Women and Adult Education: A Postmodern Perspective
The pain and poetry of life, the emotional, intuitive, essentially relational nature of our struggles is traditionally excluded from and bracketed out of academic discourse ... We acknowledge the complex and multiple realities we all experience, the realities of difference; and abandon the positivist claims to objectivity and truth.[1]
My intuitive sense is that I must write about women in adult education in Canada as I have experienced it -- in a personal a voice,[2] in context, in community with others, in the narratives that inform our lives, and with authenticity and passion. To do so is to acknowledge the contradictions that I (and other women) have experienced during our careers as adult learners and educators -- isolation and community; silence and voice; oppression and liberation; separateness and connection; official knowledge and people's knowledge; authenticity and duplicity; bureaucratic structures and grassroots movements; disappointment and celebration; disregard and affirmation; power and powerlessness; risk and safety; anger and love.
One of the research participants in my doctoral work (an adult educator and doctoral candidate herself in an adult education program) shared a story about researchers which captures my dilemma in writing this chapter:
"Well, I flew to Edmonton last week for a work related project which involved the rural population in Alberta," Helen began her story, "and just after we took off from the Calgary airport, I looked down at the land and saw this blanket of snow that covered it. Then I looked over at the mountains and was struck by the coldness of the scene, the mountains in the background and this white, cold, uniform blanket of snow that disguised everything that lay beneath it.
" It occurred to me that that's what being a researcher can be like, looking down at things from above, only seeing the uniform white snow, the snow which disguises everyone's beauty, voices, lives. If a farmer or artist or poet looked down, though, they might see something different because they know the beauty and diversity is there. So the challenge as a researcher is to wait for the snow to melt, to see what's really there."[3]
Women's experiences in adult education in Canada have been covered by a blanket of snow. We do not appear in the sanctioned histories to the extent we all know we've been there and continue to be there. The roles we've played in the field itself -- learner, tutor, advisor, facilitator, coordinator, assistant, professor, collaborator and so on -- are often devalued, overlooked and/or underpaid. Our experiences as women adult learners have often been characterized by silence and alienation. Our collaborative and relational approaches to learning and leading have been seen as deficient when compared to the competitive and hierarchical models still prevalent in most institutions. As academics in the field, we bump up against the scientific method which tells us to stuff away our voices and associations with our research "subjects," in order to attain objectivity.
But that is not the whole picture. We also see women in adult education in Canada engaging in and facilitating transformative and empowering learning for themselves and others. We see them creating community and leading in participatory ways. We see them taking risks, and making a difference. We see them working collaboratively and positively with men. We see them supporting and celebrating the accomplishments of others. We see them carrying on the day to day challenges and joys that form the very landscape of adult education in Canada.[4]
There is much under the snow, and it is beginning to melt.
At the risk of being "totally relativistic and therefore incoherent,"[5] both the style and content of this chapter is in keeping with a postmodern perspective. It is in the work of postmodern writers that I found answers to troubling issues, the most disconcerting perhaps being my discomfort with some feminist writing and my unease about the proper way to represent knowledge.[6] While I certainly have experienced the marginalization and oppression[7] that is well documented about women's experiences in adult education, that has not been my total experience. I agree with Jennifer Gore who suggests that
the grand, broad theories of Marxism, Critical Theory, and Feminism, in their fundamental acknowledgment of structured inequalities and oppressions, in their pedagogical enterprise, arrive at the need to theorize the contradictory moments ... there is something about the lives of those in classrooms, as well as the lives of (social) "classes," about activities that deal with people as thinking, feeling individuals, that requires the phenomenological, personal accounts of multiplicity and contradiction that are beginning to emerge in the works of feminist poststructuralists in education.[8]
The work of feminists in education overall, is in tremendous transition. How postmodernism is influencing educational thought is significant.[9]
In my conversations with many women in adult education, I hear stories of both oppression and empowerment. Community, connection and affirmation are used to describe women's experiences as learners and educators. Oppression and silencing are also used. Two women participating in the same class will describe it differently. Poststructuralism offers an explanation for these differences. As Davies suggests, such a perspective
