Marion Bowl

University of Birmingham · School of Education

This chapter draws on the international higher education literature to present some of the common and contrasting themes around marketisation and equality, as well as some of the contextual specifics which may be dictating policy and practice. It draws on analysis policy documents from four Anglophone countries—Australia, New Zealand, the Republic...

This chapter outlines some of the common manifestations of marketisation in contemporary higher education and discusses the extent to which the higher education market is a reality or a metaphor for a set of ideologically driven policies and processes—widely striven for but never achieved. It discusses the relationship between marketisation and sec...

This chapter discusses how institutional differentiation in England has re-cast the meaning of ‘diversity’ in higher education, creating a student body which is at one and the same time more diverse and yet more segmented. It considers the implications of increasing sector stratification for participation by students from diverse economic and socia...

This chapter explores the extent to which policy changes designed to stimulate the marketisation of English higher education (HE) have changed the nature of the enterprise. It identifies emerging trajectories and explores how various aspects of marketisation impact on system differentiation and the possibilities of a more equitable HE. It identifie...

This edited collection demonstrates how discourses and practices associated with marketisation, differentiation and equality are manifested in UK higher education today. Uniting leading scholars in higher education and equality in England, the contributors and editors expose the contradictions arising from the tension between aims for increased equ...

This chapter explores the ways in which adult educators saw themselves as exercising agency, working with or against the thrust of policies and practices which they felt were not consistent with their values as professionals. Through the stories of four long-standing adult educators it describes responses of accommodation or resistance and discusse...

This chapter presents an overview of the changing landscape of adult education and lifelong learning. It discusses the role of UNESCO, the OECD, the European Union and the World Bank in shifting the international focus from broadly based adult education for a range of purposes to lifelong learning for more narrowly economic ends. It briefly sketche...

This chapter summarises the reasons why adult education has not been able to hold its ground as a field of practice: its historical marginalisation; its diversion into debates around professionalism; and adult educators’ reluctance to engage with theoretical and political questions. The chapter calls for the reinvigoration of a theoretically inform...

This chapter explains the rationale for taking a narrative and comparative approach to researching adult educators’ careers, their professional identities and their practice in England and New Zealand. It outlines how the research was conducted with the participation of 62 adult educators and how data were collected, analysed and presented.

This chapter describes how different forms of ‘professionalism’ have been defined, refined, developed and applied to formal education. It compares how policies on professionalisation have been played out in relation to adult educators in England and New Zealand. In England the focus has been on the imposition of a prescriptive form of governmental...

This chapter describes the development and current context for adult education in two case study countries – England and Aotearoa New Zealand. While the impact of neoliberalism has been powerful in both countries, the specifics of demography, history and culture have also shaped the possibilities for action, suggesting differences as well as conver...

This chapter explores what it means to have a career in adult education through the narratives of six adult educators in England and New Zealand who are at different stages in their work lives. Their stories exemplify some of the challenges to the notion of a career in adult education – the haphazard nature of entry into the field, the opportunitie...

This chapter discusses some of the social implications of policies circulating nationally and globally and the strategies adult educators and their organisations adopted in response. Three distinct, but not mutually exclusive, types of strategic response were apparent. The first was a kind of fatalism which suggested that the possibilities for infl...

This chapter presents data about adult educators’ value orientations, their relationship to theory and the extent to which they saw theory as influencing their practice. It begins by defining the various philosophical and value orientations suggested in the literature. From an analysis of the data, a more complex picture emerges in which biography,...

This book explores the realities of adult education practice in the current political and economic climate. With a particular focus on examining the effect of the multitude of changes in policy and philosophy over the past 30 years, the book explores how the values and career expectations of adult educators have been affected, and considers the imp...

This paper examines how universities reconcile the need to project themselves as successful global competitors with the need to respond to national policy expectations, particularly around equality. It does so through a comparative analysis of the language used in the publicly available documents of universities in England and New Zealand. While a...

This paper explores how English universities operating in a ‘quasi-market’ are managing the tension between two policy expectations: the first that they should encourage social mobility by widening the social base of their student population; the second that they should compete with other universities to attract students and thereby remain financia...

This article addresses the possibilities for adult educators to exercise professional agency in contexts which have become dominated by neoliberalism. It draws on research undertaken in England and New Zealand which investigated the impact of global discourses and policies on experienced adult educators whose philosophy of practice was orientated t...

