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Editorial: reflecting back to the past, present and future: the changing nature of research on access, learning careers and identity
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Orientador(es)
Resumo(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?’
Descrição
Palavras-chave
Working-class Education
Contexto Educativo
Citação
Editora
Linköpings University Electronic Press