... involves a recognition of the inevitability of contradiction in a world made up of contradictory discourses, and provides a fundamental shift in the definition of self such that the contradictions are not experienced as a personal flaw but as ways of constituting the social world which are themselves amenable to change. I speak myself into existence through the discourses available to me, I know myself through the stories I live and the stories I tell (each of these deeply imbricated in the other) and so I can choose, with others, to change the stories and to develop new ways of talking about them. Equally I can refuse discourses that speak me into existence in ways I no longer wish. That refusal is dependent on my ability to see the way in which my identity is discursively constituted.[10]
My goal is to illuminate many perspectives of women in adult education in Canada, realizing that I see things from my perspective as a white, middle class, heterosexual, educated western woman. To accomplish that end, I contextualize the chapter by referring to a series of e-mail conversations (some of the personal portions of the e-mail have been excluded) which unfolded between myself and the colleagues I called upon to help me with the writing of this chapter.[11] Interspersed between these e-mail excerpts are perspectives from writers in the field. Indented italics are used to fill in the story with my thoughts as I was writing the chapter.[12]
From: Lynn To : Tammy Dewar Subject: Chapter on Women in Adult Education As you noted, life is really busy right now -- term papers coming due! Much and all as I would like to be really helpful with this project ... and also feeling guilty because I don't have the time ... here are some thoughts that come to me over the weekend, for what they are worth: 1. The whole area of health teaching done by public health nurses and the Victorian Order of Nurses. Prevention is one of their main mandates so a great deal of their work involves teaching patients, families, and workers in the community -- they have a long history in Canada. The VON is a Canadian organization. I remember one woman who ran the wellbaby clinic at the Montreal Settlement (an outreach program run by McGill, I believe) who used education of low income pregnant women plus supplements to their diets to produce what she called "BlueRibbon Babies" -- these were babies with normal birth weights because the mothers were properly nourished, and as a result had a lower incidence of birth defects and learning disabilities. This was a research project of the '60s. 2. Also related to nursing is the work of Helen Mussalem -- she was very involved in nursing education and was also a high profile Canadian with the World Health Organization and the UN. 3. What about all the work of Christian education workers, nuns, and deaconesses? Women weren't allowed into the ministry in many denominations but they often did a great deal of work in educating their congregations for leadership and missions. Some as port workers were likely the first to do organized ESL while others went to the mission fields and developed schools and hospitals. As a child I remember most of these missionaries being women, often in remote communities here at home and in developing countries where educating/training the indigenous populations was again their main mandate. 4. Another group of women who have a great impact are journalists like Doris Anderson (Chatelaine magazine editor & Status of Women Committee): June Callwood (tried to create awareness by writing and speaking about issues long before it was socially acceptable -- she was a founder of Nellie's (abused women in Toronto.) and Casey House (AIDS victims, also in Toronto); Barbara Frum, Jeanne Sauve, Laura Sabia, Anne Francis, Dian Francis, Judy Rebick, Judy LaMarsh (she had a show like Peter Gzowski's in the years between "This Country in the Morning" and "Morningside"), etc. Also there are French women and women of colour who have been educators and leaders in Quebec and the Maritimes particularly. Another is Judith Plant (and friends), an American who lives and publishes in Canada: " Healing the Wound" which deals with ecofeminism issues is one that I am familiar with. When I look at the other topics you listed I can see that keeping this to one chapter will be your major challenge -- you could indeed write a book about each of them and still not exhaust their potential! I'd love to see you write a chapter on "a feminist/women's critique of the behaviour of the field" or "the contradictory discourses in the field that impact women!!!"[13]Lynn's e-mail reminded me of the opening to an article I'd just read:
Where are the women role models in adult education? When I as a graduate student of adult education asked this question I was repeatedly referred to the same one or two names. It wasn't until I was able to work directly with the adult education historical documents myself in the 1990s that I discovered information about the kind of woman -- energetic, visionary -- that I was looking for.[14]
At the end of my master's program, I could not name one Canadian woman adult educator from our history of adult education in Canada, but I could name men -- Roby Kidd, E.A. Corbett, Moses Coady. It is only recently that I have come to realize this is not because I was not paying attention in my master's classes; it is because the documentation of women in adult education in Canada is sadly lacking.[15]
I went searching for an explanation.
