally affect the
merit of what I have written to this point. I consider this document to be a
place to begin a broader discussion, looking towards the NALL conference in
October. Those who see that they have been left out, slighted or
misunderstood will have an opportunity to say so.
Academic Collaboration: Against the grain
The SSHRC review committee had difficulty establishing a
clear sense of connections between NALL projects in part because of decisions
that Network organizers made early on about how to constitute and mobilize the
Network. Specifically, they decided to provide smaller grants to more
researchers rather than larger grants to fewer. (The exception here was the
national survey.) Recognizing that informal learning is “Other-centered,”
they also attempted to give primacy to researchers who, because they were
working with non-dominant groups, were less likely than others to receive
academic funding.
I am a good case in point. My community-based study of
informal learning in a psychiatric survivor courier company would not have
happened without NALL funding and the support of a broader researcher team.
Roxana Ng noted the same thing about her research into the Homeworkers
Association in Toronto. A project of UNITE, the HWA teaches immigrant
women language and job skills through formal instructions (ESL classes) and
through mutual aid (teaching each other). “I would not have obtained funding
to further the research,” she acknowledged, “without financial and academic
support from NALL.”
These funding decisions had a major impact on the kind of
Network that emerged. For one thing, it is large – almost 50 projects
– and it includes academics from a range of disciplines and institutions
across the country. Writing about the inter-disciplinary quality of her
own network, Neysmith recalls that:
Members had individual programs of research (with their) own theoretical and
policy questions. Consequently, network discussions meant negotiating
different disciplinary terrains. The process required a continuous
struggle with language and concepts. In addition, these professional and
disciplinary literatures have not, for the most part, systematically addressed
(the primary focus of the network)” (2000: 12).
She found this a struggle for a network of 13. How much more difficult it
is for NALL with 100 plus members. In spite of the Network’s size, and the
complexity of its field sites, principal investigators indicated that the best
part about participating is the opportunity to connect to and collaborate with
other people. Let me give examples that illustrate this from three different
angles.
Research Teams
A scan across NALL’s Year Four reports reveals that the
bulk of its research teams, those people identified as project leaders, are
comprised of university-based academics directing students. (I counted three
academics working alone.) The remaining projects represent variations on
this theme including academics/students with union/labor co-investigators, and
academics/students with co-investigators from community (First Nations)
organizations. There are several more complex combinations that, although the
players didn’t report on them, must have presented challenges.
The four core PLAR projects, for example, were coordinated by
a combination of academics, labor movement and community college representatives
with the significant addition of the community-based PLA Centre in Halifax.
The Labour Education project was guided by a team that included one academic,
one graduate student, one labor representative, one independent researcher and
two university-based advisors. Similarly, the project on Aboriginal women
and coalition work was guided by one academic, one student, a representative of
a First Nations organization and a First Nations community-based researcher.
Independent researchers were involved in several other
projects. I want to red flag this for both NALL and the SSHRC, not only to
raise the profile of workers such as myself but to mark our engagement in
significant academic work from a non-university base. Typically invisible,
our presence is one of the ways that the work of NALL actually got done.
In terms of the mechanics of team-work, the national survey
project faced the challenge of having international co-investigators, while the
Canadian Teacher Learning survey had to negotiate support from six teacher
affiliates. Working with diverse leadership, most case studies were focused on a
single site, community or organization. An exception here is the “social
learning team” initiated by Eric Shragge. Rounding up Jean-Marc Fontan,
Roxana Ng and I, he formed a group focused on three community/union
organizations that work with people excluded from the labor market.
As researchers, we share an interest in learning that is
shaped by the socio-political cultural of those organizations. However, we
encompass significant differences in terms of ethnicity, gender, language and
geography. Three of our members are tenured within the university while one is
an independent researcher. Located in Montreal, the two men are examining
Chic Resto Pop, a community restaurant that is designed as a place of training
for people on social assistance. Located in Toronto, the two women have studied
A-Way Express, a courier service that is operated by psychiatric survivors
(Church), and the Homeworkers’ Association, a labor union working with
unemployed members and homeworkers in the garment and textile sector who are
mainly immigrant women (Ng).
Using the Network’s resources, we joined forces “to
enrich our individual projects and to extend them into collaborative work that
will enable us to go beyond what any one of us might have generated alone.”
Over time, we came to understand that:
whether because of our actual location or our approach to research and
politics, we often feel marginal. We are ‘bridge’ people: the
university-based members play active roles in providing academic support to
community organizations and social movements; the community-based member plays
an active role in carrying the issues and knowledge/s of community groups into
academe (Church, Fontan, Ng and Shragge, 2000:4).
We learned to appreciate how each of us sees the world as
well as to show how the particular contexts in which we work differ and shape
our understanding of the issues. Commenting on the team’s process,
Shragge noted that it was “challenging and rewarding… Our first task in
building a common project was to understand our differences and commonalities.
This challenge was often more implicit than explicit. Our (initial) successes in
working through the problems came from face-to-face meetings.” We have since
discovered how difficult it is to sustain this kind of dialogue over a long
period of time.
Marilyn Laiken’s research provides another team example.
Its purpose is to locate and study organizations world-wide which are using
organizational learning approaches to embed ongoing learning within the actual
work processes – individual or group levels. Carried out with a group of
graduate students, the research examines models of organizational learning.
Commenting on this Laiken said: “The best part was working with the graduate
students in an ongoing effort to function effectively as a team. We
experienced powerful learning through a conscious process of engaging to work
through challenges of managing style differences and research approaches.
So there was a lot of informal learning among the research team.”
NALL Groups
NALL advances its objectives through the research and
program development activities of its six working groups. They are
described as follows:
- Group 1, the National Survey of Informal Learning Practices,” has
conducted the first national in-depth survey of informal learning practices
which will establish definitive benchmarks on the extent and character of
the deliberate informal learning activities of Canadian adults, as well as
differential patterns by formal further course-based continuing education
participation and social background.
- Group 2, “Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition (PLAR),” is
documenting the current types, extent and use of prior learning recognition
by educational institutions. This group will also analyze the
differential success of alternative approaches in both detecting applicants'
relevant informal knowledge and encouraging sustained and equitable
participation in education and training programs.
- Group 3, “Informal Learning Cultures,” is studying the informal
learning cultures of major disadvantaged social groups and exploring the
means for more effectively linking these forms of knowledge with further and
further course-based continuing education programs.
- Group 4, “Learning and Work Transitions,” is examining processes of
informal work-related learning in the multiple transitions between organized
educational programs and employment throughout the life course, and is
developing curricular materials to enhance the entry/re-entry of people into
employment.
- Group 5, “Informal Learning in Different Workplaces; Corporate,
Cooperative, Union, School-Community,” investigates and compares
approaches to informal learning in different types of workplaces,
organizations, households and community settings, and maps relations with
formal/non-formal education activities in such settings.
- Group 6, “Computer-based Informal Learning,” analyses the informal
learning networks used by participants in computer-based adult learning
programs.
These groups have faced very different kinds of challenges.
For example, Group 2 participants and those in other NALL groups interested in
PLAR come from a wide variety of backgrounds: teaching agencies, labor
organizations, employers, voluntary groups, individual learners and families.
They possess a wide variety of values, principles for action and experience with
PLAR. Most, though not all of them, are represented in the group. “To a
degree, the membership of Group 2, even its missing interests, represents a
microcosm of the agencies and interests involved in the utilization of PLAR
anywhere in the world.”
Members began their NALL work at a time when use, experience,
and writings with respect to PLAR were all growing rapidly. Over the past
few years, new agencies have appeared with an active interest in PLAR; eg. Human
Resources Development Canada; the Canadian Labour Force Development Board; the
Canadian Association for Prior Learning Assessment, the Ontario Prior Learning
Assessment Network and various other provincial regional bodies, public and
private. The results of Group Two projects are of immediate strategic
importance in relation to these new players.
Group Two takes in a range of projects with a common focus.
All are “devoted to exploring the principal current procedure for translating
the outcomes of informal learning to formal recognition, and making use of that
recognition to complete formal programs.” In some cases, the same researchers
are responsible for several inter-connected projects. So, for example,
Alan Thomas and Monica Collins took the lead on four (of eight) projects devoted
to the development of PLAR directly and indirectly in other countries.
Consolidation of existing but dispersed information has been
a major concern for these core projects. They were intended to: establish
and maintain a current portrait of the use of PLAR by potential students and
providing agencies; co-ordinate information on PLAR currently held by various
bodies; establish a systematic PLAR bibliography and to identify; openly explore
the values and principles of PLAR held by various groups. This multi-faceted
focus on a single program made for a cohesiveness that was more difficult to
establish in other groups.
