Abstract
Despite frequent lamentations regarding the loss of radical perspectives in adult education, there is still a great deal of critical practice being conducted with adults. It may not have the nomenclature of adult education, but in social movements, community organizations, labor unions, and environmental education an enormous amount of purposeful and planned learning is happening. Three recent texts explore in imaginative ways the ways adults in a range of different settings are learning to challenge dominant ideologies such as capitalism, patriarchy, heterosexism, and White supremacy.
English and Mayo’s Learning With Adults is a wonderful addition to the cadre of introductory, survey texts that introduce the field of adult education. I love the fact that there is no pretense at an impartial review of contrasting perspectives here. Instead, the authors frame their work in the subtitle as a critical pedagogical introduction to the field. This means that they center the work of assisting adults who are learning in social movements as constituting the core of adult education. The inclusion of “With” in the main title signals their intent to explore collaborative ways of working with people, yet they do not elide the complexities posed by power differentials. For example, in exploring dialogic approaches to teaching they raise “questions about the unequal power relations involved in such a dialogical exchange. The question becomes; Who dialogues with whom and from what position of domination or subordination?” (p. 62).
The global scope of the book is signaled right at the outset. The introductory chapter begins with a quote from Vaclav Havel: “Adult education is under assault from a variety of capitalist and neoconservative forces” (p. 1). As a response to this, English and Mayo declare that they are “providing decidedly critical and international perspectives on adult education” (p. 2) and the ways readers can become active in “creating democratic spaces for learning to occur” (p. 3). To accomplish this, the book is laid out in four sections. It begins with three chapters in Section 1 titled Contextualizing Adult Education in which neo-Liberal perspectives are critiqued and the importance of the State is reestablished. We then move to Section 2 exploring Contemporary Theoretical Perspectives, dealing, not unexpectedly, with postcolonial and postmodern frameworks but also with the enduring relevance of Marxist analysis. Section 3 explores Contexts for Practice, such as workplace learning, cultural institutions, social movements, community development, and universities. The final section on Concerns for Practice looks at feminist work, antiracist practice, spirituality, environmental education, work with older adults, and health issues.
The strengths of this introductory text are many. Given the Canadian and Maltese identities of the two authors, there is a welcome plethora of examples from outside the United States. The avowedly partisan perspective allows the same themes of agency, democracy, ideology, and power to be threaded through a broad range of different analyses. The chapters are often short—mercifully so in my opinion—but always packed with references and examples. Although theoretically informed, readers new to the field will love the innumerable examples of real sites for practice provided throughout. Finally, this is a challenging text that constantly asks difficult and provocative questions not only of the perspectives and practices highlighted but also of the reader. You cannot glide through this as you can other survey texts, because the authors won’t let you get away that easily. This will be wonderfully helpful for classroom use because students new to the field will be moved to passionate disagreement or enthusiastic recognition.
In Paulo Freire and the Cold War Politics of Literacy by Andrew Kirkendall, we have a historian’s biographical analysis of the legacy of Paulo Freire. Readers of this journal will be only too aware of Freire’s influence in adult education, but they may be less attuned to the cold war context that surrounded it. Kirkendall intends in his book to “look at the man in his times using his writings from particular historical moments” (p. 4) and claims to be the first scholar to have consulted his letters housed in the World Council of Churches archives in Geneva (where Freire spent the 1970s).
The book is not a panegyric to Freire. At the outset Kirkendall writes that Freire personified the Latin American New Left, “which, at its best could work to further democratize pluralistic societies and, at its worst, could be rather obtuse about the dangers posed by one-party states” (p. 3). He notes early on that “his techniques have been employed by people of widely varying ideological commitments for different end, even, as we shall see, at the same time in roughly the same context” (p. 2). Peter McLaren has similarly pointed out how often people take Freire’s techniques out of their context of political liberation and view them simply as a form of student-centered, participatory practice denuding them of their political power.
Not being a historian, or a Latin American specialist, it is difficult to assess the rigor of Kirkendall’s research but his footnotes are impressively detailed. Kirkendall writes breezily and briskly in an accessible style, which is welcome in a text that frequently deals in highly localized analyses. He organizes Freire’s work into six phases. “Entering History” situates Freire in Recife and explores the influence of Catholic and Existential perspectives on his understanding of democracy. In “Revolution in Brazil” we read of Freire’s interrogation while in prison but, frustratingly, are given no source for the quotes and views attributed to him. “Reformist Chile” describes the adoption of his psychosocial method and circle of thematic investigation under the reformist Frei administration. Chapter 4 concerns his growing global significance and worldwide fame while working at the World Council of Churches and Chapter 5 his brief visit to Sandinistan Nicaragua. Freire’s return to Brazil is chronicled in Chapter 6.
