| Summary: | Thesis (M.A. (English Education)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Arts, 1998. === Through Action Research it is the aim of this researcher to explore three broad critically inter-related questions in relation to the field of adult education in South Africa today and my own work with learners in an English Level 4 /4 a Language classroom. The questions are the following:
• Given that we are presently living in a world of vastly accelerated
change, what are the policies, practices and needs of adult
learners that must be taken into consideration and/or promoted
if adult education provisioning in the South African context is to
be successful in general, and if it is to be enabling for learners,
more specifically, in the English 'second’ language classroom?
• Secondly, given the historical imbalances of the past, are the
needs of blackwomen, as members of the adult learner field,
being adequately addressed by policies and practices in adult
education provisioning as it is being provided by the State
and/or other service providers at present?
• If not, what considerations and recontextualisations will promote
critically social transformative action that is geared towards
gender equity and provision in both official policy documents
and local practices? Might these recontextualisation processes
critically engage with questions around: changing technologies, Through Action Research it is the aim of this researcher to explore three
broad critically inter-related questions in relation to the field of adult
education in South Africa today and my own work with learners in an
English Level 4 /4 a Language classroom. The questions are the following:
• Given that we are presently living in a world of vastly accelerated
change, what are the policies, practices and needs of adult
learners that must be taken into consideration and/or promoted
if adult education provisioning in the South African context is to
be successful in general, and if it is to be enabling for learners,
more specifically, in the English 'second’ language classroom?
• Secondly, given the historical imbalances of the past, are the
needs of blackwomen, as members of the adult learner field,
being adequately addressed by policies and practices in adult
education provisioning as it is being provided by the State
and/or other service providers at present?
• If not, what considerations and recontextualisations will promote
critically social transformative action that is geared towards
gender equity and provision in both official policy documents
and local practices? Might these recontextualisation processes
critically engage with questions around: changing technologies,
Through Action Research it is the aim of this researcher to explore three
broad critically inter-related questions in relation to the field of adult
education in South Africa today and my own work with learners in an
English Level 4 /4 a Language classroom. The questions are the following:
• Given that we are presently living in a world of vastly accelerated
change, what are the policies, practices and needs of adult
learners that must be taken into consideration and/or promoted
if adult education provisioning in the South African context is to
be successful in general, and if it is to be enabling for learners,
more specifically, in the English 'second’ language classroom?
• Secondly, given the historical imbalances of the past, are the
needs of blackwomen, as members of the adult learner field,
being adequately addressed by policies and practices in adult
education provisioning as it is being provided by the State
and/or other service providers at present?
• If not, what considerations and recontextualisations will promote
critically social transformative action that is geared towards
gender equity and provision in both official policy documents
and local practices? Might these recontextualisation processes
critically engage with questions around: changing technologies,
differential power relations (female/male) and unbalanced
structural relations in social institutions (race/gender), usefully?
What do critical race feminists say and what can we learn from
them as we attempt to put into place an enabling legislative
framework for the adult education field, possibly before 1999
elections?
It is a tenet of this research that the field of adult education cannot be
examined in isolation to other fields in the South African context. It is for
this reason, that recent policy documents from the department of Adult
Education and Training (AET Directorate: 1997a and 1997b) are set
against other contractual frames of reference such as the Constitution
(Act 108:1996) and the Employment Equity Bill (Department of
Labour: 1997), for example, to elicit trends, gaps, ideological
contradictions, convergences and positive gains so that the project of
transformation might be taken further.
Texts by learners are taken in this research as ‘discourse articulations’
through which I consider seriously the above and the meanings made by
learners in needs analysis interviews, questionnaires, class discussions,
writing sessions and in a classroom newspaper production and design
process known as the Simiwye Adult Afewspaper (See Appendix One).
Learners’ work as 'cognitive action and hard work’ (Kress: 1997, xxi),
provides valuable insights that can, I believe, inform usefully new
formulations for future provisioning in adult education that are more
complex and closely tuned to adult learners’ own 'lived’ realities and
needs, than those being presently circulated in the field by 'experts’.
The year of 1998, sees public adult learning centres in a state of crisis.
On the programmed day of opening at the beginning of the year, all
centres in Gauteng province were temporarily closed down by the State
because of 'budget constraints’. This happened in other provinces as
well, so that the new learning year of previously attending adult learners
at public learning centres was disrupted. Though centres were later reopened
in March, the disruption to the learning year has had negative
continuing effects for both adult learners and adult education
practitioners. As a result, many have left centres entirely, while those
who still are present question what may be salvaged of a thwarted year.
Originally as a practitioner/researcher, I planned to draw closely on my
experiences with learners in the making of the Simunye Adult Afetrepaper
(1997), to forward recommendations for curricular practice in the adult
education 'second’ language classroom. The value of the communicative
processes that went into the making of the newspaper with learners still
stands, while 'this moment’ in adult education urges for research
support that is less nuclear and more broadly enabling when budgets
vii
threaten to cut provision entirely and contractual frames of reference fail
to provide protection for adult learners and educators, so that they are
inhibited from fully enjoying what is their right. The Simunye Adult
A’fiivspaper (1997) (See Appendix One) is then always at the centre of this
research, though not always fully in view. It is the backdrop to all that
has gone before the 'present moment’ and to all that I say now in making
a case for the adult education learner. Indeed, my learners make their
own case in their own words through the newspaper project, so that this
research paper is as 'supporting act’ to what they say. What learners
don’t say in the newspaper is that they are being gravely short-changed
by the South African system, yet again.
I draw then on non-reductive sociological accounts to situate this present
moment in wider global context, as it is aligned to an instrumentalist
rationality that reifies relations (and humans) in favour of power and
money. This is what is happening in the field of adult education at
present. Adult learners and their needs are held at bay, so as not to
'distort’ or 'tax’ budget allocations that are increasingly smaller. I show
then that two of the most serious flaws in adult education at present are
to do with questions of conceptualisation and political will. Changing
these means that enabling future projects - like the Simunye Adult
Aewspaper that recontextualise the possible to promote real learning
change to occur in leamers-in-need-of-access -won’t be aborted stillborn.
“All o f us w ith m ultiple consciousness must help
society address the needs o f those m ultiply burdened
first. R estructuring and rem aking th e world, where
necessary, w ill affect those w ho are singularly
disadvantaged as w ell. By designing programs that
operate on m ultiple levels o f consciousness and
address m ultiple levels o f need, w e w ill a ll be able to
reach our true potential to the benefit o f ourselves,
our fam ilies, our profession, our country, and the
world” (Wing:1997a, B2-B)(emphasis unchauged).
“We, as black wom en, can no longer afford to th in k of
ourselves or let th e law thin k of us as m erely th e sum
of separate parts that can be added togeth er or
subtracted from, until a w hite m ale or fem ale stands
before you. The actuality o f our layered experience is
multiplicative. Multiply each of my parts together, 1 x
1 x 1 x 1 x 1, and you have one indivisible being. If you
divide one o f these parts from one you still have one”
(Ibid., 81)(emphasis unchanged).
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