Writing by Kate Smyth, AONTAS Strategic Comms Officer
We recently launched the 2023 edition of The Adult Learner, AONTAS’ peer-reviewed journal of adult and community education. The main focus of the discussion was the importance of values in adult learning, and the need to continue to resist output-based models for measuring success. As one attendee of the discussion told the group, “we need to bring the humanity back.”
Founded in the 1980s, The Adult Learner is essential reading for anyone interested in or studying adult learning. It is the only peer-reviewed journal of adult and community education in Ireland. It tends to give priority to subject matter that addresses social exclusion, equality, workplace learning and the study of the teacher/student relationship.
The journal this year continues to focus on social inclusion in adult learning. This includes universal design for people with different abilities and the need for greater awareness of varied learning styles, the need for greater flexibility in adult learning for carers, and the challenges faced by Youthreach learners in Ireland, among many other issues.
The 2023 edition, and the recent online discussion to launch it, also explored the urgent need to challenge the language being used by policymakers in adult education at the moment. There is an increasing focus on skills and qualifications, and on rankings for education providers. Learning must focus more on encouraging critical thinking and a way of perceiving the world.
The session was chaired by AONTAS CEO Dearbháil Lawless, who welcomed everyone and spoke about the essential role of the journal in creating a space to critically-reflect on these issues and bring people together. The journal editor, Rosemary Moreland from Ulster University, introduced each article and the contributors, many of whom were there to speak about their work.
We were also joined by Jason Harris, an apprentice and adult learning advocate, who spoke about the hardship and poverty faced by apprentices in Ireland at the moment, and the urgent need for systemic change in policy to resolve these issues.
Keynote speaker Professor Leo Casey, Director of the Centre for Education and Lifelong Learning at National College of Ireland, spoke about the need for adult learning to focus on values rather than skills, competence, and knowledge.
Values are part of a person’s identity, they are internal motivations, and dictate our tendencies to act in certain way in certain situations. Values, Leo says, are learned, and transformational learning means a change in values.
“We need situations that make us question our beliefs and values,” he told the group.
This can lead to change. We need to teach people how to reason and how to care about the world around them. This is essential given the rising tide of far-right thinking and anti-democratic movements, as well as global issues of climate change, war and racism, AI, and diseases and viruses.
Contributors expressed concern about the culture of rankings and competition for educators in Ireland, and the output-based model for defining success. This links with Professor Kathleen Lynch’s keynote at the recent AONTAS Adult Education Summit 2023, which argued that there is a growing “tendency to reduce students, and citizens, to customers”. Gavan Sheridan’s article in the journal reflects this, offering a critique of the language used in adult education policies, which relates to the marketplace and the economy rather than to people and human lives.
In the discussion, contributor Garry Nicholson reflected on this, noting that there are “so many lost stories in community learning” because measurement of success “tends to stop at the number.” He said that adult learning providers are being forced to constantly measure things “to justify our existence” and that “adult learning is dying a death of measurement.”
His article in the journal looks at how educators can use the method of “Socratic dialogue” – where learners do not debate issues but work to define them instead – to find ways to learn. He says we need “to understand better rather than to measure” and we can do this through gathering people’s stories. “As a sector,” he says, “we need to be more ‘storied’.”
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The journal is also packed with reviews of the latest books in adult learning; including Making Inclusive Higher Education a Reality, edited by Anna M. Kelly, Lisa Padden, and Bairbre Fleming of University College Dublin’s “UCD for All” initiative; and Katriona O’Sullivan’s best-selling and award-winning memoir Poor, looking at the relationship between poverty and education.
You can download your copy of the 2023 Adult Learner journal here.
If you’re interested in contributing to next year’s journal, the call for articles is out now.