Table Of ContentS E E K I N G
W I S D O M
I N A D U LT
T E A C H I N G
A N D
L E A R N I N G
an autoethnographic inquiry
WILMA FRASER
Seeking Wisdom in Adult Teaching and Learning
Wilma Fraser
Seeking Wisdom in
Adult Teaching and
Learning
An Autoethnographic Inquiry
Wilma Fraser
Canterbury Christ Church University
Canterbury, UK
ISBN 978-1-137-56294-4 ISBN 978-1-137-56295-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56295-1
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In loving memory of my first storytellers Bel (1917–2014)
and Greg Fraser (1916–1996). And to the staff of St Heliers
Residential Hotel, Folkestone, Kent, whose love and concern for
Bel during her six years with them exemplifies the best the caring
professions could offer, my heartfelt thanks.
P
reface
It was one of those cold, dark Saturday mornings in late autumn, when the
sun struggled blearily through the grey canopy of low-lying cloud to offer
some light, but little heat, to the day’s unfolding. Our university depart-
ment was holding a conference on the future of lifelong learning, and I
was sharing the journey into work with a colleague. We were both to
attend the morning session and then drive to another forum concerning
adult education’s fragile future, this time organised by a national educa-
tion charity for which I used to work. The day was, therefore, already
tinged with misgiving, and my colleague and I swapped, after our fashion,
the kind of desultory comment which reflected our levels of quiet con-
cern. On arrival, we were soon thoroughly taken up with the last-minute
tasks that any conference demands, and it was only a few minutes before
the keynote session was due to begin that I noticed that a line had been
drawn across the notice for my workshop, and the word FULL embla-
zoned underneath. It was then that participants began to approach and
ask if I would let them in: ‘It’s a big room, no-one would notice.’ I glanced
at my colleagues’ lists; most had a few names attached, but one was com-
pletely blank and I had a moment’s wave of sympathy for the rejection this
seemed to announce. But this was not a popularity contest. It was my title,
‘Wisdom and Adult Learning’, that had attracted the crowd.1
The energy in the room was palpable. The air of expectation and willing
participation surprised me, and there was such appetite for a language that
we rarely spoke; ‘skills’ yes, but ‘wisdom’? I showed a picture of
Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. I began
with the iconic framing of Adam’s and God’s hands in that almost but not
vii
viii PREFACE
quite touching moment of connection, of life, of the transmission of spirit.
But what of the rest of the picture? Who was the woman framed by God’s
left arm? Eve? Yet, as we all knew, Eve’s creation followed Adam’s.
A number of scholars (including Conrad 2007; Hall and Steinberg
1993; and Rzepinska 1994) suggest that this figure represents the femi-
nized personification of wisdom, ‘who accompanied the Lord from the
beginning of Creation’ (Rzepinska, p. 181) and whose voice is to be heard
in the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament. This claim for her identity
is also supported by theologian Karen Armstrong, who notes, ‘[i]n the
third century BCE, a Jewish writer personified the Wisdom of God that
had brought the world into being. He imagined her at God’s side, like
Plato’s demiourgo’ (2009, p. 79).2 In ancient Greek, the word for wisdom
was sophia (sapientia in Latin); and in the succeeding millennia, the per-
sonification of wisdom as Sophia has undergone both accretion and trans-
formation, as ‘she’ has been appropriated by a significant number of
religious and secular thinkers to represent a possible summation of knowl-
edge’s potential. My suggestion in the conference session was that ‘her
half-hidden nature, in terms of the level of mainstream cultural attention
paid to her, reveals much about her contested presence in prevailing
Western discourses’ (Fraser and Hyland-Russell 2011, p. 26); and my
challenge to the participants in that workshop was the following: ‘What
care and attention, if any, do we give to notions of wisdom in our daily
pedagogic practices? If the answer is in the negative, what consequences
might there be for the framing and so-called delivery of educational poli-
cies; and for their reception by students, by institutions and by ourselves
as lecturers and tutors within FE, HE and Adult Education?’
Later that morning, my colleague and I left for the meeting concerning
the future of adult education in the light of a forthcoming general elec-
tion. The local Branch of the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA)
had invited all prospective parliamentary candidates in the town where I
live to a special meeting about their respective political parties’ attitudes
towards sustaining government support for adult education should they
gain power. The WEA is a national educational charity (with international
reach) which was established in 1903/1905 in order to provide educa-
tional opportunities for working-class men and women, the better to
ensure the sustainability of a healthy citizens’ democracy via the fostering
of critical intelligence.3 Its aim for the afternoon was rather less ambitious;
during the previous 10 to 15 years, the WEA, and other adult education
providers, had suffered a significant decline in government funding, at the
PREFAC E ix
same time as finding themselves the focus of particular accountability
regimes consistent with instrumentalist and bureaucratic forms of surveil-
lance and control (Field 2000; Martin 2008; West 2010). The purpose of
the meeting was simple. ‘To what extent might the WEA and other, simi-
lar, organisations, be enabled to continue their work?’ The responses were,
stripped of their polite embellishments, equally simple; and I paraphrase:
‘Whilst we recognise and applaud the sterling work of the WEA and oth-
ers, we cannot, in these dark days of recession and minimal resources,
privilege support for adult education beyond the needs of the economy
and relevant and related “upskilling”.’
There was some comfort to be derived in the days following my presen-
tation. Some of the participants told me how they had drawn upon our
session on wisdom within their own teaching practices. They did not mini-
mise the challenge involved. They were all tutor-trainers, and their con-
texts included working with bricklayers, army engineers and the police.
