André P. Grace

Using autobiographical queer life narratives of teachers to connect personal, political and pedagogical spaces

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 dangerous exposition of the queer self. With these challenges and risks in mind, w/e examine how our narratives provide fugitive knowledge to inform a pedagogy of ‘resist-stance’ that recognizes, respects, and engages queer identity, difference, history and culture. W/e provide examples of this pedagogy, discussing teaching strategies currently being used to connect the personal, the political and the pedagogical in classroom spaces. W/e also speak of the difficulties of living out this pedagogy as transformative teaching to transgress queer erasure in hetero-normative educational practice.

The Marc Hall Prom Predicament: Queer Individual Rights v. Institutional Church Rights in Canadian Public Education

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 this privatization as the failure of the Catholic Church to treat vulnerable queer Catholic youth with dignity and integrity as the church sets untenable limits to queer. Examining Canadian case law regarding individual rights, we argue for the importance of upholding the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the name of democratic principles. Keywords: queer youth, individual rights, institutional church rights, Catholic Church, Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Supreme Court of Canada, Court judgments En 2002, le directeur de l’ecole catholique que frequentait Marc Hall lui a interdit d’etre accompagne de son petit ami au bal des finissants. En analysant le debat politique qu’a declenche cette decision, les auteurs critiquent la catholicisation de l’education et ce qu’ils considerent comme la tentative de l’Eglise catholique de privatiser l’allosexualite (« queerness ») en separant la religion de la sexualite. Selon eux, cette privatisation temoigne de l’incapacite de l’Eglise catholique de traiter avec dignite de jeunes catholiques homosexuels vulnerables en leur imposant des restrictions insoutenables. En etudiant la jurisprudence canadienne touchant aux droits de la personne, les auteurs plaident en faveur de l’importance de respecter la Charte canadienne des droits et libertes au nom des principes democratiques. Mots cles : jeunes homosexuels, droits de la personne, droits des Eglises, Eglise catholique, Charte canadienne des droits et libertes, Cour supreme du Canada, jugements de la cour.

Striking a critical pose: andragogy ‐‐ missing links, missing values

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 Knowless influences in order to place andragogy in perspective as a set of assumptions about adult learning made fragile by what is missing. To expose the linear nature of the andragogical model, this section addresses sociological, philosophical, and other contextual weaknesses. The second part, ’Democracy and Freedom Lost in the Malcolmian Soft Sell’, elucidates the distorted view of individual freedom associated with individualism in the Knowlesian sense. It considers the impact of organizational and societal structures in shaping individual freedom and constituting democracy. While noting Knowless support of individual freedom, it accents the inability of the andragogical model to achieve this freedom.

Gay and bisexual male youth as educator activists and cultural workers: the queer critical praxis of three Canadian high‐school students

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 the students’ biographical ethnographies to help us explore their lived and learned experiences in relation to the cultures of the schools and communities that contextualize these experiences. In this exploration, we describe their educational activism and cultural work through which they problematize queer‐exclusive educational policies and practices, enhance communication and strategic action in the intersection of the moral and the political, and monitor the state of the struggle, the extent of transformation, and the need for further social and cultural action in schools. We position this work as queer critical praxis to advance LGBTQ inclusion. In delving into this praxis, we examine the contextual, relational, and dispositional complexities of three facets of Ryan, Jeremy, and Bruce’s work for cultural change and social transformation: the impetus that drove their praxis, the supports that enabled them to keep going, and their ensuing educational activism and cultural work.

Lifelong learning as a chameleonic concept and versatile practice: Y2K perspectives and trends

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 versatile practice in education and culture. It considers how participants at the three events framed lifelong learning’s parameters and complexities as they discussed perspectives and trends shaping lifelong‐learning discourse, policy‐making and practice. In doing so, three pervasive Y2K‐event themes are discussed: (a) lifelong learning encompasses instrumental, social and cultural education; (b) lifelong learning involves mediation of public and private responsibilities; and (c) lifelong learning occupies a precarious and paradoxical position in a world that desires to position it as a permanent global necessity. The essay concludes with a perspective on lifelong learning as a critical practice in a world where culture as knowledge and culture as community vie for space. It locates this practice in inclusive, holistic terms, suggesting that a critical practice of lifelong learning is guided by a key aim: to help persons become responsive and responsible citizen learners and workers who are able to think, speak and act in life, learning and work situations.

