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Fifty years after the publication of “The Modern Practice of Adult Education,” andragogy has significant presence in English-language adult education and related fields. This article takes stock of the development of this mid-century intellectual project. The context of mid-century adult education in North America is described, and the rhizomatic relationship with previous instances of the idea is examined. The effects of the project on practice and theory are considered and difficulties regarding lack of theoretical development and empirical investigation are identified. The discussion argues that the continuation of the andragogical project depends on development of key aspects, including stronger connections with international manifestations of andragogy.

This is an invited paper based on the keynote presentation that Professor Ralf St Clair made at the 2019 Australian Council for Adult Literacy Conference in Sydney, Australia on 4 October.

Strategy is one of the most pressing and difficult areas of work for university leaders. There is an almost universal expectation for institutions and the pasts of institutions to have comprehensive strategic plans. St. Clair suggests strategies and strategic plans are often confused, and expresses concerns about the utility of the design school of strategy. He proposes deeper engagement with Mintzberg’s learning school of strategic planning, and lays out ways in which this can be used in learning-centred leadership. The idea of strategic investigations is introduced as a way to enter into strategic planning on the basis of enquiry, therefore using the strengths of the university as the underpinning of strategic work. St. Clair argues strategy should only consider components of an institution undergoing change or facing challenges, and presents a framework for strategic investigations to respond to these situations.

Any initiative within an institution needs to be evaluated in order to assess its effects and decide on the next steps. This chapter is based on the assumption that many university leaders are unfamiliar with evaluating social innovations and provides background for this type of work, including the nature and uses of logic models. The inputs, outputs, and outcomes of learning-centred leadership are discussed along with examples of the types of evidence available to evaluate them. In addition, examples of concrete rubrics are provided. In the second half of the chapter, St. Clair discusses world university rankings and their shortfalls and explores how an accountability mechanism could better take learning into account. The aim of the chapter is to provide an initial toolkit for those interested in understanding more about the potential effects of learning-centred leadership and how to capture them.

St. Clair discusses learning in this chapter, and how it should be conceived as part of an organisational leadership approach. The central definition of learning as “the creation of more effective mental models” is introduced, and tied to socio-cultural, transformative, and double-loop theories of learning. The lessons from learning theory are identified and explored with particular attention to the ways the theories can enrich understanding of what it means to learn. The discussion engages with diversity, with St. Clair arguing for the pervasiveness and importance of diversity as a concern in contemporary higher education. This will involve both challenging dominant ideologies and raising the profile of experiential knowledge and learning within the academy. The chapter ends by explicating the links between learning and leadership, and how they can be mutually supportive factors in the university.

Learning-centred leadership has implications for the way an entire institution is structured and works together. The discussion begins with an examination of resources in the academy, including the various sources of support and the importance of unencumbered revenue. The central question St. Clair addresses is how resources can be arrayed to support the implementation of learning-centred leadership. The most important aspect of addressing this question is ensuring the conditions are right to support engagement within and beyond the institution. The implications of this idea are explored in the context of faculty professional development, building a leadership team, as well as communications and development. Learning allows a coherent narrative to be built, linking these areas together and ensuring these different aspects of resource utilisation are supporting the institutional vision.

A deep understanding of the challenges of contemporary university leadership requires an appreciation of the historical forces shaping the institution and their continuing influence. This chapter recounts the development of the university as an institution based around three phases: the early university, the emergence of the research university, and the current trend to massification and universalisation. St. Clair pays particular attention to issues of leadership in these phases, which serve as a background to a discussion of the current state of university leadership. The greatest challenge is the demand for accountability arising from the implementation of New Public Management in public services generally and in universities, in particular. This demand changes the role of the university leader by demanding that more attention be paid to organisational performance and separating the roles of leaders and academic staff.

