Richard Edwards

• Professor at University of Stirling

Citizen science, the active participation of the public in scientific research projects, is a rapidly expanding field in open science and open innovation. It provides an integrated model of public knowledge production and engagement with science. As a growing worldwide phenomenon, it is invigorated by evolving new technologies that connect people e...

Adult education is a very diverse arena of practice internationally, operating across the public, private and non-profit sectors, with educators and learners coming from all walks of life. In many countries there is no formal route to becoming a qualified adult educator as there is in relation to school teaching, or the qualification of Higher or F...

Drawing upon the work of Foucault and Latour, this article reflects on 25 years of critique of competence-based education and its continuing strength as a way of framing education and training. Using an example from England, it rehearses the argument from Foucault that, despite its student-centred discourse, competence-based education can be positi...

Digital technologies in combination with ‘big’ data and predictive analytics are having a significant impact upon professional practices at individual, organisational, national and international levels. The interplay of code, algorithms and big data are increasingly pervasive in the governing, leadership and practices of different professional grou...

In a wide range of fields, professional practice is being transformed by the increasing influence of digital analytics: the massive volumes of big data, and software algorithms that are collecting, comparing and calculating that data to make predictions and even decisions. Researchers in a number of social sciences have been calling attention to th...

Openness has a long genealogy in education. Whether through the use of post, radio, television and digital technologies, extending learning opportunities to more and a wider range of people has been a significant aspect of educational history. Transcending barriers to learning has been promoted as the means of opening educational opportunities in h...

Sociomaterial theories, including actor–network theory (ANT), materialist feminism and posthumanism, are sometimes argued to not be addressing or unable to address sufficiently the political and are therefore dismissed as irrelevant to educational research. Through an extended discussion of writers across the social sciences, this article seeks to...

Computer technologies and computer-mediated information and communication are increasingly parts of curriculum-making practices in education. These technologies are often taken to be simply tools to be used to enhance teaching and learning. However, in recent years, a range of cross-disciplinary studies have started to point to the work of code, al...

Around the globe a great emphasis has been placed upon improving public service delivery by reforming and enhancing professionalism. The impact and significance of the associated changes have been much debated with a focus on issues of de- and re-professionalisation, and demarcations of expertise and work. Professionals and professionalism remain t...

Purpose – This article aims to explore the concept of amateurism as a form of critique and addition to the concepts of professionalism, professional work and education. Design/methodology/approach – This is a theoretically driven article based upon a review of the historical and sociological literature on amateur–professional relations in various...

Citizen science projects have grown in number, scale and scope in recent years. Such projects engage members of the public in working with professional scientists in a diverse range of practices. Yet there has been little educational exploration of such projects to date. In particular, there has been limited exploration of the educational backgroun...

Citizen science projects have grown in number, scale and scope in recent years. Such projects engage members of the public in working with professional scientists in a diverse range of practices. Yet there has been little specifically educational research in such projects to date, or of the conceptualisation of citizenship within them. In particula...

Over the years, there has been much discussion of the impact of the internet and new forms of data sourcing and communication for education and the ways in which networked learning breaks down the bounded the institution, classroom, and curriculum. While much attention has been given to the changing spaces of education introduced by new technologie...

Higher education in the UK has become preoccupied with debates over the authority of knowledge and of criticality. In this article we argue that approaches to knowledge in higher education might benefit from a network sensibility that foregrounds the negotiated processes through which the material becomes entangled with the social to bring forth ac...

This article explores two case studies of the literacy practices of assessment in the vocational curriculum. Previous studies have identified learning in the vocational curriculum as being assessment-driven and that subjects often associated with limited levels of literacy actually require multiple literacy practices from students. Drawing upon stu...

Sociomaterial approaches to researching education, such as those generated by actornetwork theory and complexity theory, have been growing in significance in recent years, both theoretically and methodologically. Such approaches are based upon a performative ontology rather than the more characteristic representational epistemology that informs muc...

Educational policy is often dismissed as simply rhetoric and a collection of half truths. However, this is to underestimate the power of rhetoric and the ways in which rhetorical strategies are integral to persuasive acts. Through a series of illustrative chapters, this book argues that rather than something to be dismissed, rhetorical analysis off...

This article explores the discursive work done by different notions of professional development in adult education. In particular we outline the ways in which the discourses of technical expertise, competence and reflective practice are deployed to mobilise professional practices and identities in particular ways and position certain practices and...