Canadian and US adult learning (1945–1970) and the cultural politics and place of lifelong learning

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 emerging postindustrial society. In this regard, it focuses centrally on lifelong learning as an idea designed to have broad appeal in rapid-change postindustrial culture. In particular, it attempts to explicate a cultural politics of lifelong learning, which academic adult educators hoped would give the field a higher profile within what they perceived to be an emerging change culture of crisis and challenge. Two key factors are considered in these deliberations. First, this essay explores the relationship between public education (understood as schooling for children) and adult education. It takes up how this problematic relationship interfered with a post-war turn to lifelong learning. Second, it examines the shift in the meaning of the social in understanding adult education as social education in postindustrial society. It argues that the post-war discourse of democracy delimited this meaning, locating the social predominantly within a concern with preserving the dominant culture and society.

The Charisma and Deception of Reparative Therapies: When Medical Science Beds Religion

ABSTRACT 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 to deceive harried homosexuals looking for escape from the effects of internalized and cultural homophobia. Next, I investigate how reparative therapies function as orthodox treatments that charismatically meld conservative religious perspectives with medical science to produce a pseudoscience promising to treat homosexuality effectively. In this regard, I assess the ongoing debate regarding gay-affirming versus reparative therapies by first looking at the history of medicalizing homosexuality and then surveying the debate spurred by Robert L. Spitzers research. I conclude with a consideration of research needed to measure whether efficacious change in sexual orientation is possible.

Where critical postmodern theory meets practice: Working in the intersection of instrumental, social, and cultural education

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, and cultural education. It briefly traces the emergence of critical postmodernism, suggesting the value of this neologismfor adult education today. It develops two key critical postmodern themes that inform a practice sensitive to peoples and knowledges within the adult teaching‐learning habitat.

The decline of social education and the rise of instrumentalism in North American adult education (1947–1970)

Abstract 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 cultural changes marked by scientific and technological advances intertwined with Cold War adjustments and a pervasive politics of fear. In this period North American adult education became immersed in the discourse of democracy endorsing capitalism as it advanced middle-class economic and cultural values. In an analysis of the positions of dominant players in North American adult education (1947–1970), this article explores what emerged as a growing divide between the fields historical location as social education and its new location as an emerging professionalised modern practice steeped in instrumentalism. It considers what the fields historically diffuse nature meant to those in a growing professoriate as they deliberated whether adult education was a movement or a profession. The article also examines the cultural location of North American adult education and its evolving formation in academe as the educational enterprise reacted to the mushrooming of science and technology, the commodification of knowledge, and the cultural and political fear of communism. It reviews suggestions that mainstream adult educators had for enhancing the field of study and practice into the future. After turning to history to consider the nature of adult education, it ends by taking up a key question: Is adult education in crisis in the present? Here it takes up the significance of social policymaking as it discusses characteristics of critically progressive education.

A periodization of North American adult education (1919–1970): a critical sociological analysis of trends and perspectives

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. Cottons (1986, On Behalf of Adult Education: A Historical Examination of the Supporting Literature. Boston, MA: Center for the Study of Liberal Education for Adults) periodization model—modified a few years later—to organize people, politics, and ideas as categories shaping North American adult education. In exploring this complexity, the article reflects on the perennial difficulty of answering the question ‘What is adult education?’ Following brief considerations of periods one (1919–1929) and two (1930–1946) in the field’s emergence, the article focuses on period three (1947–1970) in more detail, providing critical perspectives on field expansion during the perceived corporate age of adult education. It considers how adult education and constituent higher adult education were each affected as the field of study and practice negotiated the knowledge–culture–language–power nexus where it sought presence and place. Then, comparing the historical example of post-World War II North American adult education and the contemporary example of lifelong learning in neoliberal times, the article concludes by considering how cultural change forces have placed educational formations into reactive modes over time and tides.