Abstract
Through a global lens, this book encourages its readers to reconsider and reconceptualize the merits of adult education through its diverse documentation of the issue and its many points of intersection: race, class, gender, etc. In centering Lalage Bown, lifetime advocate for adult education as a basic right and a particularly powerful tool for liberation and the dismantling of oppressive systems, this text covers an impressive range of perspectives and concerns that relate back to a view of education as paramount in any real conception of social justice.
In chapter 3, Slowey remarks on the “knowledge exchange,” (p. 42) as a process that necessarily works in multiple directions, particularly in the case of extramural university adult education. In analyzing the legacy of the late Lalage Bown and her work in the role of Director of the Department of Adult and Continuing Education (DACE) at Glasgow University between 1988 and 1992, Slowey notes the changes that have been made possible for adult learners through DACE, while considering the reciprocal impact that far-sighted and radical approaches to adult education had on the institution itself, particularly regarding opportunities for women in higher education.
This kind of reflection on the potential of educational spaces to be beneficial in multiple directions is echoed in Chapter 13, where Oluwayemisi Obashoro-John and Brian Findsen write about older persons in Nigeria pursuing education for their continued human development as they age. By highlighting the usefulness of adult education for “engagement, healthy living and long-term independence,” (p. 191) this text consistently gives us evidence of this fact, while addressing the disparities and inequities in the way that adult education is practiced internationally.
What was most impressive in this book's contextualization of Lalage Bown's exploits in the field of adult education was the recounting of her time working in Ghana in the late 1940s. In chapter 11, Michael Omowela and Budd L. Hall write about the time that Bown spent at the University of Ghana, analyzing her approach to adult education in a colonial context. Lalage and her fellow adult educators were radically reshaping pedagogy through their work on the African continent by believing in education's transformative power beyond a designated space of learning. They did so because they understood that the change they sought required support for afro-centrism in politics, the arts, pedagogy, and more. They understood a vision of Africa in which Africans determined their own destinies and shaped their own living to be the way forward. Lalage and her coconspirators were not satisfied with the colonial imagination's racist and shortsighted beliefs of what could be brought forth by making education accessible to the African people. “Her (Lalage's) education was for the Independence movements in Africa and the world, for the building of confidence of political leaders, both women and men.” (p. 156) Bown's early work was anticolonial, equitable, and culturally conscious. It realized the educational potential of the people in respect to their strengths, viewing them through a lens that critiqued colonialism's racial bias and paternalism. Bown and her non-African colleagues working in collaboration with African scholars to shape the development of the field of African studies offers us a model for bridging cultural gaps to empower people through education. This approach to pedagogy prioritizes cultural independence and autonomy on the part of African scholars, while having the support and insights of Africanists (both African and Non-Africans who shared a belief in the integrity of the African people) at their disposal.
Beyond the breadth of the sources and testimonies compiled in Adult Education and Social Justice: International Perspectives, there is a noteworthy amount of care and thoughtfulness that is evident in the interweaving of texts and ideas and the interweaving of various issues of social justice. Among the contrasting and wide-ranging perspectives, there is a narrative that is being crafted from chapter to chapter, from place to place.
This book asks that its readers bring a kind of critical engagement to their reading that functions as a mirror, that implicates any of us who find ourselves at the foot of social injustices upheld by what bell hooks called “white supremacist patriarchal ideology,” (hooks, 1994) that is, racial and gender discrimination, poverty, and incarceration, and asks that we propel ourselves and each other toward actionable goals rooted in community, tenderness, and care, with the goal of liberation. Adult Education and Social Justice: International Perspectives is a resource for adult educators, adult learners, community organizers, and community members with any kind of investment in a future in which we are more educated, more enlightened, more understanding, and through those things—more free.