There is a long tradition in education of examination of the hidden curriculum, those elements which are implicit or tacit to the formal goals of education. This article draws upon that tradition to open up for investigation the hidden curriculum and assumptions about students and knowledge that are embedded in the coding undertaken to facilitate l...

In the wake of new forms of curricular policy in many parts of the world, teachers are increasingly required to act as agents of change. And yet, teacher agency is under-theorised and often misconstrued in the educational change literature, wherein agency and change are seen as synonymous and positive. This article addresses the issue of teacher ag...

Educational analysts need new ways to engage with policy processes in a networked world of complex transnational connections. In this discussion, Tara Fenwick and Richard Edwards argue for a greater focus on materiality in educational policy as a way to trace the heterogeneous interactions and precarious linkages that enact policy as complex manife...

While much attention has been given to the changing spaces of education introduced by new technologies, the impact of spatial theory on the discussion of such education is less well developed. Drawing upon empirical evidence from the Ensemble research project, this article examines spatially some of the possibilities and constraints that arise in t...

While much attention has been given to the changing spaces of education introduced by new technologies, the impact of spatial theory on the discussion of such education is less well developed. Drawing upon empirical evidence from the Ensemble research project, this article examines spatially some of the possibilities and constraints that arise in t...

The question of capacity building in education has predominantly been approached with regard to the methods and methodologies of educational research. Far less attention has been given to capacity building in relation to theory. In many ways the latter is as pressing an issue as the former, given that good research depends on a combination of high...

This chapter examines the literacy practices of childcare students in colleges and in their homes, workplaces and communities. It is based upon the Literacies for Learning in Further Education (LfLFE) research project in the UK, which was funded between 2004 and 2007. The project explored the literacy practices associated with learning in a number...

This article provides a material enactment of educational theory to explore how we might do educational theory differently by defamiliarising the familiar. Theory is often assumed to be abstract, located solely in the realm of ideas and separate from practice. However, this view of theory emerges from a set of ontological and epistemological assump...

As lifelong learning becomes a greater focus for policy at local, national and supranational levels, a question emerges as to how to engage in policy analysis. This is a debate, which is already taking place in relation to policy analysis in other sectors of education. However, this has had little influence on policy studies in lifelong learning. T...

Trends towards greater flexibility are to be found in the reform of post-school education and training around the globe. They are part of a wider profile of changes to workplaces and labour relations within which greater flexibility is pursued. This paper charts our journey, through which we have sought to locate flexibility as a globalizing and gl...

In the analysis of polices for lifelong learning, the gap between the rhetoric and reality has become the focus for much debate and concern. Reality is compared with rhetoric and both are found wanting. In this paper, we argue that such critiques misconceive the significance of rhetoric and we outline the form a rhetorical analysis of lifelong lear...

This article represents four emergences through which to explore the significance of lifelong learning. Drawing in particular on complexity theory and actor‐network theory, it seeks to develop an understanding of the reductions and emergences, and purifications and translations to which lifelong learning is subject. To do this, the article also see...

Drawing on data from an empirical study of three matched subjects in upper secondary school and further education college in Scotland, this article explores some of the factors that result in differences emerging from the translation of the prescribed curriculum into the enacted curriculum. We argue that these differences raise important questions...

This article explores the significance of theories of the post-human for lifelong learning. Drawing upon the works of Karen Barad and Bruno Latour, it suggests that education has focused on the learning subject as a result of an a priori assumption of a separation of matter from meaning, the object from the subject. By contrast, a post-human interv...

Drawing upon concepts from actor-network theory (ANT), this article explores how the principle of symmetry can provide alternative readings of the translations of the prescribed into the enacted curriculum, without reducing understanding to explanation. The paper explores the contrasting ways in which the prescribed curriculum is translated into th...

This paper draws upon the experience of the Literacies for Learning in Further Education research project in the UK. The project explored the literacy demands of a number of curriculum areas and the literacy practices of students in their everyday lives, in order to identify those ‘border literacies’ which may act as resources for learning and atta...

What's the problem with literacy at college? How might everyday literacy be harnessed for educational ends? Based on the first major study of literacy practices in colleges in the UK, this book explores the reading and writing associated with learning subjects across the college curriculum. It investigates literacy practices in which students engag...

Drawing upon research in the curriculum of Hospitality, this article explores the contrasting ways in which the prescribed curriculum is translated into the enacted curriculum is school and college contexts. It identifies organisational culture and teacher and student backgrounds and dispositions as central to the emerging contrasts. It uses this e...

