Educational Access for Social Transformation in Adult Basic Education

• In Event: Leadership, Governance and Innovation

Proposal

In this paper presentation, I use the example of adult basic education to consider some of the contradictions of educational access as a project for social equality. I offer a critique that aims to contribute to a more critical, transformative praxis for social change (Allman, 2010; Carpenter & Mojab, 2017; Shi, 2018), especially for racialized and immigrant adult literacy learners. I draw upon my dissertation research, [DISSERTATION TITLE ANONYMIZED] (Author, 2024), where I investigated issues of educational access for young adult participants in literacy and basic skill programming in Ontario, Canada. I used elements of Institutional Ethnography to complete 17 semi-structured interviews with adult literacy learners and workers from across the Greater Toronto Area to learn about their efforts in seeking educational access from adult literacy programs to postsecondary education. In my research, I considered the way in which young adults struggled to seek educational access, as their learning was organized by state policies for competency and skills development. Through these state policies, young adults and literacy workers engaged in the work of developing human capital – an enhancement of individual skills, credentials, and qualifications to achieve social equality (for critiques of human capital theory, see Bowles & Gintis, 1975; Brown et al, 2020; Means, 2017; Wheelahan et al, 2022). Their work expressed the broader contradictions of equality and freedom that are historically and materially produced by liberal democracy in capitalist social relations (Carpenter, 2015).

Reviewing the accounts of young adult learners in adult basic education, I consider the opportunities for resistance and organizing for social change. Racialized and immigrant young adults shared about their experiences of organizing among themselves in order to learn about alternative routes into further education and work, information that was not made available to them as marginalized adult learners. They also remarked on dealing with the struggles of low expectations and stereotypes from peers and literacy program workers. Finally, young adults shared their accounts of working with other learners to support one another through teaching and motivating each other, while some literacy workers shared instances where they resisted the mandated curriculum objectives to deliver consciousness-raising activities that would engage adult litearcy learners in critical, political discourse.

However, I argue that these opportunities for resistance and organizing need to be supported with an anti-racist, feminist and critical praxis to articulate and address the material conditions of adult literacy learners. For example, I reflect on the potential for adult basic education to support adult learners in learning and addressing racialized capitalism from the entry point of their experience so that racialized and immigrant young adults can protect their communities from the continuities of inequality. I also reflect on literacy workers as agents of the state, as allies for adult litearcy learners in the shared material relations of precarity today, and as educators in an intermediary position (Sowers, 2017) to disrupt the circulation of capital by working with adult learners at a generalized level of education, before further transitions into higher education and/or work.
References:
Allman, P. (2010). Critical Education Against Global Capitalism. In Critical Education Against Global Capitalism. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004406148

Author. (2024). Dissertation Title Anonymized.
Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1975). The problem with human capital theory: A Marxian critique. The American Economic Review, 65(2).

Brown, P., Lauder, H., & Cheung, S. Y. (2020). The Death of Human Capital? In The Death of Human Capital? https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190644307.001.0001

Carpenter, S. (2015). Democracy. In S. Mojab (Ed.), Marxism and Feminism (pp. 15–23). Zed Books.

Carpenter, S., & Mojab, S. (2017). Revolutionary Learning. In Revolutionary Learning. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1kzcbv0

Means, A. J. (2017). Generational Precarity, Education, and the Crisis of Capitalism: Conventional, Neo-Keynesian, and Marxian Perspectives. Critical Sociology, 43(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920514564088

Shi, C. C. (2018). Defining my own oppression: Neoliberalism and the demands of Victimhood. In Historical Materialism (Vol. 26, Issue 2). https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-00001638

Sowers, E. A. (2017). Logistics labor: Insights from the sociologies of globalization, the economy, and work. Sociology Compass, 11(3), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12459

Wheelahan, L., Moodie, G., & Doughney, J. (2022). Challenging the skills fetish. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 43(3). https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2022.2045186

Author

• Paula V Elias, O.I.S.E. University of Toronto