Sara Carpenter

Views from the blackboard: neoliberal education reforms and the practice of teaching in Ontario, Canada

This article discusses findings from two case studies examining the impact of neoliberal education reform on the classroom practice of teachers and adult educators in Ontario, Canada. We asked educators to comment on the impacts of 20 years of policy shifts in their classrooms. Teachers in public schools and adult literacy programmes echoed each other on issues of managerialism, privatisation and punitive accountability mechanisms. Both schoolteachers and adult educators made references to a reduction in autonomy and to an emerging ‘culture of fear’ in educational institutions and programmes. The experience of teachers highlights contradictions between the promises of neoliberalism and the ground-level impact of policy.

Learning by dispossession: democracy promotion and civic engagement in Iraq and the United States

This paper brings together two ongoing research projects on current citizenship learning programs in Iraq and the United States, both of which draw from the theoretical ground of Marxist-feminist perspective. A particular strength of this paper is its comparison between two American citizenship education programs in the context of neoliberalism, war and imperialism. Many claim that citizenship learning is always an ideological project promoting a particular set of beliefs or values. However, this research reveals that citizenship education programs are also ideological in their methods—a process Mojab has termed ‘learning by dispossession’—that serve to abstract learners from material conditions in order to promote a particular vision of liberal democracy that legitimates the very material conditions learners struggle to overcome.

Introduction: A Specter Haunts Adult Education: Crafting a Marxist-Feminist Framework for Adult Education and Learning

Over one hundred years ago, Marx and Engels argued that Europe was haunted by the possibility of an alternative way of organizing social life.1 Today, the field of adult education finds itself in a complex position vis-a-vis recent transformations in the global economy, the practice of democracy, and the purposes of adult education. We face the onslaught of the demands of the knowledge economy and the rhetorical promises of the policies of lifelong learning. To this challenge we have responded with calls to our historical vocation, the transformation of social conditions, and the cultivation of community. It is clear that today this same ghost is haunting us as well. However, our ability to navigate this difficult terrain is complicated by a growing sense that we are facing the limits of the explanatory power of traditional theoretical paradigms. At the same time, we are increasingly frustrated by the co-optation of the social purposes of adult education by the agendas of capital through constructs such as human-capital theory, the knowledge economy, neoliberalism, and imperialism. Our capacity to resist this co-optation depends on our ability to generate transformative praxis, a unity of theory and action based in truly critical and useful forms of knowledge. Thus, the theories we use to guide our inquiries are of the utmost importance.

Adult Education and the “Matter” of Consciousness in Marxist-Feminism

In teaching adult education courses, a major challenge for us is to make students articulate the sources of their knowledge about themselves or the world. We ask them to think through these questions: “How do you know what you know?” “Where does your knowledge come from?” There are some immediate and predictable answers such as personal experience, accumulated academic, or work-related knowledge, or social learning through culture, tradition, media, personal, or group interaction. We encourage them to go deeper in their explanation and interpretation of social relations and their role and location in them. This, we have come to realize, is not an easy process, in part because, in our understanding, the way to answer these questions is to articulate the relationship between self and the social world as well as between consciousness and the material world. Often students are neither able to name this relationship nor are fully capable of articulating their location in these social relations. Thus, as teachers, we have found it necessary to delve deeper into the problematic of dissociated self and society. In this chapter, we undertake an exploration of the relation between consciousness and the material world from the perspective of Marxist-Feminism.

Epilogue: Living Revolution, Learning Revolution, Teaching Revolution

After many iterations, the title of this book became, based on a suggestion from our series editor Tony Green, Educating from Marx: Race, Gender, and Learning. It is a simple and astute title through which Tony inadvertently returned us to the roots of this project. In the fall of 2006 a reading group began in the adult education and community development program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. We came together for various reasons, the first of which was to read original texts by theorists of influence in the field of adult education. Marx, and those who followed after him, came to the forefront of this discussion given our interest in the critical/radical tradition of the field. Over time, the group coalesced around a central problematic: how to formulate a theoretical framework, drawing on anti-racism, postcolonial studies, feminism, and dialectical historical materialism, through which we could better understand the particular historical moment in which we live. We have asked ourselves a deceptively simple, but not simplistic, question that has guided our work: if we look through this framework, what do we see? At the conclusion of this exploration, we have to turn to another of these “easier said than done” propositions: how do we teach it?

The Dialectics of Praxis

This paper takes up the theorization of the dialectical relationships between consciousness, praxis, and contradiction by drawing primarily on the work of critical feminist and anti-racist scholars Roxana Ng and Paula Allman. Beginning with the important Marxist theorizations of the lives of immigrant women, the state, and community services made by Roxana Ng, we move forward with asserting that Roxana’s commitment to making social relations of power and exploitation ‘knowable’ and ‘transformable’ is based on a complex and revolutionary articulation of the relationship between thinking and being. This dialectical conceptualization of praxis is necessary for any potentially coherent revolutionary feminist anti-racist project. The challenge posed by Roxana is two-fold: not only how best to ‘know’ the world, but how to teach this analysis and generate revolutionary practice.