The most obvious contrast to Group Two is Group Five. Its
members are gathered together under the title “informal learning in different
workplaces: corporate, cooperative, union, school-community.” This group is an
‘umbrella’ cluster for a large number of projects, each with its own goals,
objectives and resources. Unlike other groups within the network, we had
no single task, such as the completion of a national survey, and no single focus
such as PLAR. At the first two NALL conferences, we spent much of our
allotted time finding out who was there and listening to each other describe the
projects that we brought to the table. We struggled with several
questions: “Why are we a group?” “What do we have in common?”
“How could our work as a larger group advance our other projects?” One
of our first points of agreement was openly oppositional. We didn’t
“get” the definition of informal learning that was being advanced from
“NALL Central.” It didn’t match what we observed in our various
sites.
Group Five members Kari Dehli and Doreen Fumia are conducting
a study that seeks to understand how elementary teachers participating in School
Advisory Councils learn about contemporary school reform. They are
especially interested in how teachers learn about the kinds of changes that are
claimed to make them and the schools where they teach more accountable to
parents. About her involvement with NALL, Dehli noted: “The initial
discussions with Group Five ‘misfits’ were very helpful and important
because they enabled us to question some of the key assumptions of the NALL
process. Subsequent discussions in meetings and email exchanges have continued
these discussions and this networking has been very useful.”
Group Five members have done more than just disagree. A core
group has been created, met several times independent of other NALL assemblies,
and worked to identify a collective project beyond those for which members are
directly accountable. Speaking to his involvement in that process, Shragge noted
that “the work (the social learning group) did on a discussion paper for a
Group Five meeting was a turning point for us. We took some of the
perspectives we gained from that work into the final version of our first
monograph.” He goes on to point out that “The existence of
quasi-independent research projects within a decentralized structure were the
key elements that supported and at the same time did not support the building of
collaborative research. The initiative to build our team and connect with
Group Five was initiated ‘from below’ and not by ‘NALL Central.’”
As a student researcher, Mary Stratton was the primary
liaison between NALL and the Centre for the Study of Training, Investment and
Economic Restructuring (CSTIER) at Carleton University on a project focused on
women and community economic development. Commenting on her experience in
this role, she noted that “NALL members, especially via Group Five, have
encouraged and valued my participation at the network level. Participation
in NALL provides an opportunity to work with others in drawing academic and
structural attention to important issues (as well as having a) much greater
potential for affecting needed change.”
Network-Wide
In the opening chapter of Restructuring Caring Labour,
Neysmith deliberately names the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada as a player:
because public funding was part of our strategy to ensure that our work had
visibility. The network grant accorded legitimacy and some material
support for bringing us together across disciplinary and geographic
boundaries, and made space for work that is often squeezed out and
marginalized in academia” (2000: 2).
Asked about the significance of NALL, its principal investigators also discussed
the opportunity to break down some of the separations from other scholars that
are characteristic of academic work-life. NALL provided an organized
and structured way for researchers from a variety of sites to connect with each
other, exchange ideas and develop a collective analysis. “Without NALL we
never would have got started,” Bruce Spencer noted, bluntly, while David
Livingstone asserted that a national survey “would have been impossible
without the support of an extensive research network.”
Rona Abromovitch’s project is concerned with informal
learning in the Transitional Year Program at the University of Toronto.
The major goal is to understand and facilitate the valuing and validation of
informally learned knowledge that TYP students bring to the formal university
setting. For these researchers, participation in NALL was “crucial”
and “a key reason for the advancement of our research.” Central to this was
the pooling of expertise and skills among a range of participants: students,
faculty, staff, and community members.
The Burns, Beaudin, Meawasige and Olson project is an
evaluation of the N’Swakamok Native Friendship Centre in Sudbury. It is
a study in the movement to create agencies that will both reflect and be
controlled by First Nations. These researchers noted that working with
NALL had given them “the impetus to systematically do comparative work in a
variety of North Eastern Ontario First Nations educational sites. It has
also forced us to consider how the findings we are observing compared with other
Groups 3 and 5 work on other communities trying to carry out community building
agendas.” In other words, the comparative aspects of a network prompted
questions about what is specific to particular organizational environments and
what is more universal.
In Thunder Bay, researcher Thomas Dunk undertook a project
that examined the relationship between class divisions, the production of
knowledge and its recognition or reception in society. The empirical focus
was the way in which working class individuals learn about nature and the
environment and how this knowledge is either legitimized through its
incorporation into science or is socially invalidated as irrelevant or
unsubstantiated.
3 Of his association with NALL he
reported that email and the electronic discussion list “kept me up to date on
what was going on in other institutions, and provided me with a knowledge of and
sometime access to lectures, articles, books and conferences that I would not
otherwise know about.”
Along with face to face meetings at conferences, these
were/are the crucial mechanisms for facilitating connections among NALL members.
In Dunk’s case, the Network was also a source of references, names and ideas
regarding education and training. The same was true for Peter Sawchuk who, as a
student member, found that participation provided valuable research exposure as
well as professional contacts with leading researchers in his field including
his external doctoral examiner.
NALL has been an important conceptual reference point for its
members in providing a theoretical framework for people to work with (or
against). Materials provided and events organized by the Network created
awareness amongst its members of the practices and debates around informal
learning as well as “an opportunity to reflect upon the interweaving of
non-formal and informal and the possible connections to formal learning.”
It gave people a way to start their research or expand its scope, “to ask some
questions about informal learning that otherwise would not have been asked.”
Participants found it “exciting to be positioned with access to developing
theoretical work.”
At the same time, principal investigators reported a range of
problems with their projects. On the ground they had to contend with
delays in getting survey instruments into the field and finding student
researchers, difficulties scheduling interviews and disruptions in those fragile
schedules as a result of sabbaticals and students moving on. All of this had to
be managed within a larger context of busy, demanding academic and partner
environments. The worst part of the project, noted one pi “was finding
the time to do justice to the research with all the other responsibilities of
academia.” Another noted the fact that “institutional obstacles –
practical and political – made it difficult to gain formal permission to
interact with research subjects in many jurisdictions.” A third referred
to the frustrations of negotiating labor movement politics.
In terms of NALL itself, the basic difficulties had to do
with money and reporting. The main barrier to a successful project for
some pi’s was limited financial resources. The basic level of funding was
perceived to be low. Finding time to adequately investigate and analyze
findings on Graduate Assistant funding was not easy. Network members have
learned that it is just as much work to do a study with a small grant as it is
to do one with a larger amount. They have been frustrated by the labor that was
required not just to mobilize and complete projects but to report on them. For
many, the administrative demands were simply too much.
Although it would have limited the number of projects, larger
amounts of money would have allowed some researchers to follow through on
(implicit) commitments they made to the communities with which they worked. For
example, Shahrazad Mojab and Susan McDonald are conducting a study on the public
legal education needs of immigrant women in domestic violence situations or
women who have experienced violence as a result of war in their country of
origin (e.g. Kurdish women). These researchers fostered an evolving
“methodology of testimony” which means that the women are not recounting
their painful past for the sake of the data, but to understand and participate
in social change. “We have done this process with these women and
created expectation and desire and the energy for turning that testimony into
some kind of action and change,” reported Mojab. However, without more
resources the anticipated action cannot happen – even though the researchers
are “very much committed to those communities and we want to go back and we
want to do something because we think that we owe it to them.”
Community partnerships: Engaging the politics
With a range of projects that attempted to focus on the
margins rather than the power centers in society, NALL organizers made a
commitment to working with what they termed “community partners” in ways
that would be genuinely collaborative. As Network Director David Livingstone
noted in a recent letter, “Community partners have been given sustained
opportunities to participate equally in shaping the (Network’s) research
agenda. This is fully consistent with the originating principles for
establishing the SSHRC Networks in Education and Training.”
Like its academic members, the Network partners are diverse
including forms such as co-ops, unions, corporate and community organizations.
One of their strengths (whether as collaborators or as sites) is that they force
researchers to attend to the needs and priorities of people outside the
university community, to write and represent issues in terms other than those
valued by academic journals and textbooks. A good example is The Skills and
Knowledge Profile, a PLAR project. Written in plain language with
accessible layout, it is the result of two years of NALL (and other) funded
action research organized by Advocates for Community-based Training and
Education for Women (ACTEW) in Toronto. Another example is A Resource Guide
For Women’s Studies Practice: Students Linking Academe and Community (Estable
and Meyer with Ng, 2000) produced and distributed by the Canadian Research
Institute for the Advancement of Women (CRIAW).
Although grouped in a single category, NALL partners actually
represent different histories, traditions and environments. The primary
distinction is between labor unions and community organizations – with labor
in this instance being more dominant. In his introductory remarks to a thick
report on labor education in Canada, Winston Gereluk observes that:
the majority of the aims, objectives and methods of labour education are not
encountered in any body of easily-accessible resource materials; they must be
extracted from such sources as writings and speeches of labour leaders and
union staff, information sheets and newsletters, brochures, occasional
manuscripts, policy papers and proceedings from conferences and conventions of
the labour movement. Many are derived through inference as a primary
feature of labour education is that it is inseparable from and crucial to the
aims of the host union, and the labour movement itself; i.e., it has a dynamic
relationship to the ongoing life and process of the organization which is not
found, for the most part, in the formal education system. (February 2000: 2).