Writing about women in adult education history in the United States, Jane Hugo suggests that
Looking beyond the histories to evidence generated by the adult education field itself, it is clear that historians' choices gradually excluded female adult educators from the historical narrative and precluded the inclusion of still other women by viewing their work as outside the boundaries of the field.[16]
Hugo suggests that there are three main reasons for the exclusion and marginalization of women. One, that the entire adult education enterprise has been concerned with establishing its credibility overall. Such a focus has led to looking at organizational concerns and to those in leadership positions within them. As she says, "The roles of women in these areas are often obscured by historians' focus on first, the organizations themselves as educational agents as opposed to the men and women who staffed those organizations and second, their focus on the upper levels of institutions where women were more likely to be structurally excluded."[17]
Second, men have held the power in defining the field and, therefore, their perspectives tend to be reflected in the literature. This, together with gender roles that have excluded women from leadership positions, has created an "historical narrative in which women were absent because the circle effect [men attending to what men said] mechanism acted as a barrier."[18]
Third, the discontinuous nature and the types of roles held by women adult educators has made it difficult for historians to trace. Many women practitioners at the grassroots level may have considered writing for adult education journals, but spent their time writing program materials for the learners whom they served instead.
Hugo suggests that a more inclusive history could be achieved through compensatory approaches to women's marginalization (writing women into the history of adult education), but suggests that a critical approach may be more fruitful:
... adult education historians need to make socially constructed and maintained sex roles problematic by asking what relationships exist between gender constructs and aspects of adult education like programming, leadership positions, professionalization, or the formulation of theory and its translation into practice.[19]
Hugo's comments certainly seem to be applicable to women in Canada, and challenge me to think deeper about why I may not know about women in adult education history. While a good majority of classmates in my graduate work in adult education (at least 80 percent) were women, the majority of our professors were men. Except for a Women in Education course that I took, gender issues were not raised in the core courses in my program. As Walker suggests, "In most adult education curricula, there is an absence of women, women's concerns, and feminist literature that might provide a basis from which women learners could begin to articulate, present, and theorize about their experiences."[20]
I wonder, though, how this might range across individual experience. Are there courses in adult education (either at the certificate, bachelor's or graduate levels) that do include a more balanced historical perspective? Perhaps the literature is out there and I haven't been made aware of it. It would depend upon the institution, the program and the individual instruc tor and participants within the course.[21]
Subject: Re: Chapter on Women in Adult Education To : Tammy From: Mary I don't have much time to reflect on it yet but off the top I would say PLEASE say something about the role of women as important informal educators in the world -- the transmission of culture, spirituality, practicalities, etc. You could do a continuum of contribution from the most informal but integral (sharing of info on childrearing, domestic duty, gardening, etc.) to the most formal, prestigious (researchers in the field of adult education, professors, community leaders). If you like this idea let me know and we can talk further.[22]From: Helen To : Tammy Subject: Women in Ad Ed I like your idea of looking at women's participation in the field as learners because I think the whole issue boils down first of all to women's discovery of self (of course I'm speaking personally) and then extending that to other women (women's ways of knowing).[23] Because of their learning and participatory styles women always seem to be in conflict with the academic establishment, the historical male model and that then causes us stress because we are seldom recognized for who we are. That's why you don't hear (historically) about the women in adult education except for the few who have made it their "mission." With respect to women as adult education practitioners, we have an entirely different approach. I'm thinking about my course -- Creating Programs in Adult Education -- and something I want to get into a little more in the near future. Women's planning processes are very different, I think, and no one has really addressed gender issues in the field of program planning. This is one of the things that accounts for a reaction to the traditional or classic model of program planning versus participatory approaches. Also, women are far more sensitive to (and experienced in) negotiating power and interests -- something Cervero and Wilson don't touch upon. I must keep these thoughts to come back to. Coming back to my first point and one of your last, influential women in adult education. I think we have difficulty finding them because they don't stand out the way male models do. Women's influence is far, far more subtle. We have learned to do that because it's the only power we hold. Some may interpret that as devious or manipulative, but I would think of it as survival. We influence in very intuitive and subtle ways far more, I think, than our male counterparts. And often more powerfully and significantly. That's why it's more difficult to "pick out" historically significant women in adult ed. There are far more women making an influence in ways that do not draw the spotlight and in ways that are more enduring. Holy smoke! Did I get on a roll or what? Where did all that come from? In any case I'm glad I sat down to do this. It's been the bright spot in a weekend that has just seen me write myself out of my research so that I'm looking at an incredibly sanitized version of what is supposed to be me. To quote my advisor "Stay with the objective -- I do believe it will have a stronger impact on the academic community." And this was from a woman. Interestingly enough, women and I have seldom got along and in key times they have always betrayed me ... I do have to question whether this is really an academic community I want to belong to.[24]Mary's and Helen's e-mails illuminate the relationships between gender constructs and certain aspects of adult education which Hugo suggests we examine. They both allude to the informal, but influential roles that women have played in adult education, but which may not have been suitably recognized historically or present day. Helen also identifies the importance of discovering self, an approach to learning not often attended to in educational settings. Her final discussion of women as educators and academics points to a number of competing and contradictory discourses in which women find themselves.
