Sue Webb

Can ICT reduce social exclusion? The case of an adults' English language learning programme

Strong claims are made for ICT-based lifelong learning as an effective way of reducing the exclusion of various groups in society, yet, there is very little research to support these claims. Empirical research is needed, including qualitative studies of the experiences of socially excluded learners using ICT. This article reports the findings of such a study in relation to learners from one socially excluded group, adults from ethnic minority backgrounds, who are disproportionately deprived and often excluded by language. The article discusses the study of the experiences and perceptions of adults learning English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) through ICT in seven different learning centres in England. The findings show that technology is insufficient to overcome existing inequalities in access to learning, and to engage learners who would not otherwise undertake formal learning, but ICT-based learning can reduce some aspects of social exclusion in terms of encouraging minority ethnic group learners to speak more within the host community. ICT-based learning offers a space for language learning and practice, which is often absent in traditional ESOL classrooms and in the every day lives of these excluded groups. Learning is a social practice in which the level of commitment of tutors to encouraging the use of these media and creating a safe and private space for learning affects the range of learning activities with which learners engage and the impact of these on their everyday use of English.

Gender, Foundation Degrees and the knowledge‐driven economy

This article questions the concept of ‘education for employment’, which constructs a discourse of individual and societal benefit in a knowledge‐driven economy. Recent policy emphasis in the European Union promotes the expansion of higher education and short‐cycle vocational awards such as the intermediate two‐year Foundation Degree recently introduced into England and Wales. Studies of vocational education and training (VET) and the knowledge economy have focused largely on the governance of education and on the development and drift of policy. Many VET programmes have also been considered for their classed, raced and gendered take‐up and subsequent effect on employment. This article builds on both fields of study to engage with the finer cross‐analyses of gender, social class, poverty, race and citizenship. In its analysis of policy texts the article argues that in spite of a discourse of inclusivity, an expanded higher education system has generated new inequalities, deepening social stratification. Drawing on early analyses of national quantitative data sets, it identifies emerging gendered, classed and raced patterns and considers these in relation to occupationally and hierarchically stratified labour markets, both within and without the knowledge economy.

The Feminisation of Migration and the Migrants VET Policy Neglects: The Case of Skilled Women Secondary Migrants in Australia.

There is increasingly scholarship on gender and migration, yet the international migration of highly skilled women is still somewhat under-researched. This article focuses on this neglected area in the context of Australia’s discretionary inward migration policies to solve skills shortages. The article draws on empirical research using a qualitative case-study approach with in-depth narrative interviews to explore understandings of the experience of highly skilled female secondary migrants. The findings resonate with a growing body of work in North America, Europe and the UK. Applying a gendered and intersectional analysis to the case of Australia with its complex mix of skilled migrants from predominantly English speaking countries, as well as many countries in the Asia-Pacific region and Africa, reveals a more nuanced understanding of the temporality and gendered and racialised ways in which the processes of career disruption, deskilling, intensification of domestic responsibilities and re-feminisation of health and human service work play out through tensions between migration and education policies.

Widening participation, social mobility and the role of universities in a globalized world

A university education has long been seen as the gateway to upward social mobility for individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds in countries the world over, and a well-educated working population is presented as a pathway to national prosperity for both developed and developing nations alike (e.g. Leitch, 2006). Given the higher number of socially advantaged young people who have traditionally entered university then, which in many developed nations has effectively been at saturation point, any expansion in numbers of higher education students must be achieved by broadening the social base of the undergraduate population, or ‘widening participation’ as it is usually known. The so-called ‘widening participation agenda’ has been driven by the twin objectives of social justice for the individual and greater economic prosperity for the wider society, objectives that are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Political rhetoric and media discourse have supported and reinforced these notions, and government policy in the developed world has, at least until relatively recently in the last half century or so, sought to ensure the expansion of higher education (e.g. Dearing, 1997; Robbins, 1963). At the heart of this policy is the need to reach out to people from social groups not traditionally associated with university study (Milburn, 2009; National Audit Office [NAO], 2002). This social justice project continues to be supported by recent national and international initiatives since the financial crash of 2008. The 2011 UK Government White Paper Students at the Heart of the System, (BIS, 2011) for instance, suggested that ‘... widening participation for students of all backgrounds remains a key strategic objective for all higher education institutions’. Whilst in Europe, the position is also similar, the Bucharest Communique (European Higher Education Area [EHEA], 2012) suggesting that ‘(T)he student body entering and graduating from higher education institutions should reflect the diversity of Europe’s populations’. Readers of this journal will have their own interpretations of what such laudable declarations may mean in practice (e.g. see Holford’s article in this issue) and that will vary from not just regional, national or continental perspectives, but also in terms of other ‘demographic’ factors impacting upon groups of individuals, including gender, ethnicity, dis/ability, social class, religion, sexuality, rural/urban locality and, perhaps most pertinently in the pages of IJLE, age.