First paragraph: Questions of context are not new, but are brought into particularly stark relief by developments promoted through a discourse of lifelong learning. If learning is lifelong and lifewide, what specifically then is a learning context? Are living and learning collapsed into each other? Under the sign of lifelong learning and following...

First paragraph: Following Roz Ivanič’s influential work on writing and identity, this chapter explores the effects of information technology in the writing of research and on the identity of the researcher. In particular, it suggests that the facility to copy, cut and paste is undermining the notion that research texts making original contribution...

Now that learning is seen as lifelong and lifewide, what specifically makes a learning context? What are the resultant consequences for teaching practices when working in specific contexts? Drawing upon a variety of academic disciplines, Rethinking Contexts for Learning and Teaching explores some of the different means of understanding teaching and...

This paper draws from the Literacies for Learning in Further Education research project, funded through the Teaching and Learning Research Programme. Drawing on the empirical study of literacy practices in eight Childcare courses in Scotland and England, we seek to demonstrate that, integral to the learning careers of students are literacy careers...

Retention, attainment and progression have become key issues in post-compulsory education in the UK, as the policy agenda of increasing and widening participation has taken hold. Keeping students in the system, enabling them to gain qualifications and thereby progress to higher level courses is a key educational goal. Yet alongside increasing progr...

This article explores theoretically the argument that education is an impossible practice as it cannot mandate the future. The significance of this is that educational practice needs to be developed through the values of fallibility, conditionality and responsibility.

In this report, it is argued that the most salient factor in the contemporary communicative landscape is the sheer abundance and diversity of possibilities for literacy, and that the extent and nature of students' communicative resources is a central issue in education. The text outlines the conceptual underpinnings of the Literacies for Learning i...

The article explores the conceptualization of learning and context from a number of perspectives and some of the theoretical and methodological issues raised when context is no longer considered as a container, but as a relational effect. It provides an introduction for the articles that follow, insofar as they take up lines of flight from the issu...

With different pedagogic practices come different ways of examining them and fresh understandings of their implications and assumptions. It is the examination of these changes and developments that is the subject of this book. The authors examine a number of questions posed by the rapid march of globalisation, incuding: What is the role of the teac...

Drawing on the work of Foucault, Rose and actor-network theory this chapter examines some of the methodological and theoretical implications of this work for conceptions of workplace learning. We suggest that workplaces need to be examined for the spatio-temporal ordering of practices and the actors drawn into them in order to move beyond the total...

In engaging in research we draw upon and develop meanings and concepts that help to frame what we do, how we do it and the meaning we make of it. In the process of framing, we exclude other possibilities from our research practices. To do research then is to engage in the fashioning of conceptual boundaries. This article explores the dilemmas of bo...

Over the last ten to fifteen years, there has been an increasing ordering of the practices of post-school education and training within a discourse of lifelong learning. This is particularly the case in the OECD countries and in those transnational organisations, such as the OECD and EU. While this discourses itself is not new, the significance of...

The two main objectives of lifelong learning policy, theory and practice in Britain – and also to a large extent in Europe and Australasia (Hyland, 1999; Field & Liecester, 2000) – are the development of vocational skills to enhance economic productivity, and the fostering of social inclusion and civic cohesion. Direct links are made between inclus...

This text explores the different ways in which the various social practices in which people participate becomes signed as learning, how and why that occurs and with what consequences. It takes seriously the linguistic turn in social theory to draw upon semiotics and poststructuralism through which to explore the significance of lifelong learning as...

In recent times, spatial metaphors such as border crossing, border pedagogy, speaking from the margins, spanning the abyss, occupying in-between spaces and diaspora space have emerged to characterise educational and other cultural practices. This is particularly the case in critical, feminist and postcolonial pedagogy influenced by poststructuralis...

Lifelong learning and a learning society are important planks of European Union (EU) policy. Drawing upon the work of Foucault and Rose, this article examines some of the intellectual technologies that are deployed in the ordering of these policy goals. It argues that research is one such technology and examines EU Framework Projects to explore who...

Within contemporary changes there is an increased reflexivity wherein social formations, organizations and individuals are required to change, to learn to change, and change to learn. Lifelong learning has become central to education and economic policy, with an increased emphasis on individuals, workplaces and providers of learning opportunities b...