The three central areas of academic responsibility are teaching, research, and service, and this is true on the individual and collective level. They are tied together by the idea of knowledge, and strongly influenced by how it is conceived. St. Clair argues that the approach to knowledge at the centre of learning-centred leadership has implications for how these functions are fulfilled. The open and inclusive notions at the heart of the leadership approach support research-enriched student experience and collectively designed programme structures. Research becomes a strategic resource for the university, capable of being orientated towards the institution’s vision. Perhaps most pressing, the university’s vision of its relationship to key constituencies shapes how it approaches its own development. Learning-centred leadership does not rule out any particular set of values or vision, but does require a shared awareness of what they constitute.

The international adult literacy survey series has been conducted for over 25 years, culminating most recently in the PIAAC results released in 2013. Canada was deeply involved in the development of the series, and for PIAAC funded a sample size around seven times the average. Yet the analysis of the results has been limited, and impact on the field yet more so. This chapter discusses one explanation for the failure of the survey to have a wider impact, and identifies implications for adult education policy more broadly.

This paper aims to better understand the relationship between young people's aspirations towards education and jobs, and the context in which they are formed, especially to understand better the role of disadvantaged places in shaping young people's aspirations. Policy makers maintain that disadvantaged areas are associated with low aspirations and there is support for this position from academic work on neighbourhood effects and local labour markets, but evidence is slim. Using a two-stage survey of young people in disadvantaged settings in three British cities, the paper provides new data on the nature of young peoples’ aspirations, how they change during the teenage years, and how they relate to the places where they are growing up. The findings are that aspirations are very high and, overall, they do not appear to be depressed in relation to the jobs available in the labour market either by the neighbourhood context or by young people's perceptions of local labour markets. However, there are significa...

This article reports on a longitudinal study of student aspirations at the ages of 13 and 15 in three schools in the United Kingdom, where there has been a great deal of emphasis placed on aspirations in recent policy making. The data, based on individual interviews with 490 students in areas with significant deprivation as well as interviews with parents, teachers and community members, call into question the effectiveness of concentrating educational efforts on raising aspirations. Aspirations, even in these communities struggling with poverty, are very high—the missing element is the knowledge of how to make these aspirations concrete and obtainable. Implications for educators include insights into the highly aspirational nature of marginalised communities, the key role teachers play in helping aspirations come to fruition, and the need to focus on supporting young people to achieve aspirations that already substantially exceed the jobs available in the UK workforce.

The International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), an initiative of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), was carried out in the early to mid-1990s across more than 20 countries. It was followed in the early years of the 21st century by the Adult Literacy and Life Skills (ALL) survey and the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC, currently in data analysis). This article reviews the philosophical basis, theoretical underpinnings and data analysis of the original and subsequent IALS-based surveys. The purpose is to inform users of the survey data of what the surveys can, and cannot, provide. The author argues that the key use of these surveys is providing insights into population-level distribution of one form of literacy, namely a particular kind of text consumption in a developed society. He also points out the challenges regarding the use of the survey series for making international comparisons, for documenting change over time and for representing broad models of literacy. The tendency to use the survey findings for these uses is considered by the author as a misuse of the data, which leaves the potential of the IALS surveys to provide insights into the effectiveness and equity of different educational systems largely untapped.

The authors critique the mechanistic notion of aspirations running through much research and policy-making on educational and vocational outcomes. They present a performative model, with individuals drawing on limited social resources to express aspirations within constrained contexts. This argument is illustrated by discussion of the findings of large-scale empirical investigation of the aspirations of 490 young people in three UK schools. Five themes from this analysis are presented and it is argued that these need to be explored in order to enrich and expand our understanding of young people's expression of aspirations.

