Andre Grace

• University of Alberta

This article investigates the political, cultural, and educational work of two pioneering Canadian gay teachers during the 1990s: James Chamberlain and Murray Corren. These advocate-practitioners took up roles as social activists, cultural workers, and engaged teachers whose transgressive acts focused on the social and cultural transformation of sc...

For generations, sexual and gender minorities have had to confront “those seeking to will us away, persecute us into oblivion, or shame us into permanent despised status” (Brooks, 2015, p. xvii). Moreover, we have had to “willfully bear a stigma that is only now lifting” (Katz, 2015, p. xiv). Our progress, starting with recognizing gay rights as hu...

Political, cultural and social fallout following the introduction of the anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda in 2009 intensified fabrication of an anti-gay public pedagogy of negation and nemesis that fuelled the passage of the Anti-Homosexuality Act, 2014. The Government of Uganda, conventional Anglicanism and US evangelical Christianity were all im...

Since the mid-1990s, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has emphasized lifelong learning for all, spearheading various educational policy initiatives that expect the involvement of all sectors of education including higher education (Grace 2013; Milana 2012; Wildemeersch and Salling Olesen, 2012). Despite these initia...

Despite recent progress in civil rights for sexual and gender minorities (SGM), ensuring SGM youth experience fairness, justice, inclusion, safety, and security in their schools and communities remains an ongoing challenge. In Growing into Resilience, André P. Grace and Kristopher Wells - co-founders of Camp fYrefly, a summer leadership camp for SG...

This article provides a critical sociological analysis of trends and perspectives pervasive during the emergence of North American adult education (1919–1970). In discussing transitions during the first 50 years of what is considered modern practice, it draws on Webster E. Cotton's (1986, On Behalf of Adult Education: A Historical Examination of th...

In 1947 the Truman Commission on Higher Education accentuated the importance of adult education in its report entitled Higher Education for American Democracy. In 1970 a new US Handbook of Adult Education signifying the move to a more professionalised field of study and practice was published. The intervening years encapsulate a time of profound cu...

Autobiographical queer life narratives are communicative spaces where queer teachers take up personal issues of being, becoming, and belonging in contextual and relational analyses of their situated experiences. In this work w/e consider the challenges and risks involved in this research, which, when shared and probed in classroom spaces, is a dang...

This is groundbreaking book examines the influence of the radical educator and social critic John Ohliger and provides a challenge to orthodox approaches to adult education. Ohliger’s call to focus on the necessity of learning to democracy, and his critique of those that fail to keep freedom and responsibility at the center of the learning enterpri...

This paper considers how three Canadian high‐school students—Ryan, Jeremy, and Bruce—engaged in queer critical praxis intended to free lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans‐identified, and queer (LGBTQ) students from the silence, exclusion, and symbolic and physical violence that heterosexism and homophobia provoke in schools. We, the authors, construct th...

In this article, I examine the history and resurgence of interest in sexual reorientation or reparative therapies. I begin with a critique of the contemporary "ex-gay" movement, interrogating Exodus as the prototype of a politico-religious transformational ministry that works to "cure" homosexuals, and examine how Exodus utilizes ex-gay testimony t...

In Canada, current federal learning-and-work policy is focused on individual learner-worker development using an iteration of lifelong learning as cyclical. This policy aims to enhance the social as an effect of enhancing the economic. In this neoliberal milieu, cyclical lifelong learning has become not only a norm but also a culture and an attitud...

The authors work in the intersection of theorizing, experience, and research in this article as they explore a critical social model that they created to guide an informal, arts-informed, community education project for sexual-minority youth and young adults. As they consider the influence of arts-informed education and Freirean pedagogy of indigna...

This chapter examines changes in preservice and continuing teacher professional development that are aimed at addressing sexual minority issues in schools as students' learning places and teachers' workplaces.

Writing the queer self involves locating the self within a broad understanding of queer that recognises a spectrum of sex, sexual and gendered subjects. In this article, I discuss how I write the queer self to link the personal to my positional practice as a gay teacher educator. I overview my work with Agape, which is a focus group that I initiate...

In the wake of World War I, lifelong learning emerged internationally as a chameleonic concept and complex culture that has had diverse iterations over time and tides. The historical conspectus of this emergence provides a contextual backdrop for a critical analysis of keynote addresses given at the three previous biannual International Lifelong Le...

This article turns to the history of the modern practice of adult education to speak to the versatility of lifelong learning as a fluid and indeterminate concept that some have viewed as a learner's way out and others have viewed as a learner's burden. It identifies change forces that have shaped particular purposes and functions of lifelong learni...