Even so, enough historical work has been done that Spencer
can trace the outline three types of related education. The first is union
education, which he defines as “all education offered by unions for their
members and is particularly focused on preparing activists for leadership roles
in the union.” The second is workers’ education, which “is
associated with the turn- of-the-century provision of non-vocational liberal
adult education.” Spencer spends most of his attention on the third
type: labor education, it being “broader in scope than mainstream union
provision, can encompass all labour studies courses targeted at union members,
and perhaps workers generally, but should be interpreted as excluding labour
studies programs targeted at a general student body” (1998a). Within
labor studies, he distinguishes between courses that focus on tools, issues
(e.g. sexual harrassment or racism), and issues (i.e. the union context and its
perspective).
Community organizations are much less well understood and
documented as learning environments and as producers of certain kinds of
knowledge. Most are environments in which questions of informal learning have
not previously been raised. The following (much abbreviated) list gives you a
sense of the diversity of these sites within the Network. Some of NALL’s most
interesting work will come from organizations such as these.
- The N’Swakamok Native Friendship Centre in Sudbury is an urban based
Native educational authority running projects across a wide range of
programs including an alternative school, social activities, programs of
cultural re-enforcement, programs aimed at quality of Native life, family
and child development, pre-natal program, employment services, courtwork,
drug and alcohol counseling, translation, youth services and HIV/AIDS
education program.
- The 761 Community Development Corporation is a community organization in
downtown Toronto. It was established in 1995 to work in partnership
with people who have experienced long-term poverty to create employment
opportunities through community-based entrepreneurial initiatives.
- The Halifax PLAR Centre is a joint project involving five Halifax
universities, the provincial community college system, and representatives
from community groups, voluntary organizations, labor, the private sector
and government. The PLA Centre offers individuals and groups
individual interviews with a PLA advisory, transferable skills workshops and
portfolio development courses. It also works to encourage education
and training institutions to recognize prior learning achievements for
admission, program placement and advanced standing.
- Growing Jobs for Living Coalition (GJOBS) is an adult education and
participatory research project in the Quinte region of eastern Ontario.
The area is characterized by high unemployment and under-employment, and by
environmental degredation (with links to health problems). GJOBS
provides a socio-political and environmental context within which to
stimulate learning. Its largest project is in Community Shared
Agriculture.
- Gerin-Lajoie’s research examines closely the role of a variety of
Francophone minority community associations and organizations in the
reproduction of the French language and culture. Sites that are of
particular interest to her include, for example, Direction-Jeunesse,
Association canadienne-francaise de l’Ontario, and Scouts du Canada.
- The Big Carrot, a worker co-operative, is a natural foods retailer in the
east end of Toronto with 75 employees. It is the largest single
retailer of natural foods in the country with annual sales in 1997 of $8
million and has been consistently profitable over the past three years
(Quarter and Midha, 2000).
- The Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women is a
national, not-for-profit organization committed to advancing women’s
equality through research. Founded in 1976, CRIAW is a bilingual,
membership based organization which bridges the gap between the community
and academe, and between research and action.
In some cases, community sites are comprised of multiple
forms or organizations. For example, George Dei and Stephanie Cheddie are
examining independent learning strategies and prior learning styles developed
and utilized in the Kensington community of Toronto. This is a geographic
area west of Spadina Avenue and South of College Street. With a diverse
history dating back to the 1780’s, Kensington today, is a “mecca for
cultural and consumer consumption. Diverse groups, varying in ethnicity, class
and age shop at the Kensington market.” The researchers view Kensington
as an excellent site of learning that incorporates diverse spaces such as bars,
restaurants, cafes, clothing store, food stores (general and specialty), fish
markets, meat stores and bakeries. They find it a very friendly community and a
great site in which to work.
In other cases, community participants have no formal
organizational location or affiliations. Kurdish women, for example, are
facing “massive social and economical problems, unknown even to some of us who
have been in contact with the community for a long time. These women carry
the long history of war, violence, displacement, and trauma. Illiteracy in
English and any other languages that they speak is common. Even the
educated ones are trapped in the cycle of low-paying service oriented jobs”
(Mojab, email, October 25, 1999). Part of Mojab and McDonald’s project
is to assist these study participants to become organized around collective
needs and problems. They see the most important task in their study to be
“establishing a network among the women participants in this project.
This requires organizing regular gatherings, planning activities, taking steps
towards implementing some ideas etc.” (email December 14, 1999).
The task takes its toll emotionally. “The most difficult part of the
research,” Mojab wrote, “was the exhaustion and stress we experienced
through the data collection phase.”
Whatever the location, NALL’s principal investigators were
more than pleased to get out of the university and into the field. They
valued the opportunity to engage with partners and explore the various sites, to
learn from the work and to share the learning with others in a regular and
organized way. For example, Celia Haig-Brown partnered with Kaaren Dannenman of
the Treaty Three Trappers’ Association to document and organize a pilot
program which “allows the space needed for traditional Aboriginal knowledge
keepers to develop a pedagogy of the land.” The best part about this
experience was:
planning the trips to the place where the (Aboriginal) course is offered
because it actualized the premise on which the curriculum was based: that the
land is the place where learning begins. (The location features) trails
through the bush, the ice and snow of late winter and the waves and vastness
of the lake in summer. Because this particular space has been
continuously occupied by Aboriginal people since time immemorial… working
there is a constant reminder of the significance of the (re)development of a
traditional pedagogy and the restoration of traditional knowledge to its place
with the people of the land (Year Four report).
Researchers working with union partners mentioned the
satisfaction of new or renewed contact with rank and file workers. A good
example is the project that Syd Schnaid directed with the Telecommunications
Workers Union and communications unions across Canada. It involved action
research into the impact of introducing a major enterprise resource planning
system in the Canadian telecommunications industry. In particular, it
examined how union members learn and adjust to the new systems and work
processes through both formal and informal means. Researchers were particularly
pleased when it became obvious that telecommunications workers themselves
possessed the tacit skills necessary to make these new systems function – and
that managers were actually relying on this expertise.
By participating in the NALL project the workers themselves have gained
insight and self-confidence. They have overcome their sense of fear and
isolation that they experienced individually in the face of unprecedented
technological change. They gained self-confidence in their ability to
communicate their individual insights into the system; by sharing these
insights they have come to the conclusion that their tacit knowledge is
essential to the operation of the system (Year Four report).
NALL researchers placed high value on direct, practical
outcomes such as this emerging from their research. With the Canadian Labour
Congress, Jeff Taylor is conducting a study into how formalized learning relates
to more informal dimensions of learning both on and off-line in connection with
union-based tele-learning. He reported that the best part of his project
was “working with the community partner to devise a program of activity and
research that meets the partner’s needs.” Among those who felt good
that their work was useful outside the university walls were research
consultants working for CRIAW. They conducted a study that focused on student
practica as a site for informal learning. The researchers were
specifically interested in practica in women’s organizations as a form of
“training” for students enrolled in women’s studies programs. The
most positive aspect of this research experience was that it produced
information that is useful to all the actors involved in women's studies
practica.
Defending the Connection
In Writing the Social, sociologist and NALL member
Dorothy Smith argues that “No intellectual enterprise can subsist in a
social vacuum.”
Every such enterprise participates in something we could call, perhaps
euphemistically, a community. Because we are working with texts, reading
and writing texts, the existence and significance of that community are often
invisible to use. Yet it is always implicit in what we write. How,
then, are we to defend and intensify connections beyond the academy against
the multiple ways it inhibits them? (1999: 27)
Her words point to a primary dilemma of NALL’s existence: defending and
intensifying these “inhibited” community connections.
Many among us are knowledgeable about what it takes to cross
university/community boundaries. Our thoughts resonate with those of the late
George Burns who reported on a research and development project that involves
five Aboriginal jurisdictions.
The research takes place in the Aboriginal settings themselves. And all people
associated with the research project, including the researcher, are Aboriginal
people. And they’re from the local communities. And some of
these communities are over 200 miles apart. Robert (Beaudin) mentioned
that I am the academic but it is the other way around. It’s my role to
stay out of the role of the Aboriginal people, and allow them to do what they
ought to be allowed to do and that is to find their own space to do their own
research in the manner in which they see fit (Group Three transcript).
This process can be unsettling. Budd Hall and Doreen
Clover did a study with the Steering Committee members of Growing Jobs for
Living Coalition (GJOBS) in Quinte. The primary purpose was to find out what
informal learning activities members were involved in, how and what this process
of social learning contributed to the coalition and how they understood the
relation between their informal learning and the non-formal learning
opportunities provided by GJOBS. At the beginning of the study, the
researchers gave Steering Committee members a draft of the interview questions
for comment. Discussing these questions turned out to be the worst part of
the research. One member was extremely opposed to using interviews and remained
highly critical throughout. Hall and Clover acknowledged that, no matter
how sensitive or well-intentioned the researcher, interviews create objects of
study (interviewees) – something some GJOBS participants vocally disliked.