Rethinking "influential" seems particularly relevant in looking at the role that women have played overall in adult education. While influential typically brings to mind one's ranking in an organization, one's publication record, or one's authority and sanctioned power within an organization, some of the more informal roles "influence" in subtle ways. Program associates or assistants (usually women) are often the first contact for adult learners wishing to return to an educational setting. Their support and encouragement, together with helping new learners navigate the educational bureaucracy, is overlooked. One only has to review course and program evaluations for proof of their importance and influence.[25]
Similarly, the roles played by the secretaries of adult education associations in Canada -- the Canadian Association for Adult Education (CAAE), Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education (CASAE), the Canadian Association for University Continuing Education (CAUCE) -- are not adequately recognized. The behind the scenes work of these people (again, usually women) has far reaching influence.
The same can be said for the multitude of women in parttime instructional or coordinating roles in a variety of community/volunteer organizations, parent groups, churches, and continuing education groups. While organizations are coming to recognize that these women are the frontline ambassadors of the organization, they still tend to be underpaid and undervalued. As Helen says, "There are far more women making an influence in ways that do not draw the spotlight and in ways that are more enduring." One just needs to take a look around.
Helen's observation that women's learning "boils down first of all to women's discovery of self" reflects the growing recognition that many women have felt alienated and silenced[26] in traditional educational environments that have valued competition and argument over collaboration and dialogue. Very often, a return to adult education (no matter what the particular context) can spark a process of discovery of self for women.[27] Adult education methods are held up as participatory, collaborative, and supportive of relationships. With the guidance of a facilitator, learners come to construct their knowledge within a supportive and safe environment.[28] This is very much in keeping with feminist approaches to learning.
Herein lies the contradiction, however. Adult education methods, overall, are said to be about participation and collaboration. That is not always so and is especially not so in graduate adult education programs. When Helen says, " I do have to question whether this is really an academic community I want to belong to." she is referring to the contradictory discourses in graduate adult education that place both women and men in challenging positions. As one participant in my research noted:
The other thing that I found very contradictory is that here were all these people teaching me adult education who never used any practices of adult education. It's like you get into a university setting and you do things a certain way regardless of what you know. I mean here they're talking about needs assessments and being interactive and I thought so," Elizabeth laughed, "let's see some of it and I saw nothing."[29]
S. Benson et al. make an even stronger criticism of their experiences in a graduate adult education program when they say, "As women and as a woman from another culture, we have found that we are discouraged, or at least not encouraged, to participate in the academic discourse. The many "rules" of the discourse within the traditional institution, rules about power and knowledge, favour the participation of others."[30] The adult education field has yet to grapple with an institutional academic discourse that does not support the very values upon which the entire adult education enterprise is built. Adult educators who espouse and want to live feminist practices and/or adult education practices must find a way to work with these contradictions.[31]
It is no wonder that women graduate students question how they will fit into adult education overall. People have asked me how many times I thought of quitting my Ph.D. program. Every day, I replied. Now that I am involved in teaching graduate courses in adult education, the tension has heightened. I find it incredibly difficult to remain true to what adult education and feminism have taught me over the years, and maintain my credibility as a professor caught in a system that still insists on specific ways to represent knowledge and specific grades to assess that knowledge.
Helen's comment that "women and I have seldom got along and in key times they have always betrayed me" also reminds me of an interesting conversation that took place among the women in my research. One of them suggested that there appears to be a need for women professors to push their women students, to be more demanding than their male counterparts, and, in some cases, to oppress and silence women. The suggestion was that women professors had a challenging time themselves as graduate students and so, thus, they pass this on to their own students. There was really no consensus on the issue, as some of the other women in the study felt that the women professors they had were excellent adult education role models. To me, it is a very troubling contradictory discourse in academic adult education that can alienate women from each other.