In 2002 Marc Hall's principal denied him permission to take his boyfriend to his Catholic high-school prom. In examining the politicization of the ensuing prom predicament, we critique Catholicized education and what we perceive to be the Catholic Church's efforts to privatize queerness as it segregates being religious from being sexual. We situate...

In this paper we provide a North American perspective as we explore the formation and comprehension of queer knowledge in adult education and in larger sociocultural contexts. We consider the need to position queer in adult education mindful of how queer is historically and currently positioned in culture and society. In doing so, we articulate que...

This essay focuses on contemporary lifelong‐learning discourse as it was reflected in deliberations during three events held in Australia, Canada and the UK during 2000–01. Through the dialogical lenses of these Y2K events that brought together an array of international participants, it examines lifelong learning as a chameleonic concept and versat...

This essay emerged from the authors’ presentation at an invited session of the 15th Annual Conference on Interdisciplinary Qualitative Studies (QUIG) at the University of Georgia, Athens, 3–5 January 2002. They presented on the conference theme, ‘Vision, Voice & Virtuality: (Re)Conceptualizing Qualitative Representation.’ Their work here encompasse...

In this paper we research our roles as academic adult educators who worked with 40 graduate students during a 10 day summer institute, which we developed using the theme "Culture and Diversity in Education for Adults". We discuss how we framed the development and delivery of this summer institute in the context of a transgressive and transformative...

Adult educators can use historical, cultural, and theoretical queer knowledges to build an alternative pedagogy focused on three themes. The first is engaging queer history and queer studies to transgress adult educational space. They can be used to construct and affirm a transgressive notion of queer as normal that counters a historical notion of...

This essay begins with an overview of the contemporary status of graduate education for women students in the United States and Canada. It then presents a historical conspectus of the status of women's work and the socio-cultural location of the homeplace in relation to graduate education in these two countries. From these perspectives, it examines...

This essay examines adult learning in Canada and the USA (1945-1970). It explores this emergence in relation to moves to establish academic adult education as a cultural force that could help citizen learners to negotiate a way forward amid the collision of instrumental, social, and cultural change forces altering life, learning, and work in the em...

This essay examines adult learning in Canada and the USA (1945–1970). It explores this emergence in relation to moves to establish academic adult education as a cultural force that could help citizen learners to negotiate a way forward amid the collision of instrumental, social, and cultural change forces altering life, learning, and work in the em...

Knowledge production in US academic adult education (1945–70) altered significantly in the light of apparently pervasive and permanent post-war economic and cultural change forces that transformed both the individual and the social. This paper explores this in relation to a post-war knowledge explosion that equated knowledge with productivity in a...

This paper explores how critical postmodernism as an emerging theoretical scaffolding contributes to the development of a reflexive, inclusionary adult educational practice. It builds on critiques of technicism offered by critical adult educators to suggest possibilities for a practice that takes place in the intersection of instrumental, social, a...

The first part of this essay, entitled ‘The Andragogy Debate: Twenty‐five Years of Deliberation’, examines the evolution of North American andragogy. It presents the changing views of researchers in a chronological dismantling of andragogy as a theory of adult learning. It provides a brief account of Knowles's influences in order to place andragogy...

Describes the life and work of Father James J. Tompkins, a Canadian Catholic priest who preached "think, study, act"--social vision proceeding to group enlightenment leading to social action. (SK)

This essay explores personal, political, and pedagogical dimensions of bringing queer culture as community and the fugitive knowledge it generates to bear on academic culture as knowledge. In doing so, it takes up issues of being, becoming, and belonging as a queer person and citizen. In 1973 in an essay entitled Relentless Verity, J. Roby Kidd acc...

This paper examines the impact of neoliberal pragmatism, which puts the instrumental and economistic first in learning and work. It looks at learner-workers' perspectives on participation in permanent training, and it calls for a critical social pedagogy of learning and work as a means to frame a way out for conscripted learner- workers. Lifelong l...

In this paper we explore the Out Is In project and how we incorporate arts-informed initiatives to support the social and cultural learning needs of queer, questioning, and allied young adults in Alberta.

In Canada increasing numbers of young adults are disengaging from cyclical participation in lifelong learning. In this paper I explore this phenomenon in relation to federal neoliberal learning-and-work policy that focuses on cyclical lifelong learning and individual learner-worker development. I specifically consider two cases: the predicaments of...

In this paper we explore Alberta's Out Is In project, which is an arts-informed community education project that we developed to focus on the individual development, social learning, socialization, and inclusion of queer young adults. We discuss activities including a summer 2004 leadership and learning camp that used informal and nonformal learnin...