Thesis for Ed.D. at University of Toronto, 1994.
CHAPTER 1 - RESEARCH STANCE
D'Arcy Martin
Within the adult education field, my own practice is aligned with that of popular education. The aims of this practice are to engage those with the least power in the society, to develop them as critical thinkers and transforming agents, and to accomplish this by dialogue rather than imposition.193
Popular education, as distinct from other streams of adult education, takes a stand in support of the oppressed sectors of society in their struggles for social justice.194 It uses democratic, collective, creative processes which respect the experience and knowledge of the learner and maximize participation. And it emphasizes the dialectical relationship between action and reflection - between education and popular organization.These are essential ingredients for progressive educational praxis within the Canadian union movement.
Above all, popular education is a philosophy of educational practice. It is no accident that it has developed on the margins of society, and on the margins of educational research.195
Deborah Barndt has recently summarized popular education in response to the basic questions: What is popular education? Why popular education? How is it done? Her responses are so clear and concise that I will cite them here fully:
"What?
Popular education is a process of developing peoples' awareness of their social situation and strengthening their ability to organize to change it. It integrates the processes of research, education, and organization by and for popular sectors.
Why?
Popular education is aimed at ending economic exploitation, political domination, and cultural dependency. Its ultimate goal is to build a new, more human and just society...
How?
Applying a dialectical methodology, popular education starts with peoples' experiences of working and organizing (practice), helps them develop a more critical structural understanding of those experiences (theory), and leads them to take more strategic action based on the new and deeper understanding (practice).
It is a collective process, involving people in teaching each other and in learning by doing.
It is critical, seeking the structural and historical causes of problems.
It is systematic, moving logically from the concrete to the abstract and back to the concrete (practice- theory- practice), encouraging both reflective and active phases.
It is participatory, involving people fully in the processes of research, education and organization.
It is creative, using cultural forms (drama, drawing, music, stories, photos) as educational tools, tapping peoples' imagination and energy."196
Popular education, then, is defined, not by what is taught but by what is learned and applied. This distinction comes clear in the practice of union education. The participants in a residential steward course of 2-5 days learn from a variety of sources. There are films, readings, exercises, lectures and discussions.197 The films may be selected by me and a course leader, the reading material and exercises written or at least edited by us, and the actual sessions led by us. Yet I remain convinced that much of the most valuable learning occurs simply because a union course provides a supportive collective environment in which people who are generally "time poor" have time to reflect on a single topic.198
The informal exchanges among participants are often a powerful source of learning as well. In this respect, the skilful union educator will always try to "bring the coffee break into the classroom", to maximize the frank and practical tone of self-directed learning in the formal courses. Indeed, for the learners, I have on occasion felt that the formal classes were a break and relaxation from the intensity of coffee break conversations!
For example, during a smoking break in a recent "Facing Training" course, I noticed that delegates from one plant were picking the brains of delegates from another plant where a joint training committee had been operating for some months.199 After the break, I asked the less experienced group to share what they had learned with the whole class, and the resulting discussion ran for a full hour. It was good pedagogy, good politics and good fun. The climate of the Learning Domain allows for such flexibility, and as long as the course leader is clear on objectives and able to keep people's attention focused on them, details of the course agenda can be re-negotiated constantly throughout the course.
The production, distribution and consumption of knowledge in contemporary society are unequal. Certainly there is evidence that this is so in Canada.200 Learning is one process by which unionized workers can challenge the limits imposed by inequalities of wealth, power and knowledge.
These inequalities are of particular importance in a period of transition from an industrial to an information society. The increased concentration of power in the hands of the "technocrats" and the increasing marginalization of "techno-peasants" raise these issues in stark terms. Essential to any discussion of popular education, then, is a position with regard to those who hold economic, social and educational power.
The single greatest advantage of a union over a formal education institution as a learning environment is the flow of power between teacher and student. In a union course, certification of outcomes is a secondary concern, and hence the power of educators over learners is drastically curtailed. The corresponding limit of union courses, like all the Learning Domain, is that the lack of widely accepted certification standards means that the learning achieved lacks a stamp of public approval which can assist the learner in seeking employment or advancement outside the union culture.201
The union course leader, then, lacks the traditional club of the Educational Domain, the capacity to grade and fail participants. However, the participants have the political club of criticizing the course leader in their locals, so that participants are not sent to future union education where that individual is teaching.