My colleagues explained that they had wanted to harness some of the
vitality in the workshop, but they did not expect the overwhelming
responses which their students provided. ‘It’s real you see,’ the tutors said,
‘it’s so much more real than the stuff we normally deliver’ (see Fraser and
Hyland-Russell 2011, p. 25).
But what was meant by these distinctions between differing levels of
reality? What was being offered that could generate such enthusiasm and
promote further dissemination? Other colleagues at our conference
offered the promise of rebellion in their titles (e.g. Strategy, Discipline and
the Lifelong Learning Body; The Future of Skills for Life: Differentiation or
Disgrace?). But the word ‘wisdom’ in mine hinted at something more, and
the opportunity of connecting with each other in a different kind of peda-
gogic space.
One of my colleagues spoke to me of the resonances he had felt during
our session. ‘Sean’,4 a retired Detective Chief Superintendent, taught in
the same department as me. He compared the environment that he had
left in the police service with the prevailing situation in some fields of adult
education, including our own department of post-compulsory education
and training:
A lot of the issues were the management mantras; ‘value for money,’ ‘effi-
ciencies,’ ‘economies,’ ‘more for the same’ and ‘the same for less’ and it
appeared to me that we were actually beginning to lose focus from what we
were here to do; and we very much got into instrumentalist sort of policies,
x PREFACE
and works, and targets and performance which skewed a lot of the real pur-
pose of policing. But the thing that surprised me is that some of the things
that I railed against in the police force, I still rail against today [in Education]
because the aims and objectives, the intended learning outcomes, the lesson
planning is so defined they’ve actually lost the plot of what they’re here to
do. (Fraser and Hyland-Russell 2011, p. 32)
Sean’s words resonate with those of Abbs (1979, pp. 11–12), who
argued so cogently almost 40 years ago that:
[T]he instrumental view of education is recorded faithfully in the mechani-
cal metaphors and grey abstractions of current educational discourse […]
The effect of such language is to numb the mind. […] It is not an accident
that many of the metaphors, dead as they are, derive from mechanics […]
from military manoeuvres […] and from behavioural psychology […] It is
the language of stasis, leaving education without a subject, without a history
and without a future. (In Fraser and Hyland-Russell 2011, p. 29)
It is a language far removed from the vibrant and vital potential I see in
Michelangelo’s depiction of the female figure in God’s embrace. But to
what extent might she serve as restorative metaphor for a revitalised fram-
ing of certain teaching and learning policies and practices? Sean and I, and
others of our colleagues who responded to my workshop, would seem to
be in accord in distinguishing between our current parcelling of the learn-
ing process into easily digestible components ‘and the opening of the
mind and soul to the potential for greater knowing that cannot always be
predicted’. And, as Tara Hyland-Russell and I also went on to argue, if:
instrumentalist, consumerist and bureaucratic forms of knowledge dissemi-
nation come to dominate our pedagogic practices, the idea that [knowledge
construction] could make sense outwith these discursive frames becomes
less and less of a possibility. And it is because of its power to help [in deeper
meaning-making] that the pursuit of wisdom is so crucial. (Fraser and
Hyland-Russell 2011, p. 32)
Rather surprisingly, perhaps, the concept of ‘wisdom’ is significantly
undertheorised within educational terrains (Tisdell 2011). The book that
follows seeks Sophia, and her metaphorical power, to help in understand-
ing the different and hopeful expectations she seemed to evoke in col-
leagues such as those who attended the workshop, and to explore her
PREFAC E xi
resonance in articulating some of the tensions within the prevailing dis-
courses which shape and frame particular kinds of educational practices.
This quest for Sophia is also couched within larger questions about the
potential for education, specifically adult education, to attempt to address
deeper and more troubling aspects of certain sociopolitical, psychosocial,
spiritual and environmental concerns that beset us all.
This pursuit also entails trying to grasp what Sophia represents for me
and why I feel I must heed her call. Without that understanding, I fear
that the integrity of this project would be significantly diminished. In what
follows, in this autoethnographic inquiry, I am striving to find connections
between certain aspects of my own biography and their resonance with
larger concerns. C. Wright Mills (1959/2000, p. 11) urges precisely this
connectivity in The Sociological Imagination:
What are the major issues for publics and the key troubles of private indi-
viduals in our time? To formulate issues and troubles, we must ask what
values are cherished yet threatened, and what values are cherished and sup-
ported, by the characterizing trends of our period.
It is in the spirit of asking these questions, and in the invitation to read-
ers to engage with the ‘conversation’ that follows, that my search for
Sophia is framed. And it is in this spirit that the tone and tenor of the book
unfold.
Canterbury, UK Wilma Fraser
Notes
1. This episode first found expression in ‘Searching for Sophia: Adult Educators
and Adult Learners as Wisdom Seekers’, which was co-written by Tara
Hyland-Russell and me, and included in Tisdell and Swartz, 2011.
Quotations from that chapter are duly acknowledged.
2. In Fraser and Hyland-Russell, 2011, p. 26.
3. For an evocative portrayal of how historian and WEA tutor, E.P. Thompson,
interpreted the WEA’s mission, see Luke Fowler’s 2012 film, ‘The Poor
Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna
Southcott’ (lux.org.uk).
4. ‘Sean’ is one of many who have contributed so much to this volume. All
names introduced with quotation marks are pseudonyms.