This paper explores English universities’ responses to widening participation policy developments. It draws on an analysis of Access Agreements submitted to the Office for Fair Access (OfFA) - and publicly-available material produced by eight universities in one region. We analyse how universities from different mission groups present their commitm...

This article analyses key events in the history of adult and community education in Aotearoa New Zealand. It draws on historical sources to examine the role of grassroots community activism and local and national networking in upholding a broad vision of adult and community-based education, in the face of a hostile policy climate. The authors sugge...

One of the central arguments of this book is that men’s and women’s learning may best be understood by locating it in a wider context which includes the historical struggles between competing ideologies, theoretical perspectives and discourses, and that those gender differences are socially constructed - shaped by history, culture and power relatio...

This chapter draws on the findings of two OECD sponsored statistical surveys of adult participation in education to explore the extent to which they indicate a problem with men and their education in a number of industrialized countries. It confirms the complexity of the issues of men’s and women’s educational engagement and the salience of factors...

This book reflects on current debates around gender and education, and the so-called 'crisis of masculinity'. Are men under-represented or over-represented in lifelong and adult ducation? And how should gender patterns be explained? Are women outstripping men in terms of achievement? And if so why? Is it possible men are becoming educationally disa...

This paper explores the ways in which the language of ‘networking', ‘communities of practice’ and ‘learning in communities’ has been used to serve government policy priorities in the adult and community education (ACE) sector in Aotearoa New Zealand. The paper draws on research which explored the role of regional networks in meeting ACE practitione...

This paper explores the notion of preparedness for university entry in relation to mature students in England and Aotearoa New Zealand. It focuses on what has become the predominant entry route for mature students in England and Wales - the National Open College Network (NOCN) accredited Access to Higher Education Diploma - and on university-based...

This article explores some of the challenges of utilising collaborative research approaches when undertaking contracted research projects for government and non-government agencies in the adult and community education (ACE) sector. To discuss these challenges, the article draws on three recent examples of research projects undertaken for ACE sector...

This paper explores the impact of changing higher education policies and funding on university adult and continuing education in England and Aotearoa New Zealand. It discusses some of the contextual factors contributing to sustaining continuing education in New Zealand, against the tide of developments elsewhere, and in spite of its subjection to t...

Adult and Community Education (ACE) policy and practice in Aotearoa have unfolded in the context of domestic and global historical, political and cultural developments (Tobias 1994, 2004). We begin this paper with a brief overview of that history, insofar as it is relevant to ACE’s development. We examine changes in the fortunes of ACE from the ide...

This paper focuses on the ways in which lecturers in two universities negotiated their identities as teachers of students from diverse backgrounds within the context of the changing nature of higher education. This research forms part of a two-year project which explored, among other things, the influence of student and teacher identities on academ...

This paper explores the potential for conducting collaborative and critical research in higher education which problematises the role and practices of the academy in maintaining exclusion. It begins with a brief discussion of UK government discourse on widening participation, and contrasts this with the research literature which indicates the persi...

We explore the conditions under which students engage with, or disengage from, learning at university within the context of increased student diversity. We discuss the concept and use of academic engagement and disengagement but focus on the dynamics of disengagement in two comparable first year computing modules at a pre‐ and a post‐1992 universit...

This article explores some of the challenges of conducting action research in higher education. It arises from an ongoing research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme (ESRC/TLRP), ‘Learning and Teaching for Social Diversity and Difference’, which examines the dynamics of academic eng...

This paper explores the challenges and opportunities in undertaking collaborative action research with a diverse range of largely community-based Adult and Community Education (ACE) practitioners. ACE in Aotearoa New Zealand is currently the focus of a government-funded, sector-wide initiative aimed at enhancing professional development opportuniti...

The growth in the student population within higher education against a background of government policy promoting the concept of 'widening participation' has led to much debate about the nature of university teaching. Academic engagement of all students within increasingly large and diverse classrooms has proved difficult to achieve. The research th...

Book Reviewed in this article: Motivating Students for Lifelong Learning Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2000 Adult Guidance Services and the Learning Society Will Bartlett, Teresa Rees & A. G. Watts, 2000 Innovating in Higher Education Andrew Hannan & Harold Silver, 2000 Skills Development in Higher Education and Employment...

The paper describes part of an ongoing study of the experiences of 32 mature, ‘non-traditional’ students as they make the transition to higher education. The paper draws on the stories of three of the participants to highlight some of the financial and institutional barriers experienced by mature minority ethnic students. It points to the need for...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Birmingham, 2001.