Scotland has a strong learner-centred system of adult literacy and numeracy education. Examination of the Scottish system can usefully highlight the issues associated with application of this approach in adult education more generally. Two important aspects are the need for highly skilled educators and the difficulty of evaluating such systems. The authors conclude that the Scottish system is at a critical point in its development and may move closer to a more traditional model if the current approach is not deliberately maintained and developed. Scotland’s approach to literacy education is unique and has the potential to inform adult basic education in many other jurisdictions—about what is both desirable and undesirable within such a system. It has grown up through a combination of educational and political factors that have created the space for this alternative approach to basic education to emerge, along with the adoption of one dominant and influential theoretical perspective. Here we take a closer look at this initiative in terms of the background, the policy, the practice, and the areas that need further development. We hope this discussion will help illuminate ways in which changing the framing of adult education makes some things possible but makes others more problematic.

The aim of this article is to make initial suggestions as to how certain aspects of adult literacy and numeracy education would benefit from research resources. The author identifies several issues affecting literacy research, such as limited research capacity and lack of a shared international forum. He then discusses four aspects in more detail: models of literacy, the benefits of literacy education, instructional practices, and the effects of diverse settings for practice. In all of these areas, he argues, it is important that attention is paid to the distinction between research about and research in literacy and numeracy education, as these two types of research serve different purposes using different strategies. The article closes with a call for more reliable research-based information in order to inform and enrich the professional judgement of educators.

Transformations in educational research structures in the United States and UK over the past decade are examined, and it is argued that these changes are manifestations of wider forces. Rather than internal developments in the field, they are better understood as serving the changing interests of the state in an era of increasingly globalized capital. The argument that the imposed changes improve the quality of educational research is shown to be inconclusive. It is suggested that these structural transformations can be seen as an attempt to promote market managerialism in educational research for political ends.

In 2003 the National Literacy Secretariat (NLS) of Canada, at that time a branch of the Department of Human Resources and Development Canada, decided to review its research function. This article discusses some of the questions the review raised for the field. Many of these issues are to do with the management of knowledge – what research gets funded, to be performed by whom, and with what kind of approach – whereas others are concerned with the meaning of the research function itself, and what it can contribute to a field of practice such as adult literacy.

Federal educational policy, funding, and legislation are currently forwarding a research agenda described by the current administration as “scientifically based.” We characterize this agenda, described in multiple official documents as “the gold standard, “ as neopositivist. We consider the ways in which this research paradigm and the methods that accompany it (i.e., randomized field trials) are particularly problematic for knowledge generation in adult basic education, an important subfield of adult education. We focus on three areas of concern that exemplify in significant ways the limitations of scientifically based research: the contexts of adult basic education, the ways in which practitioners use research, and the state of the knowledge base.

This article examines the use of research by adult education practitioners both empirically and theoretically. It is suggested that arguments for making research more relevant to practice must be treated with caution and that the relationship between research and practice is inherently loose. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed.

The author identifies issues facing critical adult educators in academic settings and argues for instructors' and students' active engagement with critique.

Strategies for developing critical and active environmental literacy in adults are discussed in the context of developing and participating in the social practices likely to change the way our societies think about and act on ecological issues.

This article addresses the formation of curriculum in an employment preparation programme using a theoretical perspective combining the work of Bernstein and Bourdieu. The employment preparation programme (UTP) was situated within a Canadian labour union with a progressive, community-centred philosophy. Despite this orientation, the programme was strongly reproductive of current liberal constructions of unemployment as a personal trouble rather than a public issue, resulting in a highly prescribed educational process. I explain this using ideas of social and cultural capital, viewing UTP's primary function as transmission of appropriate forms of capital to unemployed people. Like economic capital, social and cultural forms have to be guarded against contamination and inappropriate expenditure, leading to the imposition of a strong boundary around valuable knowledge. The challenge for progressive educators in vocational settings is to find a way to transmit the capital necessary for success in the ...

The notion of community offers a useful analytical concept for exploring the vocation of adult education, but the value of this approach depends upon careful exploration and application of the term. One means to achieve this is to consider community in terms of a relationship rather than an entity. This approach shows how communities serve to regulate behavior and inform values. It also demonstrates some ways in which analysis of the underlying relationships provides insight into adult education practice.