Even when this process goes well, it can lead to unexpected
outcomes. “In forming authentic and sustained partnerships with
non-academic groups,” Ng wrote, “especially those who work with marginal
sectors of the population, the academic researcher has to be willing to
accommodate the needs of the partner organization.”
This may involve altering the original research plan. In the present
study, I was asked by UNITE and the HWA to help them update the conditions of
homeworkers by incorporating additional questions into my interviews with
homeworkers. Surprisingly, it is this part of the research that
has received the most publicity and yielded policy and programmatic results
(Year Four report).
Regardless of how it goes the university-community
relationship is always complex. Mojab’s attempt to use a participatory,
feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial approach illustrates a more general
struggle. “I think that the richness of our data is very much related to our
connection with the community that we work with in terms of the language, in
terms of understanding the subtleties of the culture, historical, social
background of each community that we worked with,” she reported. However, the
project was delayed going through ethical review because of the university’s
concerns over legal liability. Mojab felt that, in the way concerns were
raised, the university pathologized and legalized potential participants who
were illegal immigrants or didn’t have a status. In order for the study
to go ahead, some women were excluded from participating.
NALL’s relationship with SSHRC has also been problematic.
Although there is a clear “NALL Central,” the Network is relatively
de-centered. Not only have individual researchers been given a lot of
autonomy to run projects as they see fit but partner organizations, too, have a
lot of influence in the direction and shape of research projects. So much so
that SSHRC reviewers were uncomfortable about who was in control. In their
mid-term report, the review committee noted:
the absence of an overall conceptual framework that would facilitate a better
integration of the different and numerous research projects. While
admitting that co-determination is a very democratic way to proceed, we
wondered if this really was the best approach for rigorous systematic
research. Our main concern is that this participatory style could lead
to fragmentation and few lasting results (SSHRC mid-term review).
The review committee strongly encouraged the Network Director
to set up a small group of experts in the area to pull together all of the
projects, to identify the missing components and to take responsibility for the
development of a conceptual framework. However, Steering Committee members felt
that taking such a step would “undermine the participatory action research
principles and methods that are basic to the operation of NALL.”
Curiously, the evaluation committee first celebrates the great potential of
this model for those working in any research network, then suggests that the
consensual management style and strong participation of community partners
that are inherent in this approach could negatively affect the quality of the
scholarly projects…. It would be most unfortunate if the recognized progress
that we have made toward genuine researcher-partner collaboration were
undermined by the arbitrary reassertion of a more conventional
university-centric model of scholarship (Letter to Yves Mougenot, SSHRC,
January 31, 2000).
The knowledge that “there is no necessary contradiction between genuine
community participation and high quality scholarship” is a primary point of
coalescence within the Network. Ironically, it is a point that is
unrecognized and/or delegitimated by our funder.
4
Divergent Methods
One of the early problems for Network organizers was how
to orient a highly diverse membership to informal learning. The
“aides” they created included an extensive bibliography of what were deemed
important readings in the area. Six core articles were circulated as was a
set of lecture notes by David Livingstone (1998). This strategy required
members to do substantial reading. Novices had to layer the new material
on top of existing demands within other fields of study or stemming from other
projects.5 The limitation here was time. As
Neysmith points out about the Caring Network, “One of the themes that surfaced
repeatedly in our discussions was that precious resource called time: time to
think; time to communicate, laugh, and love; time to take action. From day
one it was a scarce asset” (2000: 24).
Because of time pressures, a good number of us actually
picked up on dominant debates within the Network in fleeting rather than focused
ways. For example, in addition to sitting in meetings, my understanding of
informal learning began from reading (and keeping hard copy of) the provisional
definition that was circulated over the discussion list. It read:
Informal learning is any activity involving the pursuit of understanding,
knowledge or skill that occurs outside the curricula of institutions providing
educational programs, courses or workshops. Informal leaning may occur
in any context outside institutional curricula. It is distinguished from
everyday perceptions and general socialization by people’s own conscious
identification of the activity as significant learning. The basic terms
of informal learning (objectives, content, means and processes of acquisition,
duration, evaluation of outcomes, applications) are determined by the
individuals and groups who choose to engage in it, without the presence of an
institutionally-authorized instructor (Ed-Train, November 1998).
Hard on its heels came a note from member, Allen Tough. It read:
We could sharpen this definition of informal learning by saying that the
person’s PRIMARY motivation (at least 50% of the total motivation) for these
activities is to gain and retain certain definite knowledge or skills or
understanding. Otherwise, we end up including episodes in which
learning was only 10% of the person’s overall motivation (email, November
21, 1998).
[“Extraordinary,” I thought. “50%.”] This casual exchange later
became food for thought for the Shragge research team as well as for Group Five.
In the same way, I picked up on debates over the use of the
terms “further” or “continuing” education to refer to “all other
organized educational activities, including further courses, training programs,
and workshops offered by any social institution” (Livingstone, 1999:50).
There were, I discovered, people who felt that the term “non-formal” was
more accurate.
Now I know the term ‘non-formal education’ is not favoured within NALL and
I understand why. What is being referred to is what we might call
‘traditional adult education’ but adult education has come to mean all
education of adults and has lost any distinctiveness it may have had.
David’s choice of ‘further education’ also has problems as it has been
used in the past to refer to post-school formal education not part of the
higher educational system. For the most part NALL is distinguishing informal
learning from the learning that takes place in more formal settings therefore
naming that which is neither formal nor informal is not that important.
If we have to name it I would urge sticking with Canadian adult education
conventions – non- formal education or site of learning – until we come up
with something better. (Bruce Spencer, email, January 2000)
Along with the prepared materials, and perhaps more than anyone recognized,
these kinds of exchanges effectively established a conceptual framework for the
Network.
There were, however, differential responses to this
framework. Very broadly speaking, some researchers already understood or
quickly learned the formal/non-formal/informal distinctions. With a clear
sense of what informal learning was, they saw their task as measuring it (in
order to assess increases or decreases in comparison with other surveys, for
example) or describing it within new sites and organizational environments. In
other words, for some members, informal learning waited “out there” to be
discovered. As Tough pointed out, you simply had to know what you were looking
for.
What I found is that doctoral students, because they had the conceptual
framework in their head, were better at getting at ‘learning projects’
than the surveys where we paid a research organization to do it. The
(latter) were using people who didn’t understand the phenomenon well enough
to really probe and get people to recall it. (1999 remarks to NALL conference)
Other researchers understood their task as starting with a
site and building towards a concept. Far from “discovering” informal
learning, they saw themselves creating knowledge of it as part of their academic
practice. They did so using various theoretical frameworks and, sometimes,
reading against the grain of the recommended literature. As Shragge observed in
his year four report, “A lot of the researchers heading up projects were
unfamiliar with the concept of informal learning. We were recruited to
join the network for other reasons including previous research interests and
experiences. We had to figure out how we could define our perspective on
informal learning, and how to then link that to our debates and discussions in
the wider Network.”
The tension between these two approaches is obvious.
Some (but not all) of it has to do with different methods.
6
Take, for example, Ari Antikainen’s description of his work. “We are
investigating inter-subjective social reality by means of qualitative logic,”
he states, “not statistical representativeness. We are using a
biographical method, namely a life-history approach composed of a narrative
biographical interview and a thematic interview … We have made an attempt to
analyse people’s everyday life as it appears in narrative biographical
interviews and theme interviews concerning learning biography. From this
point of view, we can argue that people learn by living” (1996:13).
Different sites, standpoints and methods have taken research
projects under the same organizational umbrella in different directions to the
point where they may not be comparable. As Dehli points out:
I enjoy the discussions about what variously/differently comes to ‘ count’
as informal learning in the different parts of the network. It seems to
me that the very requirement to count, which a survey demands, does produce
some activities as informal learning, while excluding others. Small,
site specific projects, on the other hand, lend themselves to noticing and
note-ing processes, negotiations, ambiguities and practices in which
individuals and groups engage. So, (in the Network) it’s not only a
top-down versus bottom up difference, it’s also what different social
science approaches bring into view (email, 2/6/2000).
What are the implications for the Network? One view is that our task is to
integrate the deductive and inductive work that we have done as a contribution
to the existing case studies and North American surveys that currently
constitute a body of work on informal learning. But it remains to be seen
whether integration of our various findings is actually possible. As Dehli
argues, there “Might be some interesting political differences, too … which,
following the Sennett book you reference, ‘we’ might work to bring into our
public discussions” (email, 2/6/2000).
