CBE: Critically Building Educational Alternatives to Competency-Based Education for Adult Learners

• In Event: Access to and Equity in Canadian Higher Education for Mature Students Symposium

Abstract

Objectives
Competency-based education (CBE) is evident in the lives of mature, adult learners in sites of further and postsecondary education (PSE), from the day-to-day activities in their classrooms to processes for measuring learner and program performance (author, 2025; Rosenblad et al., 2022). CBE draws from behaviourist aims to produce general or specialized skills in individuals, evaluating them through itemized criteria across different levels or scales of performance (Chappell et al., 2000; Nodine, 2016). Adult basic education programs often rely on CBE to organizes the experiences of adult learners who seek access to further and PSE. I consider the tensions that the everyday experiences of racialized and immigrant adult learners raise for CBE and its reproduction of racialized and classed inequalities.
Theoretical Framework & Perspectives
I take up critical adult education approaches, drawing from anti-racist and feminist scholars who use dialectical historical materialism (Allman, 2010; Bannerji, 2020; Smith, 1990). In my study, everyday experiences are understood as socially differentiated and mediated by the mutual development of classed, racialized, and gendered social relations, and embodying forms of consciousness, practice, institutional relationships, as well as individual and collective identities, which come up in the day-to-day of learning struggles for adults. I also understand adults’ everyday experiences to reflect their standpoint (Cockburn, 2015; Smith, 1990), a vantage point that reveals the ruling dynamics that adults reproduce, resist, or challenge in their struggle to access and complete education.
Methodology & Data Sources
I draw from a subset of my findings from a previous study on the experiences young adult learners seeking to access education and transition to PSE. The study involved an anti-racist, feminist qualitative study (Das Gupta, 2003; Okolie, 2005; Vijay, 2023) using semi-structured interviews with 8 adult learners and 9 adult literacy workers in Toronto, Canada to consider how the standpoint of young adults both expressed and challenged ideology in the work to deliver educational access. Data analysis included attention to participants’ accounts of enrolling, participating, and leaving basic education programs and examining the forms of consciousness and textual work (Allman, 2007; Smith, 2006) evident in their everyday accounts.

Findings & Scholarly Significance
Racialized and immigrant adult learners expressed frustration about learning that was too ‘low’ or simple for their abilities despite participating in an adult program advertised as ‘basic education.’ Still, they also expressed appreciation for the learning and relationships that they developed in their respective programs. I argue that their contradictory experiences of frustration and appreciation can be better understood when analyzing the way CBE, as it manifests in the lives of adult learners and the work literacy workers, brings to life ruling practices related to human capital. I argue that these CBE-approaches worked to present adult learners with idealized behaviours and scenarios about transitioning to PSE, as if transitions occurred outside of a world mediated by poverty and discrimination. I conclude with reflections about alternatives to CBE, including naming and addressing the contradictions of racialized capitalism with adult learners.

Author

• Paula Veronica Elias, University of Toronto