The experiences of women in adult education mirror those of women in many other disciplines and fields of study. While the feminist movement has done much to address women's marginalization and oppression, its relevance to all women in all contexts at all times is being questioned. Tetreault suggests there are five phases a discipline moves through in its increasing inclusion of gender issues.[32]
Phase one, male scholarship, assumes that male experience is the norm. Phase two, compensatory scholarship, considers women as deficient and the emphasis is to bring them up to the male standard. Phase three, bifocal scholarship, views the human experience as dual, male and female, and strong roles are expected of each gender. Phase four, feminist scholarship, views women multidimensionally. Phase five, multifocal/relational scholarship is gender balanced. There is a realization that experiences are the same and different across genders.[33]
Linda Sattem's research suggests that much of adult education research is reflective of phases two and three. As she says of the scholarship in adult education at these levels, "valuable information is learned about women and their experiences. This information was and is missing from our knowledge base. The danger would be that adult education stays in these early phases."[34] Collard and Law echo this sentiment by suggesting that
However, to our knowledge, adult education has yet to consider the impact of postmodern thought on its foundational bases and on the normative social and political goals it draws from these.[35]
It is my hope that this chapter has raised questions about the role of women in adult education. There is much I did not address adequately -- women in instructional roles, women as planners, and women in administration being only a few examples. As women recover their history and voices through the scholarship we have already seen, I hope we move on to embrace a multifocal practice and scholarship that transcends universal categories and labels such as gender, class or race, to acknowledge the sameness and difference in all of us.
1. C. Brooks, Z. Dharsey, M. Francis, T. Mitchell, "Working Across our Differences -- Perspectives on Oppression," Convergence, XXVI, 2 (1993) p.21.
2. Sight has usually been the metaphor used for knowledge as in "my eyes were opened and I saw the light." In contrast, the work of C. Gilligan, In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982) and M. Belenky et al. suggest that voice is a metaphor for understanding women's experience and development. They also point out the difference between the private (or personal) and public voice (as do other feminists). The private, subjective voice has usually been viewed as inappropriate to describe the more public aspects of work. Feminists assert that the personal is the public (or political).
3. Cited in T. Dewar, Women and Graduate Adult Education: A Feminist Poststructuralist Story of Transformation, Doctoral Thesis (Calgary: University of Calgary, 1996) p.123.
4. See T. Dewar, Women and Graduate Adult Education, 1996, for a discussion of the themes identified in the previous two paragraphs, as they apply to women in graduate adult education.
5. See the discussion of postmodern perspective in the previous chapter.
6. Defining postmodernism is a challenge (and, some would say, a contradiction in itself) -- entire books are written on the subject. Laurel Richardson ("Writing: A Method of Inquiry" in Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln, eds., Handbook of Qualitative Research. London, Sage, 1994) provides the most concise explanation I've read: The core of postmodernism is the doubt that any method or theory, discourse or genre, tradition or novelty, has a universal and general claim as the "right" or the privileged form of authoritative knowledge. Postmodernism suspects all truth claims of masking and serving particular interests in local, cultural, and political struggles." So, for example, postmodernism would question the assumption that researchers are to take an objective stance toward their research, or that the proper way to write a textbook chapter (or research paper) is in an objective, third person voice. Feminist poststructuralism is one outgrowth of the postmodern movement. In this approach, one is "persistently self-conscious about her or his personal biography and social positionality and the positive and negative effects those might have on the research process and the published report of the research" (J. Schuerich, "Methodological Implications of Feminist and Poststructuralist Views of Science" in NCSTL Monograph Series No 4, ERIC Doc# ED 364 421 (1992) p.8).
7. See, for example, J. Hugo, "Adult Education History and the Issue of Gender: Toward a Different History of Adult Education in America," Adult Education Quarterly 41, 1 (1990) pp.1-16 for a discussion of historical perspectives; E. Hayes and L. Smith, "Women in Adult Education: An Analysis of Perspectives in Major Journals," Adult Education Quarterly 44, 4 (1995) pp.201-217 for perspectives on women in adult education publications; and S. Collard and J. Stalker, "Women's Trouble: Women, Gender, and the Learning Environment," New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, No 50 (1991) for women in educational environments.