7
Blurred Boundaries
I have described NALL as an affiliation of many players,
theoretical frameworks, methods, and sites of enquiry. These elements make its
work potentially very rich. At the same time, turning new actors and
organizational environments loose on informal learning puts serious pressure on
existing definitions in a field that is already troubled by “the boundary
problem.” Where and how firmly to draw some lines around informal learning is
clearly an ongoing problem for the Network. Where does formal learning end and
informal learning begin? Are the boundaries fixed? Should they be?
Must we be able to fix the meaning of informal learning? In this section,
I want to look at various ways that NALL members have taken up this problem.
Flipping informal learning on its head: First Nations
A major challenge to established boundaries of informal
learning comes from NALL projects that focus on Aboriginal/First Nations
communities. They actually reverse the conceptual formulation. In other
words, what the literature calls “formal,” First Nations communities call
“informal” whereas what the literature calls “informal,” the Aboriginal
“pedagogy of the land” deems formal education. Burns, Beaudin and
Olson explored this through a project about First Nation’s experience,
relations and practice at the Wahnapitae First Nations Resource Centre. Among a
range of models, Wahnipitae represents direct First Nation location learning;
Elders are the primary teachers. Although Elders have not been afforded
status, power and prestige as a result of graduating from the formal education
system, they are formal teachers in Aboriginal communities. “They teach that
which is central to culture, heritage, self-esteem, self-concept, what it is to
be Aboriginal, Aboriginal knowledge structures and pedagogical processes,
problem solving processes, Aboriginal world views, self-determination,
self-government and so on” (Burns, forthcoming). The formal is
therefore, in many ways, highly dependent on informal knowledge. “In
First Nations education, formal and informal learning are continuously and
sometimes contentiously conflated.”
Group Three members discussed this extensively at their
spring 2000 meeting. On the one hand, as Haig-Brown pointed out “The
notion of informal learning resonates easily with the traditional pedagogy of
many Aboriginal nations. Traditional Aboriginal education was a part of
every day life and was life-long. Much of it is not written; some of it is
sacred and cannot be written. The written form can never replace the
intensity and illumination available from doing the work in its context.”
On the other, she noted that with the assistance of her First Nations’
colleague, Kaaren Dannenman, she had come to see that “what goes on in
conventional schooling is what would be classified as informal knowledge in
relation to indigenous cultures and indigenous knowledges. Because… it
removes people from that context that is land-based. And it definitely has
a colonizing dimension to it. ‘Indigenous’ in this case I’m thinking
of directly as land-based knowledge that comes through the soles of your feet
and into your mind.”
Dannenman elaborated, stating that “One of the big things
that has been important in our community is that we want our kids to have a
choice and right now they don’t. The only education they have now is the
so-called formal or conventional education. They don't have the choice of
learning our formal education (namely) being on the land. And it is really
important for our community to re-develop that connection to the land and in
that way re-establish and revitalize our culture.” Such a major
inversion presents interesting opportunities. As Haig-Brown concluded:
“There are so many exciting epistemological possibilities in the work that
Kaaren is doing. It offers a tiny glimmer of hope that universities might
actually do serious theorizing again, theorizing that has a relevance to place,
to the land and the Aboriginal people.”
Doing and Learning: No Seams
Livingstone and Tough have both argued the need to
distinguish informal learning from organized education, on the one hand, and
from basic socialization or tacit informal learning on the other. “Explicit
informal learning” is that which can be consciously identified as significant
by the learner and retrospectively recognized both in the form of knowledge and
the process of acquisition. It is a discrete rather than diffuse learning
experience. By contrast, with socialization, “learning and acting constitute a
seamless web in which it is impossible to distinguish informal learning in any
discrete way” (Livingstone, 1999:51).
Some NALL projects don’t make these distinctions. For
members of Group Five, the boundaries of informal learning have always been
blurred or “seamless.” We have been searching for some means, conceptually,
to acknowledge the fluidity of its occurrence. Dehli and Fumia’s work is a
good example. It analyzes very localized practices and relations of informal
learning that are embedded in elementary school teachers’ work. For
these researchers, informal learning is both voluntary and involuntary.
Their study suggests that it is difficult to maintain boundaries between formal
and informal, voluntary and involuntary learning. It suggests that
boundaries between formal and informal learning “are vague and permeable and
in some ways imposed by researchers on participants’ activities.” With
coming changes in regulation and certification of teachers’ competence, the
boundaries between formal and informal learning are likely to become more
contentious. So, this question may become more acute in the future.
With a number of colleagues, I have been involved with a
preliminary survey of users of the voicemail system operated by the 761
Community Development Corporation. The respondents were people who have
experienced long-term poverty and/or homelessness. In approaching them, we
anticipated that their lives would not fit neatly into categories such as home,
work and community. We changed the NALL survey questionnaire to reflect
this understanding.8 Predictably, responses to a
modified section on daily life were not as orderly and as easily categorized
they were in the national survey. Despite ongoing reinforcement of the
different categories of questions, respondents generally continued to provide
responses that overlapped in a number of categories. It was very difficult
for them to separate learning from doing; they perceived the distinction as
artificial.9 People were clearly engaged in
informal learning that was having an impact on their lives but they understood
it in an experiential, more seamless way than the dominant definition of
informal learning.
Another example of the blurring between learning and doing
comes from a study done by Martin, Garcia and Sawchuk. Their intent was to
document informal learning and the linkages between non-formal and informal
learning processes concerning the issue of workplace reorganization amongst
unionized workplaces in Ontario. It focused on a particular union local
that was involved in an extensive series of workplace reorganization plans
during a period of major sectoral restructuring. Analysis revealed the
importance of the inter-play between workers’ informal learning in the union
local, their research activities and their non-formal education efforts in
response to management workplace reorganization schemes.
More developed themes include the notion of local traditions
of inquiry, namely, a stable pattern of knowledge production development amongst
workers in local unions. Another theme is the notion of learning in real
time, meaning learning that was not separated from practical, ongoing action but
inseparable from it. In other words, the project highlights “how local
groups of workers become engaged in ongoing production and formalization of
knowledge, and how informal learning, union courses and union-based research
practices all occur as elements of each other. Learning and research
become part of action itself rather than abstract classroom experiences.”
In New Zealand, researcher Jody Hansen conducted three
interviews that addressed the question: how does a woman learn to be a
dominatrix? They were done with Mistress Margaret, an Auckland-based
dominatrix. She was 50 at the time of the interviews and had been in the
industry three years. Mistress Margaret was new to the sex industry and
didn’t know what she would need to know to be a dominatrix. “So I had
a whole lot ahead of me which I didn’t anticipate. I had to start somewhere
and I didn’t have a teacher. … A couple of people gave me pathetic
books but they weren’t much help. I didn’t approach learning to be a
dominatrix in a systematic way because I didn’t know what I was expected to
know at the end of the process” (unpublished transcript).
Thus, Mistress Margaret did a lot of her learning by doing.
She speculates that:
If I had found another mistress to work with, someone who had the same, for
want of a better word for it, ethical standards, it would probably have
speeded up the process. I learn best by practice and most of the sessions are
going to be one on one, so sooner or later I’d have had to get out here and
cope on my own. Having a learning triangle of a mistress, a client and
an apprentice … probably has some limitations as it changes the
interpersonal dynamics of the session…. I think it is best done in small
steps reinforced with a lot of practical application.
Mistress Margaret invented her own process – advertising in the paper and
interviewing men about their fantasies and sexual needs. She taught herself a
lot, including:
thinking on my feet, getting cues from people’s body language and then
acting on them constructively, adjusting the excitement of a session so that
it goes up and down, and always maintaining a sense of mystery. I work from
home. Three or four one-hour sessions constitutes a good day’s work.
It’s a long day in that I have to keep the phone on a long time for booking
appointments, talking to potential new customers, but I’ve learned now to
integrate these activities into my life.
Still, this work can’t be done by formula. “Different sessions have
different challenges so it’s hard to pin point an exact formula…. It’s
important to gain as much trust as possible early on…. Every sort of session
has a different intrigue.”
Incidentally, learning by experience
According to Livingstone, a key dimension of current
studies on informal learning is the relationship between incidental (ad hoc,
spontaneous) and planned (deliberate, intentional) learning. The NALL survey,
his major project, retains from Tough an emphasis on discrete learning projects
or activities deliberately organized by the learner outside of educational
institutions. However, in a recent paper, he also argues that informal learning
doesn’t have to be planned. “It can be situationally stimulated with
no prior intent…. ad hoc, incidental and only consciously recognized after the
fact” (1999:54).
Livingstone and Sawchuk illustrate this point in their joint
paper by telling the story of a petrochemical worker and his partner who get
involved in developing a park in their neighborhood.
These people did not get together with their neighbours with a particular
learning outcome in mind. Nor did any of the co-participants have an
idea of the knowledge/skill forms they would come to build. Rather,
knowledge/skill forms arose out of a collective non-pedagogical mode of
interaction …” (unpublished, pg.16).