Unlike English and Mayo’s avowedly partisan approach, Kirkendall strives for a historically judicious assessment. At times, there is, strangely, a sort of sniping tone. Consider this assessment of his influence while at Harvard in 1969:
The main difference between Freire before and after Harvard, one might say, was in his appearance; Freire grew a beard to ward off the Cambridge cold and kept it on for the rest of his life. It may seem to fit with the revolutionary mantle he now claimed, it increasingly if gradually gave him the look of the “guru” he was becoming. (p. 91)
For anyone seeking to go beyond Freire’s primary texts in order to understand the contexts that shaped his intellectual development, Kirkendall’s text is worth a look.
Learning to understand how Whiteness functions is the enormously complex adult learning task explored by George Yancy’s collection of essays, Look, a White! In this book Yancy continues his exploration of Whiteness begun in earlier collections such as What White Looks Like and Black Bodies, White Gazes. I first became aware of Yancy’s work in his 1998 book of interviews with African American philosophers and was immediately taken with the way he explored philosophical questions in the context of contemporary life. His recent collection, Pursuing Trayvon Martin, continues this project. Although Yancy does not situate himself in adult educational discourses, he deals head on with the adult educational project of teaching about race and racism through the construction of personally unsafe, self-disclosing classrooms.
Yancy’s book is complex, passionate and, for a White adult educator like me, productively jarring. He writes elegantly, with an enviable knack of interweaving striking stories of personal experience into philosophical analysis. Rarely has a book I’ve read had so many turned-down pages, notes in the margin, and underlined sections. What I really appreciated was his repeated naming of how “the opaque, white racist self” (p. 173) pervades Whites’ identities. In the very last paragraph of the book he captures what for me has been a truth about myself: “Being a white antiracist and yet being racist are not mutually exclusive. Rather, being a white antiracist racist signifies tremendous tension and paradox but not logical or existential futility” (p. 175). I will always benefit from the unearned privileges and blindnesses embedded in the racist institutions and structures I move through each day. And I will never lose entirely the racist perspectives, intuitive judgments, and embedded filters I have learned all too well and that are “insidiously operating as the level of simply being bodily in the world as white” (p. 21).
The overall intent of Yancy’s book is to name the enduring reality of Whiteness and White racism. It comprises six chapters, four of which spoke directly to my work as an adult educator. Chapter 1 pulled me in immediately as Yancy describes being “interviewed” by a White professor of philosophy. The so-called interview turns into an uninterrupted effort by the professor
to present himself as “pure,” as a “good white,” who was above the fray of racism and lived beyond the trappings of race matters. He used my presence, my hour, as a space for white self-confession and self-glorification . . . desiring that I spend my time bearing witness to his “white purity,” so that I could state emphatically and unequivocally that he was one of the “good guys.” (p. 18)
I was forced to ask myself how many times have I done this, and how did it make colleagues of color feel? How, in my search for approval, have I marginalized colleagues?
The strength of Yancy’s work for me is that it constantly yanks me back from the realm of academic analysis to questions of daily conduct. Just as I’m becoming comfortable with a critical theory focus on structures and ideology, Yancy introduces a powerful personal example that concretizes this analysis and makes me ask disturbing questions of myself. This is particularly so in an analysis of bell hooks’s transgressive pedagogy. Yancy’s examples of classroom moments when students burst into tears when discussing race, and the awkwardness this induces, were vividly recognizable. He writes of “silence in the room, a sort of awkwardness of not knowing what to do next” arguing that, “this awkwardness is indicative of pedagogical success, not failure” (p. 59). Pedagogically, allowing silence to linger “functions as a teachable moment (where) all of us present might feel the weight of the moment” (p. 59).
Pondering uncomfortable, emotionally charged outbursts is, for Yancy, “fearless listening” (p. 71), in which people live with important discomfort. He argues, along with hooks, that foregrounding race makes classrooms necessarily unsafe, dangerous spaces. He regards his classrooms as dangerous, “because they demand so much at the level of personal integrity, honesty, and exposure while not sacrificing critical engagement” (p. 132). And these demands are just as present for teachers who are called on to disclose their own contradictions, knowing all the while that “to engage one’s identity and being-in-the-world through the passionate deployment of critical interrogation can cause suffering, great disappointment, and creative vertigo” (p. 80).
What Yancy’s book supplies that is missing in the first two books is the exploration of the emotionally turbulent nature of any work that asks adult teachers and learners to challenge dominant ideologies and interrogate settled practices. He asks (pertinently for me), “When did anger and the simultaneous truthful disclosure of pain and suffering become incompatible?” (p. 153). I have to say that the most memorable moments of my teaching career have all been suffused with emotion. And the kind of fearless, unsafe listening to passionate declarations of hurt, including denunciations of my own actions, is something that will never become routine or habitual for me. It is rare to find a philosophical book so deeply grounded in recognizable experiences and felt emotions, and one that weaves abstract analysis and autobiography so seamlessly.
Together these three texts represent different entry points to understanding the radical tradition in the field. English and Mayo’s book offers a global, macro-level introduction to adult education practices understood from a critical viewpoint, Kirkendall’s attempts a biographical analysis of one of the heroes in the radical tradition, and Yancy’s explores an inherently contentious dimension of radical work—dealing with racism and White identity. Taken together they present three important avenues for applying critical theory perspectives to theory and practice in the field.