Alan Tuckett contributed the following one page reflection on the weekend as
part of ALA's weekly email Commentary forum. You can go direct to the
commentary site at http://www.ala.asn.au/commentaries/Tuckett2405.pdf
or
read on.
Dear members,
Welcome to issue number 11 of the Commentary, written by Alan Tuckett,
NIACE, England.
Eating, drinking and adult learning - a letter from England
by Alan Tuckett
Adult Learning Australia Commentary, Number 11, 24 May 2000
This weekend a group of adult educators from Australia, South Africa,
Uruguay, Jamaica and a clutch of European countries, backed by staff
from UNESCO's adult education institute, have been at NIACE in
England, wrestling with the following question. What kind of document
would be helpful in support of the first International Adult Learners
Week, which will be launched at EXPO 2000 in Hanover, Germany on 8
September?
We all agreed that there is no prescription or formula for success -
other than that there is no paradigm. We agreed too, that we did not
want to produce a guide, but to capture conversations and experiences
of how people have explored using a festival to highlight adults'
learning experience in literacy, and in lifelong learning more widely.
Still, as soon as we said that, Joe Samuels from South Africa argued
that there needed to be celebration, eating, drinking and fun. They at
least transcend cultural boundaries. So too does the power of good
storytelling, and the effect of existing students on other people's
motivation to learn.
As the weekend rolled on, there was a sharp sense of common goals
shining through different practices - the literacy bus that toured the
communities of Benin for a month in the run up to International
Literacy Day performed a comparable function to the learning train
that travelled across Russia last September. Not quite the same as the
pensioners water-skiing on the River Mersey as part of Liverpool's
Growing Old Disgracefully campaign, the Swiss one hour a day learning
tram, or the church service that launches Jamaica's Adult Education
Week. All shared the displacement of adult learning from private and
invisible spaces to public and visible ones.
Everyone agreed that visual images were important, but few had such an
eye for design as the Australian campaign, with its coordinated images
on posters, pamphlets and television programs. Our financial
circumstances were different, and we debated long and hard about how
much needs to be planned, how far a Week or festival should be
top-down with state support, and how far it should grow bottom up.
We were all pleased to have UNESCO's endorsement of Adult Learners
Week as an enrichment of International Literacy Day - yet we wanted to
nurture the practice of mutual visits, shared experiences, and the
evolution of activities fit for the purposes of new participants. We
recognised that whilst Adult Learners Week is more than a Eurocentric
or Anglophone initiative, it had not yet succeeded in firing the
imagination of many in the south.
The results of our discussions are posted on the International Adult
Learners Week email group hosted by Adult Learning Australia, which
represents the beginning of a global dialogue on these issues.
Educational innovations are notoriously difficult to transfer from one
context to another. But there are now 30 or more countries organising
weeks, days or festivals to promote lifelong learning in this way. The
weekend gave way to the UK's Adult Learners Week and our politicians'
speeches reminded me how much we have borrowed of Keating's 'clever
country' policies… and we don't have an election until next year.
______________________________________________________________________
© Adult Learning Australia. Alan Tuckett <alan.tuckett@niace.org.uk> is
Director of the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education in England
and Wales. ALA welcomes your feedback at the online forum at
<www.ala.asn.au/commentaries>.
Tony Brown
Director
Adult Learning Australia - promoting lifelong learning
______________________________________________
http://www.ala.asn.au
02 6251 9918 (tel)
02 6251 7935 (fax)
PO Box 308 Jamison Centre, ACT 2614
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