This paper explores the question of the purpose of education within the context of Lyotardȁ9s framing of the postmodern condition. It points to some of the continuities and discontinuities in the framing of the current condition as postmodern and the recurrent problematics of truth-telling which is the mark of this condition. It suggests that educa...

This article takes as its focus the ''and'' in discourses of teaching and learning. Drawing upon the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I argue that the ''and'' signifies a complex, sticky relationship between teaching and learning, and that we can radicalise our conception of ''and'' to bring forward a range of different discourses. The argument sugges...

This article explores the question of what we might understand to be a learning context within discourses of lifelong learning. If we identify learning as both lifelong and lifewide, how then can we frame a meaningful notion of context and what is its relationship to learning? These are important questions that have been explored within work on sit...

This article explores the rhetorical work done by discourses of professional development in education. In particular it outlines the ways in which the rhetoric of technical expertise, competence and reflective practice are deployed to mobilise professional practices and identities in particular ways and position certain practices and dispositions a...

The issues that this symposium addresses include: poststructuralism, Michel Foucault relevancy to guidance and counselling, narrative therapy, discursive positioning. Contributors were encouraged to adopt a critical and reflexive stance so that the symposium would provide readers with both theoretical and practical perspectives and a new and/or dee...

This article explores the ways in which framings drawn from post-structuralism can help to inform the understanding of guidance practices. In particular, it draws upon the later work of Foucault and Actor-Network Theory to question the centrality of the humanistic subject predominant within discourses of contemporary guidance and raise issues of po...

This article reports on the outcomes of the first phase of the Literacies for Learning in Further Education project, which is exploring the literacy practices required for successful study within different curriculum areas in four Further Education Colleges, two in Scotland and two in England. It draws upon initial interview data with staff and stu...

Drawing on the work of Foucault, and to a lesser extent actor‐network theory, this article examines some of their methodological and theoretical implications for conceptions of workplace learning. We suggest that workplaces need to be examined for the spatio‐temporal ordering of practices and the actors drawn into them in order to move beyond the t...

This paper seeks to extend work previously published that points to the importance of rhetorical analysis to policy studies. It argues against the notion that policy can be dismissed as ‘spin’ and explores further the work of rhetoric within the UK government’s policy texts of lifelong learning. For the authors, rhetorical analysis helps to point t...

The notions of lifelong learning and a learning society have been an important policy driver in the European Union at both the Commission and national government levels for a number of years. Overall, these policies aim to promote the twin goals of competitiveness in international markets and social cohesion within the still-expanding borders of th...

This article explores the relationship between changes in governing and the significance of lifelong learning for this. Drawing on Foucault's notions of governmentality and technologies of the self, and concepts derived from actor-network theory, I argue that discourses of lifelong learning act as intellectual technologies through which there is th...

This article critiques certain notions of a learning society. These are framed largely in economic and humanist frameworks of competitiveness and social exclusion. This overlooks the implications of information, communications and media technologies, and the linguistic turn in social theory. These suggest a learning society can be framed as a ‘soci...

The idea that the present is a period of intense structural and destabilizing change has become central to establishing policy contexts, to which there needs to be a response. Change and adaptation to change have become watchwords of policy, including educational policy. One central area of response in the UK and internationally has been the emerge...

John Field (2000) has recently argued that there are changes taking place in the practices of governing that have significant implications for lifelong learning. In particular, he points to attempts to mobilize civil society, of which life-long learning policies may be considered a part. This paper examines this proposition by locating Field's argu...

Social exclusion and inclusion have emerged as strong policy-leading concepts at both the national and international level in recent years. Policies on lifelong learning are themselves in part premised on the contribution education and training can make to promoting an inclusive society. It is argued that social exclusion offends against human dign...

In recent years, there has been much discussion of the significance of postmodernism and postmodernity for the study and practice of adult education. At the same time, lifelong learning has emerged as a significant strand of policy around the globe, reconfiguring the institutions and purposes of education. This article examines the complication of...

Chris Edwards informs that companies are focusing on re-developing self-modifying software, complex instructions, and parallel processing concepts to develop new generations of processors that emphasize on energy per operation in place of performance. It is being observed that dissatisfaction with the energy performance of conventional processors a...

Social exclusion and inclusion have emerged as strong policy-leading concepts at both the national and international level in recent years. Policies on lifelong learning are themselves in part premised on the contribution education and training can make to promoting an inclusive society. It is argued that social exclusion offends against human dign...