This example is quite similar to one given by Spencer who cites the activities
undertaken by a local environmental action group: organizing meetings, preparing
submissions or writing newsletters (1998b: 23). The definition called up
by both is of informal learning as a process “pervading everyday life
experience, the sources of what both workers and working class ethnographers
have called “street smarts” (Livingstone and Sawchuk, unpublished, pg.14).
To my mind, these remarks point to the “iceberg” of experiential learning
that haunts Network discussions of informal learning in general.
10
Many Network researchers are struggling with the relationship between learning
and experience, specifically with learning that arises not intentionally but
simply as a feature of every day life.
Experiential knowledge is a significant feature of several
Group Five projects. As sites of learning, the psychiatric-survivor run
alternative businesses that I studied value both employee experience with the
psychiatric treatment system (a criterion for hiring) and their experience as
workers (and potential trainers) in both the business and the larger social
movement. The CRIAW project on practica placements for women’s studies
students identified the experiential component of learning in the field as very
important for female students. Here, they gain an “experiential feel for
feminism,” as they forge links between theory and practice that don’t get
made in formal settings.
Stratton found that CED practitioner knowledge specific to
women is very experiential, especially the angle of learning from (street-wise)
program participants. The kind of learning CED practitioners value and
identified as useful to their program participants was often at odds with
traditionally accepted ideas about what should count as knowledge. The dominant
paradigm tends to totally discount and dismiss learning and experience which is
not formally credentialized. Thus, she identified a clash between CED
knowledge that is recognized academically and that derived from practice in
everyday life. Put another way when formal education and training opportunities
do occur, there is frequently a clash between the academic and CED approaches to
learning and what is counted as valid/valuable knowledge.
Jack Quarter and Harish Midha’s study (1999) explored the
informal learning processes by members of a worker co-operative. Here,
employees govern the organization but they don’t necessarily have formal
training for the governing role. They must acquire those skills along with
skills related to job performance. These researchers found that the
predominant mode of job-related learning among co-op members was through
informal means. The most important were learning from experience (learning
by doing), one on one or group discussions and questions to internal and
external experts including other members.
Mojab and McDonald’s study highlights the importance of
participatory and experiential learning for Spanish and Kurdish speaking
immigrant women as they grapple with the complexities of the Canadian legal
system. The researchers found that women have different learning needs at
different points in their experience; violence and trauma had an impact on their
learning capabilities differently at various stages of their life.
Learning in a formal setting is impossible at times of crisis such as separation
from spouse. In the face of overwhelming need, this study shows that word
of mouth is the most effective means of informal learning for women in these
kinds of life situations.
Collective learning
Another key area of debate is collective informal
learning. This refers to the importance of recognizing that social engagement is
integral to knowledge acquisition. Criticisms of past studies into informal
learning honed in on their preference for individually-conducted learning among
members of dominant social groups. “Collectively conducted learning processes
are the least well documented part of adults’ informal learning”
(Livingstone, 1999:53). They are, however, a strength of the Network. To
some degree all of the case studies focus on collective learning.
In working across three employment-related community sites,
the Shragge team’s primary interest was:
not in job market preparation but in the social processes that go on around
that preparation and the impact they have on participants. The informal
processes that we are examining in our project are not explicitly identified
in the organizations. They are part of the day to day interaction
between participants and staff, and are shaped by the wider culture of the
organization. These we describe as informal ‘social learning’ and
are linked to such issues as personal and political identification,
citizenship, participation and the building of networks of solidarity (Year
Four report).
The group identified three features of social learning.
They include:
- Solidarity learning: takes place not according to an explicit curriculum
but spontaneously and unpredictably through social interactions that foster
people’s participation;
- Reshaping the definition of self: learning in which participants build new
identities; they rethink who they are in relation to society;
- Organizational learning: the ways in which community organizations
come to understand how to operate and position themselves within an
entrepreneurial culture while continuing to carry forward their historical
concerns for social and economic justice
In all cases, the learning that occurs is embedded in social interaction whether
between participants, between different levels of a community organization,
between organizations or between organizational representatives and their
funders. Social learning is often unanticipated, incidental and dynamic in
nature.
Responding to this formulation by email, Spencer indicated
that he liked “the way that you are breaking up the informal learning within
community groups – as Lindeman would say ‘true adult education is social
education’ – and labeling it ‘social learning.’”
I would suggest that a lot of what goes on in non-formal education organized
by social groups is not dissimilar to informal learning in those social
groups. This becomes particularly clear when you look at labour
education. It has the three elements you describe. I would argue
therefore that what you are describing for social learning takes place
informally in community, labour and other solidarity groups and also in
non-formal educational events organized by them. The essential feature
of this type of informal and non-formal education is that it is
transformational (individually and socially) whereas most formal education is
accommodative/adaptive (email, 24/01/2000).
Within Group Five, of which the Shragge team is a part, a
consensus is emerging around informal learning as a social process,
characterized by relationship. We observed that people are thrown together
(or deliberately choose to meet), groups form and learning results from the
social interaction. We noted that the term ‘communities of practice’
drawn from the work of Lave (e.g. 1995) and her colleagues has become key to
Laiken and her student team’s investigation of learning organizations.
Also, in the CSTEIR study of women and community economic development (CED),
Stratton discovered that learning from others, especially low-income program
participants, is a significant part of practitioner learning. This happens
individually but also through networks of people active in the field.
A key concept to emerge from Hall and Clover’s study is the
idea of informal learning as an integral part of social learning (making a
better contribution to GBOBS) and not just something geared toward personal
growth. Participants noted time and again that, although informal learning was
extremely important, it was the social learning structures and spaces of the
non-formal education activities organized by GJOBS that contributed the most to
community citizenship. The non-formal learning processes validated the
informal. In the focus group process, participants came to understand both
non-formal and informal as part of social learning.
For First Nations communities, studies of informal learning
come out of a context in which they are seeking self-governance. As Burns
pointed out:
What I’m saying is that the Aboriginal people are both distinct and unique,
based on other inherent rights that they have, treaty rights and
constitutional rights. And within those rights they have the right to
self-government. That is, every First Nations has a right to formulate
and operate its own government. No other Group in Canadian society has
that right. There is no mandate for an ethnic group, for example, to go out
and develop its own government, where as the Aboriginal people are distinct
and unique in the sense that they have that right among other rights (Group
Three transcript).
For Mojab and McDonald, the most exciting part of the
research was “noting the growing interest and group formation among women.
The women involved … are calling themselves ‘The Right to Know’ group,
indicating a growing sense of collective purpose. Such purpose does not
occur easily… Evidence of group cohesion was a turning point in the research
experience.” Further:
What came out very strikingly was the importance of collective learning,
again, not during crisis periods but the importance of learning together, and
from their own experiences, with input from people like professionals, not
necessarily lawyers, but people who would have the knowledge they were
seeking. But there is also the importance of learning from one another.
The women learned through word of mouth. And it was in the community
that they were learning: in the park, in the laundromat, as they waited at the
school to pick up their kids. And what was a little disturbing was that
much of this legal information was incomplete in inaccurate, and had profound
implications if they then went through the legal system (Group Three
transcript).
The purpose of Taylor’s project is to investigate the
informal learning practices surrounding the trial use of new tele-learning
technologies as part of the CLC’s labour education and training activities.
An important question is how they do or don’t relate to the educational
principles and cultural values espoused by trade unions, namely mutuality,
collective action and solidarity. The researchers are concerned that the
core union values are only partially reflected in the types of isolating
practice that tele-learning may tend to encourage. Preliminary findings
suggest that there are important dimensions of the tele-learning that are rooted
in the social and material organization of people’s lives off line in terms of
their time, space and energy to participate. Webs of contacts both online
and offline may be important as well.
The main purpose of the Working Class Learning Project is to
further document the actual learning practices of working class people starting
from the household. Preliminary results confirm the general findings of
the NALL National survey that working class people engage at least as
extensively in informal learning as those in more affluent class positions.
New information generated is in the area of documenting collective learning
practices that had previously been ignored. Preliminary interviews suggest
that working class households construct a wide variety of strategies for coping
with schooling, ranging from active cooperation by both parents and children to
active resistance to overt discrimination by some older adolescents.
Although how they might relate to each other isn’t yet
clear, NALL has a cluster of projects addressing the question of collective
learning that involves resistance and political action.
- The objective of Schugarensky and Myers’ study is to investigate the
informal learning of adult citizens who are involved in democratic
processes. It involves a case study of Toronto’s Healthy City
Project and its claim that a key to achieving a healthy city is the
political skills up of its citizens. The project asks how members of
marginalized communities learn how the city works and obtain a voice in
terms of policy. The study would like to find out, through
participants’ self-examination, where and how they acquired their
political learnings and the complementary/contradictory role of formal and
informal learning in this regard.