8. J. Gore, The Struggle for Pedagogies (New York: Routledge, 1993) p.49.
9. For an excellent overview, see K. Pritchard Hughes, "Feminist pedagogy and feminist epistemology: an overview," International Journal of Lifelong Education 14, 3 (1995) pp.214-230. For an in-depth treatment of the subject, see J. Gore, The Struggle for Pedagogies (New York: Routledge, 1993).
10. Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harre, "Contradiction in Lived and Told Narratives" Research on Language and Social Interaction 25, 1991/2, pp.8-9. The notion of competing and contradictory discourses comes out of the work of feminist poststructuralists such as C. Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987); B. Davies and R. Harre, "Contradiction in Lived and Told Narratives" Research on Lived Experience (Newbury Park: Sage, 1991/92); and P. Lather, Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy with/in the Postmodern (New York: Routledge, 1991). Discourse refers to the common sense beliefs a particular group of people have and the language they use to express it. The language they then use (especially in regards to self), can influence their own power within a particular context. Of contradictory discourses, Weedon suggests, "How we live our lives as conscious thinking subjects, and how we give meaning to the material social relations under which we live and which structure our everyday lives, depends on the range and social power of existing discourses, our access to them and the political strength of the interests which they represent" (p.26). Examples include any of the professional discourses (ie. legal, medical, educational). Very often, the average person can be powerless because they do not have access to the language of the discourse -- they must rely on the lawyer, the doctor, the educator to interpret and represent their interests.
11. Private e-mail, Carley, November 3, 1996. While the protocol of quoting from various types of electronic means is still in transition, some distinction has been made between public discussion lists on the internet and private communication between people. Public lists are those that can be accessed by anyone over the internet, and standard practice is that one can quote from those, provided full reference is used. E-mail communication between people is considered private and, therefore, permission must be gained from individual authors before quoting. Permission has been granted by all e-mail authors referenced in this chapter.
12. Laurel Richardson's work is seminal in challenging the notion that knowledge must be represented in an objective, distanced manner, usually characterized by an absent narrator and passive voice. She points out that using these conventions "increases the probability of one's work being accepted into core social science journals, but they are not prima facie evidence of greater -- or lesser -- truth value or significance than social science writing using other conventions" (1990, p.17). See the following sources: Writing Strategies: Reaching Diverse Audiences (Newbury Park: Sage, 1990); "The Consequences of Poetic Representation," in Investigating Subjectivity: Research on Lived Experience, eds. C. Ellis and M Flaherty (Newbury Park: Sage, 1992); "Poetic Representation, Ethnographic Presentation and Transgressive Validity: The Case of the Skipped Line," The Sociological Quarterly, 34, 4 (1993); "Writing: A Method of Inquiry," in Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln, eds., Handbook of Qualitative Research (London: Sage, 1994). See my dissertation for an example of a multi-genre approach (individual/collaborative autobiography, real/imaginary dialogue, circles of learning, narrative, fictional representation, stories, deconstruction and poetry) to the representation of a research project.
13. Private e-mail, Lynn, November 4, 1996.
14. L. Karlovic, "Jessie Allen Charters," Adult Learning May/June, 1993, p.13.
15. A valuable resource, however, for adult educators who would like to address this lack in their own classrooms is the Herstory, The Canadian Women's Calendar series. Published annually (with the exception of 1983 and 1984) since 1974 by the Saskatoon Women's Calendar Collective, these calendars profile women and women's organizations of our past and present. I was amazed by the number of women I read about who played significant roles in adult education in Canada. Michael Welton has written of women in adult education. See, for example, M. Welton, ed. Educating for a Brighter New Day: Women's Organizations as Learning Sites (Halifax: Dalhousie University, 1995) or M. Welton "Amateurs Out to Change the World: A Retrospective on Community Development" Convergence 28, 2 (1995) pp.49-61. Convergence, while concerned with international issues over-all, is also an excellent resource. See their subject index for a wealth of articles about women in adult education. Refer also to Chapter 4 by Shauna Butterwick in this book.
16. J. Hugo, "Adult Education History," p.2.
20. G. Walker as paraphrased in S. Collard and J. Stalker "Women's Trouble: Women, Gender, and the Learning Environment," New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, No 50 (1991) p.76.
