Editorial: reflecting back to the past, present and future: the changing nature of research on access, learning careers and identity

Merrill, Barbara; Galimberti, Andrea; Fragoso, António

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.1/20529

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Authors

Merrill, Barbara

Galimberti, Andrea

Fragoso, António

Abstract(s)

Historically it could be argued that issues of access were apparent in the late nineteenth century with the University Extension Movement in the UK and Ireland which offered education to working class men. And later in Scandinavia with the Folk High Schools as well as the work by Rubenson (1979) in the 1970s on recruitment to education. Early research in the 1980s and 1990s in the field of access focused on the process of adults accessing and participating in education and much of the literature centred, and continues to centre, on higher education (Williams, 1997), at that time educators and researchers used the term “second chance” but is rarely used now. This mirrored policy concerns on the need to widen access and participation by policy makers at national and European levels. There was little research on the lived experience of adult learners once they enter the system as the key concern was to get adults to return to learn, largely for economic reasons to enhance the skills of the workforce in a competitive global world. This tension was connected to the rise of the neoliberal paradigm that oriented the uses and meanings of the lifelong learning endeavour in an instrumental and linear direction (Barros, 2012; Milana, 2012). Once adult learners had accessed higher education, for example, it was assumed that they were on an equal footing with younger students, research at this time mainly looked at how adults managed to overcome the barriers both at the beginning and during their learning itinerary (Cross, 1981). Over the years research and literature on adult access broadened in scope and moved beyond access issues as some researchers began to ask the question ‘access to what?’