- Shragge notes that there has been a shift in the orientation of
community organizations from conflict and rights to consensus and
partnership position. For the social learning team, the question is how do
community organizations work against becoming part of the regulatory
apparatus of the state? We observe that there are tensions between the
public policies that result in the funding of the programs and the
definition of practices within the organizations. The ability of the
groups to be independent of these pressures is linked to their visions,
traditions and social/political power. The construction of citizenship
in many cases is related to the degree of activity of the members in
defending their organizations and constructing counter-definitions of their
personal situations and collective solutions to the problems that they face.
- Hall and Clover’s study identified the fact that there was no
support for political group learning as a key barrier to informal learning
at GJOBS. There is a major deficiency in support for social group
learning activities in people’s own communities and the important role
that they play in social change.
- Dei and Cheddie view their Kensington community site/s as a space of
social and political resistance. Many individuals within the
Kensington community remain politically active and aware; they are
mobilizing people to take control of their own political and economic
futures. This project hopes to learn how agency is accomplished in
this community of resistance.
- Nina’s Basia’s research investigates provincial unions as a
vehicle that teachers can use to come into a broader understanding of the
educational system, education policy and reform. How do they use
unions for political purposes? As governments diminish the role of
school boards, how and where to unions take over?
Strategies: Debates over “Recognition”
A primary tension among NALL researchers is between
members who view informal learning as a powerful strategy for validating and
recognizing untapped, unrecognized or de-legitimated knowledge, and members
who view it as a way of regulating and appropriating this knowledge. The
advantages of “recognition” have been clearly articulated:
The collective recognition of this informal learning and its occurrence
across the life course can lead to people more fully valuing both their
own learning capacities and those of other social groups. By
recognizing the amount of informal learning they are doing, ordinary
people can begin to identify connections among the learning activities in
which they are involved with their workmates, families and community
members. On the other hand, they can be more articulate with trade
union leadership, with employers, and with government policymakers about
what kinds of learning programs should be developed and should be offered
to link to the competencies and interests that are already there, rather
than just accepting more unilaterally established training provisions.
From the vantage points of governments, trade unions and employers,
informal learning research can enable them to become more responsive to
the interests and receptivities of the workforce for different forms of
educational programs. In short, with such data, learning needs can
be more fully and effectively problematized and strategized in terms of
needs for whom, for what and from what standpoint (Livingstone, Group
Three transcript).
To date, PLAR is the most specific and well-developed
strategy for linking informal learning with formal educational programs and
requirements. However, a major question for PLAR researchers is whether its
practices are transferable to the kinds of organizations and populations
that are a focus for other NALL researchers. I am thinking here of
preliminary data from Corson and Goldberg’s study on immigrant and
Aboriginal first languages as prior learning qualifications. It
indicated that the relationship between formal and informal learning may be
dependent on context (e.g. workplaces versus academic settings).
Several NALL projects are looking for the practical
equivalent of PLAR. Some of the participants of Hall and Clover’s study of
GJOBS were unclear why informal and non-formal learning were treated as
disconnected. A crucial point that emerged as a result was that in
terms of working towards socio-environmental change, informal learning by
GJOBS members had to be augmented by socially oriented non-formal,
collective learning processes if it was to be most effective in terms of
building citizenship and creating change.
In Schnaid’s study, workers are being rendered
redundant and de-skilled by the combined effects of major technological
change and an attendant corporate merger. Only through a combination
of personal informal learning activities and more formal structured learning
will it be possible to ameliorate these negative effects. The major
finding was that formal learning has been totally inadequate to the task of
implementing the radically new system. Workers informal learning has
overcome shortcomings of the formal training that has been supplied with the
system. The study is offering guidance in how to structure both the formal
and informal education that must accompany technological change. It is
identifying ways in which formal learning structures and informal learning
experiences can be coupled so that they are mutually reinforcing under the
control of the learners to the greatest extent possible.
Laiken and her student research team found that informal
learning in the workplace is best mobilized through peer consultation, team
reflection, informal “communities of practice” on the job action
learning and personal self-directed learning on line and in other
environments. These are key components of organizational learning.
On-site informal learning has a great deal more impact on actually changing
behavior at work than does either the formal learning of a degree program or
the non-formal learning of classroom training sessions when these are
engaged in isolation from each other. However, the impact seems to be
greatest when the three are combined.
In Stratton’s study of women and CED, participants
identified informal learning as more often useful than formal learning to
them in their work. The relationship between formal and informal
learning emerges as highly complex, sometimes complementary, often uneasy.
A strong but positive theme that emerged in this study concerned the
importance of the process of integrating various kinds of knowledge (formal
and informal).
But not everyone thinks that making these kinds of
connections is a good idea. As they work in conceptual terrain “where
learning, politics and identity intersect,” Dehli and Fumia are asking
questions about “the effects of the new regimes of teaching on teachers’
sense of self and learning (informally and otherwise) of teaching
differently and making that work visible and accountable to others.” While
teachers’ identities are at stake in these negotiations, so are their
bodies. The teachers Fumia interviewed identified physical reactions (health
problems) arising in response to dysjunctures between their sense of
teaching and the actual demands of the job; their expectations for their
work and what they are actually able to implement. Many feel
continually watched by parents and members of the community. “Do the
teachers learn ‘stress’ through reform?” asked Fumia in an email note.
“Do they ‘learn’ how to work through stress and come out the other
side of it? What does this kind of ‘learning’ benefit/product? The
(re)regulated, redefined teacher? Is the ‘learning’ about
negotiating the boundaries of mandates and understanding how to interpret
them, resist them? Can this kind of questioning be taken up as
‘informal’ learning?”
To summarize, these researchers argue that:
It is not so much a matter of recognizing informal learning so as to
enable individuals to gain access to formal education, but rather a
question of negotiating the terms in which differently situated
teachers’ learning and knowledge will be recognized. In a small
and preliminary way, this study questions the implication that a policy
objective of connecting informal learning to organized education has
already been determined and that the work of research is to figure out how
this may be accomplished. It questions the incitement for workers to
engage in continual learning, the calls to make learning visible and
countable, the means of identifying, categorizing and evaluating, and the
ways in which individuals and communities are asked to become involved in
advising and running public institutions (Year Four report).
Members of Group Five support this position. At our
October 1999 meeting, more clearly than in previous discussions, we
identified a reactionary edge to informal learning. We talked about
informal learning as a strategy of governance that depends upon (requires)
individuals taking responsibility for re/making themselves and regulating
their own conduct. It can be viewed as power (what Foucault talked
about as ‘power within’), as capital. Our discussion of this point
concentrated around a cluster of words: accountability, self-regulation,
responsibility, individualization, entrepreneurialism, exclusion and
governance. As that meeting, we began to identify regimes of accountability
across different sites.
At its spring 2000 meeting, Group Three had an active and
wide-ranging discussion about similar issues affecting most of its projects.
One of the first questions raised pertained to the role of the state with
respect to the learning needs of various communities. Speaking to her
project, Mojab observed that:
Through our research we are becoming very celebratory of the resiliency of
(Kurdish) women and their strong instinct for survivor. It is very
informal; it is very empowerment; it is outside of the institutional way
of learning. And so we contribute that to the process of informal learning
within the definition and the debate that is provided. But if we say
that this is the way that women learn, that they do it without any
adherence to the resources of the state, well, what is going to be the
role of the state in answering for their needs, their learning needs?
And how much of it is going to be the responsibility of a community that
is totally without resources? There is the danger of isolating it further
without falling back into any kind of the state support and the state
responsibility (Group Three transcript).
Through their administrative apparatus, governments have
the power to provide supportive funding and other resources. But these
collaborative or partnership arrangements often diminish and disempower, as
the state appropriates community knowledge/s for its own purposes. Many
Group Three projects are positioned to speak about community empowerment and
this potentially contradictory role of the (capitalist, colonialist,
imperialist) state. In doing so, members recognize that communities
themselves are not homogeneous but structured by (among others) gender,
class and race relations.
Market forces are also important to many Group Three
projects, especially around questions of funding. Several are located
in sites where participants are being drawn into/operate within an
enterprise (entrepreneurial) culture.11
There are openings here for individual agency but serious concerns around
individualization of responsibility, and the commodification of
non-traditional knowledge. Members balanced these concerns somewhat
with the recognition that there is also resistance to commodification of
(indigenous) culture. At some level, whether or not they explicitly
address political activism, all of the Group Three projects have something
to say about learning for social change and institutional transformation.
At its broadest, Group Three’s discussion was an
attempt to create an understanding of its projects within the context of
structures of power. The group acknowledged that its understanding of
formal and informal learning has to do with relations of power, and
questions of power/knowledge dichotomies. Burns argued that “the
dichotomization of formal and informal learning, and indigenous knowledge
and Western knowledge is not a happenstance. It works in the interest
of the non-Aboriginal people” and that problem has to be addressed.