21. While the context of this discussion is historical perspectives on women and how an individual professor's perspective might influence curriculum choices, how women are portrayed overall in the literature (and how that then informs adult education curricula) is important. E. Hayes and L. Smith, "Women in Adult Eduation: An Analysis of Perspectives in Major Journals," Adult Education Quarterly 44, 4 (1994), pp.201-217 used qualitative content analysis to examine 112 articles in four major North American and British adult education journals for their perspectives on women. Five dominant perspectives emerged -- women as adult learners, women as deficient, women as coping with new social roles, women as marginalized, and women as collaborative learners. A sixth perspective (only identified in one article), women as feminist, was noted by the authors as holding more promise in that it "provides the opportunity to identify and understand feminists' proactive efforts to create positive change for themselves and other women. In addition, it becomes possible to clarify the values and political agendas that underlie alternative feminist approaches" (p.213). The literature chosen by individual professors for inclusion in the adult education curriculum could portray a multitude of perspectives of women. As Hayes and Smith point out, adult education has the potential to make valuable contributions to general feminist scholarship on women and gender. As an expanding and diverse educational arena, with women as its most rapidly growing student population, adult education represents a societal factor with a potentially significant relationship to both the maintenance and change of gender-related roles and norms (p.214).
22. Personal e-mail, Mary, November 2, 1996.
23. The phrase "ways of knowing" has come to be associated with the work of M. Belenky, B. Clinchy, N. Goldberger and J. Mattuck Tarule, Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1986). Their work suggests that women experience truth, knowledge and development in five "ways of knowing." Their main finding suggests the importance of relationships, caring, and a sense of community to women's experiences as learners/knowers. While they also suggest that these ways of knowing could be found in men's thinking, they did not claim that their findings did represent men's experiences.
24. Personal e-mail, Helen, November 24, 1996.
25. In a recent conversation with Lynn, she pointed out that associates and assistants outside the adult education field also play an educational role overall. Consider the informal educating they do in their daily interactions with supervisors and colleagues, because they are the central information source for the activities of an office. This certainly challenges our definition of an adult educator.
26. See Belenkey et al., Women's Ways of Knowing; R. Hall et al. "The Classroom Climate: A Chill One for Women?" (Washington: Association of American Colleges, n.d.); and M. Lewis and R. Simon "A Discourse Intended for Her: Learning and Teaching within Patriarchy," in J. Gaskell and A. McLaren, eds., Women and Education (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises, 1991).
27. Belenkey et al., Women's Ways of Knowing, 1986.
28. The adult education literature is full of such examples, too numerous to mention here.
29. As cited in Dewar, Women and Graduate Adult Education, p.98.
30. S. Benson, J. Fretz, S. Jiao, and K. Kennett "When Silence Isn't Golden: Four Female Graduate Students' Experiences of Academic Discourse," Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education (Vancouver: Simon Fraser University at Harbour Center, 1994, p.37). For yet another perspective on women's learning in higher education, see E. Hayes and D. Flannery, "Narratives of Adult Women's Learning in Higher Education: Insights from Dissertation Research," Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (New York: 1996). They identify four concerns -- lack of any coherent line of research on women's learning, little incorporation of a gendered analysis, need for research that involves a more diverse group of adult women, and adult women's experiences of being "outsiders" in higher education. While their research confirms many of the themes mentioned in this chapter, they also found some intriguing challenges and contradictions to popular beliefs. For example, a popular assertion is that women tend to be "silent" in classroom discussions due to self-doubts and low confidence. In contrast, as we described above, the women in Furst's (1994) study described themselves as outspoken (p.7).
31. See G. Payeur "Women as Adult Educators," Adult Learning (1993) p.12-14, for a personal account of this "integration."
32. M. Tetreault "Feminist Phase Theory: An Experienced-Derived Evaluation Model," Journal of Higher Learning 56, 4 (1985) pp.363-384.
33. Paraphrased from L. Sattem, Adult Education and Feminist Phase Theory: Practicing What we Teach (Ohio State University: Proceedings of the Annual Midwest Research to Practice Conference, 1993).
34. L. Sattem, Adult Education and Feminist Phase Theory, p.95.
35. S. Collard and M. Law, "Universal Abandon: Postmodernity, Politics and Adult Education," in Annual Adult Education Research Conference Proceedings (Athens: Georgia University, 1990) p.54.