ICAE’s Guevara: Flexibility and partnering needed in adult education policy

“Given the diverse nature of post-schooling education, we need flexibility in adult education policy, not rigid structures,” argues Robbie Guevara, President of International Council for Adult Education and Associate Professor at RMIT University in Melbourne.

Jose Roberto ‘Robbie’ Guevara, President of the International Council for Adult Education (ICAE) and Associate Professor of International Development at RMIT University in Melbourne, was interviewed after the European Association for the Education of Adults (EAEA) Conference held in Helsinki in June 2024. The discussion revolved around significant questions, including those addressed during the conference.

What do you see as the main concerns in the field of adult education and lifelong learning in the coming decades?

We asked this at the EAEA conference last summer, and a lot of adult educators identified the lack of resources and the professionalisation of the field. These are valid concerns.

“Sometimes the first thing you need to do is to keep quiet and listen. Listen to what the learners are saying and to what they may not be saying, rather than focus on the solution you might bring as an educator,” says Robbie Guevara.

However, I come from a tradition of community activist education in the Philippines. I’m an environmental scientist who found myself working in communities. We didn’t call it adult education, just community organising, which during the martial law period was activist-oriented, grassroots-based and transformative. Our learners were farmers, fisherfolks, women and indigenous peoples. It was learning that was part of building a stronger social movement.

Therefore, when you ask me what the main concerns are, my first thoughts were the social, environmental, and political issues that we need to learn and facilitate better with communities, if we are to contribute to responding to these concerns.

You mentioned professionalism, which implies that somebody’s paying you.

Yes, who’s paying you? How do you recognise professional qualifications of somebody who works in community building?

There is also a concern that professionalisation might make it too transactional. How do we keep the transformative at the heart of adult education?

Part of the answer is reflexivity. I tell my students to learn to keep quiet and listen. Listen to what the learners are saying and to what they may not be saying, rather than focus on the solution you bring as an educator.

It can be challenging for me an educator, because it makes me feel vulnerable. I don’t know what they expect from me. But if I can begin to see how I am part of this community, an insider rather than an outsider, then perhaps I will gain the confidence to walk alongside and learn with them.

What other issues are you concerned about?

There are also specific issues that we need to address such as climate change, gender inequality, peace, conflict and migration. These issues may seem distinct, but from a global perspective we do see them as inter-linked. One of the challenges for adult educators is how to effectively link the local experience to the global realities.

How to effectively link the local experience to the global realities?

There’s also a challenge of what adult learning is within international development cooperation. If you say you’re teaching people how to sew and weave, that is capacity-building for income generation. But I would argue that as development workers, who are also adults, we are also learning from the experiences of engaging with these communities. So, it is not just top-down capacity building but more mutual and reciprocal adult learning.

People who experience adult education are often those who have either missed out on schooling and have gained a second chance at learning. This is the challenge; I think adult education needs to be experienced and labelled to be appreciated.

You’ve touched on the solutions, but what else do you recommend in that regard?

What’s the practice of adult learning? It’s not just about teaching to a set curriculum. As a colleague said, in adult education the curriculum is life.

Adult learning is not just teaching curriculum. The curriculum is life.

As an adult educator, we usually begin with people’s problems. For me, it goes back to Paulo Freire’s conscientisation – motivating learners to identify – ‘what do I need to learn? Why do I need to learn this?’ They might have missed formal schooling, but they have life experience. How do we engage and value these?

Education policy is often biased toward what we call ‘front-end’ education, because it’s harder to make policy for post-schooling education which is more diverse. Hence, we need to embed the principles of contextuality, flexibility, adaptability and partnership-based approaches in adult education policy. We don’t need rigid structures.

What kinds of partnerships do you have in mind?

The critical partners are government, civil society and the private sector. We’ve been wary of the private sector going into education, particularly with digitalisation. But the private sector is also where a lot of adult learning happens, particularly within workplaces that provide this opportunity.

I prefer to call it partnering because when you talk about partnership, often it’s transactional, whereas partnering recognises a process whereby we are growing, changing and learning together.

Partnering refers to a process where we are growing and learning together.

Sometimes we forget the underlying principles that can inform what we’re trying to achieve. In Finland I learned about sivistys, that it’s not just about education. Like the German concept Bildung, it recognises that learning is part of our living.

So, the challenge is to find such concepts of learning within our own cultures, particularly from our local indigenous populations. We must reclaim and reconnect to these cultures. This could potentially enrich education policy.

How do we balance the needs of local and global education with lifelong learning?

For me, there’s no local that’s not globally connected. Climate change has shown this: it’s a shared global problem, but the local manifestation may be different.

But what cuts across is that climate change is not an environmental problem in search of a technical solution, it must include a global equity and justice dimension in how we teach it.

In the Philippines, the reality of the global came from our colonial past and more recently through our migrant workers. Everybody has a family member working overseas. But such global awareness needs to be linked to gender-sensitivity, because often it is the mother who works overseas. This is an example of an adult education issue that we need to learn more about.

What role does adult education play in tackling these global challenges?

It’s the understanding that the global is not ‘out there’. Global is perspective, not location. You can do global development with migrant and refugee populations in the streets of Melbourne, as you would in many European countries.

The pandemic gave us a quicker understanding of the global compared to climate change, which can be very slow change. I started talking about climate change with farmers in the early ‘90s and they said, ‘what is climate change? What’s the greenhouse effect?’ But now farmers have experienced it. They’ve seen that something has fundamentally changed, and they want to understand and find out how to overcome it.

The climate underpins most other challenges, but what other challenges do you see?

Another challenge is developing new ways of learning, recognising that information is easily accessible. Most people in cities can connect to the web to get information. I do recognise that there’s still a huge digital divide in terms of access and ability to afford the technology.

We need to find ways to facilitate learning with people across the different parts of this digital divide, including those who are ‘over-informed but under-critical’ and those who need basic adult literacy, even before they can develop digital literacy.

As soon as somebody in a remote village gets online, on social media, they immediately face disinformation.

Yes, they need to learn how to critically engage before they trust what they’re reading. How to get reliable information? It’s no longer just reading and writing.

Hence, we can refer to it as critical digital literacy or media literacy. Hence, the media should also be a partner in this.

The media now includes anybody who posts something.

Yes, we are no longer merely consumers of information. We create and share information.

But the mainstream media still plays a huge role, and governments have a responsibility to provide information through national broadcasters, for example. The anchor person on the evening news can be an adult educator.

In the end, we all play a role in contributing to some form of adult learning. But as a professional and committed adult educator, I would conclude that we are part of a continually emerging field of practice that we need to help to become more visible, if we are to ensure that we will have the resources to advance the kind of lifelong learning that we need to shape a more equitable and sustainable future for all.

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This article is part of the theme 'Policy and Practice 2024'.

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