The participants in a union course are electors, and often opinion leaders among their fellow workers or they would not have been delegated to the course in the first place. The course leader is usually a staff representative, hired by the union officers and directly accountable to them. If push comes to shove, it is the participants whose voice will be heard over the comments of the course leader, however carefully phrased.
In other words, the power dynamics in union education are the precise opposite of those in the formal education system. This inversion of power models the social transformation that social unionism seeks more widely. It should be recognized and valued as a distinctive educational dynamic, indeed as the seed of a genuinely democratizing educational process from which the formal educational system could benefit greatly.202 It is this power in the hands of the learners which protects union educators from some of the mechanistic applications of popular education methods which occur elsewhere.
An example of mis-applied popular education approaches would be a recent text for teaching English as a Second Language, where five steps are applied to the de-coding of an image of an accident on the job. The steps themselves are: elicit a description of what's going on in the image, move to an identification of a problem it represents, the students' personal connection/affective response to it, situating of the problem in its social/historical context, and strategizing actions.
This sequence is certainly based on Freirean principles and practice, but its application is mechanistic, because the power processes shaping the culture of the workplace aren't incorporated:
"The premise seems to be that people don't perceive the social causes of their problems (in this case, poor ventilation), and that once they do, they will collectively take action on them. What concerns me is that this premise ignores the fact that people very often do perceive the social cause of their problem and don't take action for a whole host of reasons left unexamined by this approach.
The notion of subject-positioning helps me see that Mario could very well perceive that the lack of air is making him dizzy, yet still have self doubts about his carelessness. (Just as the women at my literacy program can see that the Philadelphia schools they attended were racist, yet still blame themselves for `failure'. Just as I knew, as an undergraduate, that a male professor had put his hand on my knee in his office, yet wondered afterward if it was all in my head.
Foucault's concept of power knowledge would suggest that in order to tackle Mario's self doubts, we'd need not to prove that he was careful, but to deconstruct the discourse that constitutes as true that workers are too stupid to be concerned about their own safety and take precautions."203
In the context of a union course, such a text would certainly come under critical scrutiny. Collective experience has been accumulated in the politics of the body. The rights to know, to participate and to refuse for health reasons are now widely assimilated into the union culture, and such material would not go unchallenged. While Mario might still not act against the employer, without collective support, at least the mystifications that might lead to self-blame could be overcome.204
Hence the power dynamics between participants and course leaders are central to this study. This can extend into reflections on the relations between members and leaders in the union, between workers and managers in the workplace and between unions and corporations - governments in Canadian society as a whole. The dialectic of interests in the educational process, and the building of a bridge around enlightened self-interest thus becomes a metaphor for renewal in the union and socialist transformation in the workplace and society as a whole.
Learning occurs in the union culture, in forms as valid and liberating as the individualized learning projects studied in liberal adult education. The power dynamics around it are integral and energizing rather than disruptive. Assertion of the "right to learn" by workers must necessarily be collective, since any individual who tries to negotiate with the state ( even in the relatively benign form it takes in Canada) simply has no bargaining leverage. He or she alone is in an open plaza, faced with a formidable adversary.
This is why the involvement of unions in public debate over job training is so significant. By securing a collective entitlement to paid leave from the job for study, and by influencing the content and method of the study, unions become a crucial advocate for the right to learn. The involvement of labour in establishing the Canadian Labour Force Development Board and corresponding provincial and local structures will be discussed below. At this point, it is sufficient to note that it is a logical extension of labour's commitment to membership education. And for unions to make a creative and democratizing contribution to the policy debate, it will be essential to draw on the experience of empowerment which members have felt in their own union courses.205
Trade unionists work with power every day. Indeed, the unionist tendency is to seek, not the most oppressed in a group of workers, but those who have leverage with which something could be done to remedy injustices. Union education seeks to build the information, confidence and skill needed to challenge hegemony. It undertakes this challenge by changing power relations in the workplace, in the union and in the society.206 The theme of transforming power relations will recur throughout this study.