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Book Review: Paterson, L. (2015) Social Radicalism and Liberal Education
No full textThis book will be useful to anyone interested in understanding the history of liberal education in general and, more specifically, for those interested in how liberal adult education was interpreted and developed by radical social and educational reformers in the first half of the twentieth century. Putting this history together is, in my opinion, a really helpful contribution that students, educators and academics will find particularly beneficial. The fact that the author is an exceptionally clear, concise and authoritative writer adds to its value. Because of my own interest in adult education, I will focus on this specific dimension rather than liberal education and schooling, which the book also addresses. Another justification for this is that, as Paterson points out, liberal education was more often discussed in the context of adult education than it was in schooling
Easter Rising Dublin 1916: Learning the Legacy of a Revolutionary Moment as a Subjugated Discourse in Scotland
Get PDFThis paper is the start of a larger work in progress, and is based on personal experience, professional experience as an adult educator, and ongoing investigative research. It argues that the historic events in Ireland in Easter 1916 were overtly and covertly subjugated as a discourse in Scotland; brought under the yoke and made subservient to dominant discourses of the British State. With the linguistics of the actual 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic in mind, I place emphasis on a key and insightful definition of discourse by Edwards & Usher (1994: 08): ‘discourse defines what can be said, which is based on what cannot be said, on what is marginalised and repressed.’ The paper, then, is the result of semi-structured interviews and recordings of lectures that dealt with, in the main, the relationship between Scotland, the Irish in Scotland and the Rising in Dublin in 1916.
Political Education in Scotland: A Practitioner’s Perspective
Get PDFBy way of introduction, in the build up to the Referendum on Scottish Independence in 2014, I was involved in different bits and pieces of political education work with young people; looking at the issues that were important or personal to them (politics with a small p) and how that connected to governments, policies and decision making (politics with a capital P). For example, a group of young people with specific learning difficulties made connections between issues like bullying, prejudice and discrimination and whether or not there would be greater equality of opportunity if Scotland ruled its own affairs
Book Review: Ismail, S. (2015) The Victoria Mxenge Housing Project: Women Building Communities Through Social Activism and Informal Learning
No full textBoth apartheid and customary laws in apartheid South Africa created racialised and gendered patterns of poverty and inequality. Women, in particular suffered, a double discrimination through not being allowed access to land, finance or housing. This fascinating study follows a group of poor, homeless women in the Victoria Mxenge Housing Development Association (VM) who acquired the skills to save money, secure land, build houses and create a broader social movement. Salma Ismail has created an important resource in this book through her personal dedication and scholarship, covering the progress of this initiative over a period of twenty years, beginning in the early days of the newly elected ANC government. This is crucial to her analysis, which explores the changing political contexts, the relationship between NGOs and the state, and the creative and critical role of radical popular education
Early Twentieth Century Radicalism in Community Education and the Socialist Sunday School Movement.
Get PDFAn exploration of the development of Socialist Sunday Schools and their connection to Radical education
Exhilarating Times
Get PDFSoundings has been arguing for a long time that Labour should ‘take a leap’, that it should challenge the dominant terms of debate: that, rather than accepting the established political terrain, it should be marking out distinctive territory of its own. Just before the last election we bemoaned the party’s lack of inspiration, arguing that this was a ‘moment crying out for some political bravery’.1 The whole point of the Soundings Manifesto, likewise, has been to argue the political necessity of challenging the currently hegemonic common sense and to establish new groun
A Genealogy of Youth Work’s Languages: Founders
Get PDFA genealogy is a way of viewing a discourse’s heritage that supports our understanding of it in the present. Here I look at one aspect of the genealogy of youth work; its language. In this article I set out the importance of a discourse’s language and describe the different ways it can be translated through its existence. I look at youth work’s foundational moment: the environment that gave it birth, the people who brought it into being, and the language they used to name its characteristics. This, I suggest, provided youth work with a particular language; a Christian language
Book Review: Akwugo Emejulu, (2015) Community Development As Micropolitics: Comparing Theories, Policies and Politics
No full textI approached reviewing this book with considerable interest. Having been active in community development in one form or another for about 50 years, I had observed the changing nature of the relationship between what was happening under the umbrella of this term in the USA and that in the UK with both intellectual and practical curiosity. When I first started serious work in community development, (and indeed before that as a postgraduate student), disregarding literature from UK writers who drew on their experience as colonial administrators, most of the literature available to us originated from the USA, dominated by the-then more radical – or so it seemed – methods of Alinsky which challenged the rather more mainstream books which reflected in their authors’ eyes the notion of community development as one of the three methods of social work. Even the two influential reports emanating from the Gulbenkian Foundation had to dig hard to find a significant UK-based canon
Book Review: Blyth, Mark (2015) Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea.
No full textMark Blyth is a butcher’s son from Dundee raised after the early death of his mother by his paternal grandmother. At the start of his book he acknowledges that without the support of a strong welfare state in childhood, he would have been unlikely to have made the transition from a relatively poor background to his current position of professor of International Political Economy at an Ivy League University in the United States. A central message of this book is how a crisis in the private sector has been erroneously (and purposely) reframed as a public sector problem caused by excessive state spending
Book Review: Leona M. English and Catherine J. Irving (2015), Feminism in Community: Adult Education for Transformation
No full textThis is the kind of book that ignites your spirit when you are assailed on all sides with neo-liberal agendas. These agendas convey messages about ‘value for money’ education, labour activation, economic development, all of which took centre stage in adult education in Ireland over the past few years. Leona English and Catherine Irving succeed in shifting the lens away from the pure marketisation of the field towards a more enriching, politically aware and egalitarian focus. They identify the gap in the literature on women and learning and the intersection of race, ethnicity, class and gender. In the wider debates on equality, women as a category have become increasingly invisible, but even more worryingly, the authors maintain that there is a general dilution of previously powerful pedagogies in favour of more superficial, short-term and individualised outcomes. For example, while we have interrogated the notion of empowerment for many years, at least the concept was and is about power. Now, however, this concept is reduced to ephemeral, almost inconsequential ideas about self-esteem and confidence, devoid of social and gender analysis. This is a very long way from the political aims of feminism, yet it dominates many public and media discussions on the status of women