Burn’s position on the question of linkages between
“informal” and “formal” is that the formal knowledge of the
Aboriginal people (that passed along by Elders) has to be “restored,
validated or re-validated and asserted through … the public school
system.” To quote (and recognize) him more fully:
As an educator and an educational researcher how can we create
institutions that are going to embrace diversity, and not just embrace it
but allow ourselves to be shaken up by the diversity and develop from
that, both in schools and at post-secondary levels. And in other
ways too. And that takes us back to that whole notion of what do we
mean by this formal versus informal? We create rigid boundaries,
yes, and we act on them, but we really need to reconcile some of these
aspects as well (Group Three transcript).
Haig-Brown drew a somewhat different conclusion from her
involvement with First Nations. A major struggle for her was to “live the
contradiction of ‘formalizing’ a program that must retain a level
of informality if it is to be true to Aboriginal pedagogy. Even as we
develop courses and the program itself, we are trying to keep a level of
flexibility and unpredictability that will make it responsive to students,
the land with which we live and work, and the teachings themselves.”
After spending time on the land:
We quite quickly come to the understanding that as soon as you do
something in the school system you’ve compromised the project beyond
recognition. What has to happen is that the university has to go to
the place. And that’s what we’ve been intentionally doing.
When I was on the back of that skidoo I said ‘ha ha York University, bet
you never thought you’d find yourself here!’ (Group Three transcript).
Responding to worries about appropriation, Livingstone
argued that our task is to empower traditional or subordinated knowledges in
such a way that their contents are not totally revealed and vulnerable for
appropriation by the dominant forces in society. The issue is:
to decide collaboratively amongst the groups that we’re working with
what is going to be most effective in terms of presenting versions of that
knowledge that will be empowering internally and more effective in terms
of working out relationships with dominant groups in society over the
resources that are the rightful due of people. That means
demonstrating the competencies of people in generic ways, in terms of
showing some of the kinds of learning that they’re involved in that have
been totally suppressed and ignored within workplaces, for examples.
But what you do with that knowledge and to what extent it becomes part of
any equation with the state including the SSHRC is very much a matter of
negotiation with the indigenous groups that each of us as researchers is
working with (Group Three transcript).
Still, we are wise to be cautious. After examining
the relationships among formal school learning and informal community/home
learning practices experienced by Aboriginal youth in Saskatchewan,
Wotherspoon and Butler remained concerned about the shifting boundaries
between formal and informal learning. “We are dealing with this question
in the context of First Nations perspective in which formal education has
been very central to processes of colonization. It has excluded
traditional heritage and a lot of the Aboriginal experience is not
validated.” Some Aboriginal groups are making efforts to gain
recognition for indigenous forms of knowledge and ways of knowing. One
of the major barriers is that, despite clear conceptual definitions,
informal learning remains a slippery concept to apply in institutional
educational contexts. (See here also TYP results.)
In the end, Burns’ summary of issues for Group Three
may apply to the Network as a whole. He observed that the relations between
formal and informal (indigenous and non-indigenous) are “dynamic,
dialectical and contradictory.” In terms of strategy, the
relationship between immediate concerns and longer-term goals for structural
change are vital. As researchers we want to validate and be challenged
by indigenous knowledge in its appropriate context but also apply their
insights within conventional institutions.
Conclusion
And so we arrive at Contested Terrain: The
boundaries and practical impact of informal learning as the theme for
the October 2000 conference. I hope that, through this document, the general
areas for debate and possibilities for research, program and/or policy
action have become clearer – especially for NALL members who have limited
exposure to Network projects. I hope that members will take the conference
as an opportunity to correct errors, fill in holes, add layers and
contribute nuances that will enhance this initial effort to give textual
shape to NALL’s communal ‘we.’
Notes
1. Most of the research for this report was done in the Spring of 2000.
Methods included: consultations with key people who are most familiar with
the Network’s construction and operation (Network director and
administrator etc.); reading project descriptions (particularly the year
four reports); reading some individual papers; participation in the face to
face discussions with Groups Two, Three and Five (tapes and transcripts
where possible); selected telephone interviews.
2. Members will know that there is a project directed by Peter Sawchuk
that deals specifically with Theoretical Foundations of Informal Learning.
Some of the issues that I only touch on here will be dealt with in more
detail through this mechanism.
3. Note projects focussed on the land including Haig-Brown, Dunk (working
class individual’s learning about nature and the environment) and Clover
and Hall (daily experience with nature as a source of learning about the
environment) in comparison with projects such as those of Schniad and also
Taylor that deal with the impact of new technology.
4. SSHRC was also critical of NALL’s relative lack of corporate
partners. Responding to this with respect to Group Six, Jeff Taylor notes
that: I am concerned, however, that when the committee suggests that more
attention be paid to the needs of the ‘corporate’ sector … what they
really mean is that Group Six’s focus on ‘working people’ …. Should
be severely diluted. … I would argue against diluting its terms of
reference to attract capital. Capital is very well served by other networks
and funders dealing with telelearning. The Telelearning Network of Centres
of Excellence, which is the largest Canadian research network in the area,
is dominated by capital’s preoccupations and values. In addition, only
three of the approximately 175 projects funded by the Office of Learning
Technologies have had labour participation, while most of the others have
‘corporate’ involvement. And my hunch is that these and other networks
and programs are not being criticized by reviewers for courting capital and
ignoring labour and other important groups. One of NALL’s strengths is
that it has challenged capital’s domination of knowledge creation. One of
the ways we have been able to do that is by exploiting the contradictions
and openings that exist in the liberal state at the moment. We should
continue this by, for example, asking SSHRC to show us that similar
‘balance’ among various social groups is being demanded of other
networks. If SSHRC can do that, I’m willing to play the liberal game and
allow some involvement in Group Six.
5. As an independent researcher with a range of contracts, for example, I
am currently reading about illness and disability; community economic
development and the social economy; wedding dresses and material culture;
museums and cultural representation; mother/daughter relationships;
women’s work, femininity; feminist theory and research methods;
auto/ethnography, personal narratives and experimental writing; masculinity
and prostate cancer – and of course, informal learning.
6. Most of the projects in Neysmith’s Caring Network used qualitative
methods. Writing about this, she notes that qualitative method “can
actually be misleading because it often refers only to design or data
collection methods and does not address the more substantive question of a
researcher’s epistemology, the framework or theoretical perspective used
by a writer for specifying the content and generation of knowledge about our
social world” (pg. 12-13). She goes on to point out that qualitative tools
are used in all research traditions, frequently by feminist scholars, but
that they are not the distinguishing characteristic of feminist methodology.
“Feminist methodology shares with the critical school of social research
the aim to develop a theory of society that sustains and promotes the
possibility of practical action in the service of constructing a fair and
just society … knowledge building is directed towards an end beyond the
intellectual … (towards) projects of social transformation or changing
social conditions….” (pg. 13).
7. Note from David Livingstone on this section: “The dichotomies used
here (out there/creating it; integrate/expose differences; doing/learning;
voluntary/involuntary/ and more generally between outcomes and processes)
are all real enough in the entire corpus of NALL work. There are important
political differences in the regulate versus empower roles of informal
learning. But we need to be very careful about conflation of these
distinctions as well as conflating research methods with political
orientations.” I reference this here for further discussion.
8. Note Peter McDougall’s original paper that documents the changes.
“The section dealing with “Home Items” in the NALL survey was
significantly changed. The title of the “Home Items” section was changed
to “Daily Life.” This title change was intended to reflect the fact that
the idea of “home” would not be reflective of the lived experience of
many of the respondents. Many members of this population either do not have
homes or live in situations in which the idea of “home” is tenuous at
best. It was believed that “Daily Life” would be a more accurate way to
capture this population’s daily lived experience which includes their
home/shelter experience” (pg. 4).
9. NALL member Michael Welton notes the philosophical lineage of
learning by doing or experience from Aristotle to David Hume to John Dewey.
He links the focus on every day life to Habermasian theory of communicative
action (1995).
10. John Garrick suggests that the best way to handle the definitional
question is by locating informal learning itself under what he sees as the
broader category of experiential learning. He draws his support for this
from Andersen, Boud and Cohen (1995) who argue that “experiential learning
is of particular interest to adult educators because it encompasses formal
learning, informal learning, non-formal education, lifelong learning,
incidental learning and workplace learning” (Garrick, 1996: 26). The bulk
of Garrick’s argument, then, is about experiential learning as a
humanistic discourse “whereby learners actively define their own
experience by attaching meanings to events” (pg. 31).
11. An interesting cluster of NALL projects deal with informal learning
in the context of entrepreneurial initiatives of various types. They include
Rachel Gorman’s project (through Working Class Learning Strategies) on
work in a disability collective, Butler’s project on Aboriginal youth
training for entrepreneurialism, the Dei/Cheddie project on Kensington
Market, Meaghan’s project on working safely in the sex industry, the
Shragge team’s work with alternative and training businesses, and
Stratton’s work on women and community economic development. The
contradictions of entrepreneurialism and learning are sub-them of the
Network’s work that bears watching, given global trends in this direction.
References
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Andresen, L., Boud, D., and Cohen,
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