Higher vocational education and social mobility: educational participation in Australia and England

Abstract This article explores the issue of social mobility in relation to the recent expansion of higher vocational education (HIVE) by non-university providers. The post-school vocational education sector has become the object of policies to widen access to higher education to ensure greater social mobility and provide second chance education to those who do not complete initial education in Anglophone countries. Drawing on typologies of vocational education and training systems, the article generates understanding of the expansion of HIVE within two Anglophone countries (Australia and England). The article considers the implications for widening opportunities to higher education for non-traditional students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds in these two contexts. Descriptive analysis of current national data on participation reveals surprising differences between countries. The article concludes by discussing the extent to which the higher education offerings in vocational institutions can contribute to social mobility within these two countries.

The MOOC phenomenon: toward lifelong education for all?

In one of his more technologically determined moments, Marx famously remarked that ‘[t]he hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steammill society with the industrial capitalist’ (Marx, 1963/1847, p. 109). Education, no less than society as a whole, has been shaped by technology: writing, the codex, paper, the printing press, the blackboard, the slate, the epidiascope, the fountain pen—all have very clearly shaped how knowledge was developed and disseminated, and how people could study and learn. In an age of Powerpoint, the Internet, Skype and the ‘virtual classroom’, the importance of technology for education is of course, a truism. Yet, perhaps strangely, specifically ‘educational’ technologies have always been of quite minor significance—certainly for adult and lifelong education—when set beside broader technological developments. Many years ago, Harrison (1961) showed how the development of railways made university adult education possible in nineteenth-century Britain. Correspondence courses everywhere have relied on cheap paper, cheap printing, and—probably most of all—universal and efficient postal services. The British government’s original name for the Open University, A University of the Air (Department of Education and Science [DES], 1966), reflected its reliance on radio and television. While the power of technology to shape education is not in doubt, exactly how it does so is a matter of constant debate. Most new technologies have their evangelists, though many have proven false prophets. Educational history is peppered with technologies whose impact was far smaller, or more transient, than their advocates expected; likewise, there are many examples of technologies whose impact came only after a ‘lag’ of years or decades. To take an extreme example, libraries’ pedagogical role in universities changed when printing made books cheaper and more plentiful—but not ‘until more than two and a half centuries after the introduction of print’ (Moodie, 2014, p. 457). The most recent objects of adoration among technological evangelists are ‘MOOCs’—Massive Open Online Courses. They will, we are told, change education out of recognition: partly by the new opportunities they present and partly by their threat to existing institutions, systems and structures. The authors of An Avalanche is Coming, for instance, have assured us that MOOCs both threaten ‘traditional 20th century universities’ which ‘don’t change radically’, and offer them ‘huge opportunities ... if they do’ (Barber, Donnelly, & Rizvi, 2013, p. 3).

Neo-liberalism and the shifting discourse of ‘educational fairness’

This editorial picks up and develops an issue we explored a year ago (Waller, Holford, Jarvis, Milana, & Webb, 2014), in an editorial on the role of universities in widening participation in education and (generally upward) social mobility in the globalized world. Commentators in the global north have noted a recent shift in both governmental rhetoric and policy direction on the role of education in social change. The movement has essentially been from education policies designed to help the many (e.g. for socially disadvantaged groups to access higher education), to those designed to help a very select (and generally more capable) few; that is, to permit just ‘the best and the brightest’ from that background to enter a ‘top university’ and be the beneficiaries of the trappings of career success. We seek here to identify how it came to be that, for much of the developed world in particular, the discourse and policy shift around educational fairness has changed since the turn of the Millennium, and in particular since the global economic crisis of 2008 onwards, from seeking a wide-ranging good of ‘social justice’ to a narrower target of ‘social mobility’ for a far smaller number. A leading writer on education and economic development, Shirley Walters (2014, p. 186), recently suggested ‘Learning has become an individualized and increasingly expensive possession’ that can be traded in the market place with growing ease. This is true both nationally and internationally as globalization leads to enhanced opportunities to study or gain employment abroad for those unencumbered by family commitments or other constraints. However, this process is not open to all citizens equally, leading to a widening gap between rich and poor, both internationally and within any given economy or society. Most developed societies are becoming economically more polarized despite politicians and commentators paying lip service to notions of greater equality—see the clamour to publicly support if not actually implement policy to advance the ideas of The Spirit Level for instance (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2010). Individuals with significant levels of initial education are able to pursue opportunities for lifelong learning far more readily than those with little or inadequate formal education. This enhances competition for increasingly scarce resources such as opportunities for educational experiences and qualifications. Most commentators, and in particular those from the political left, suggest the current world system of exchange is a ‘neoliberal’ capitalist one, which Flew

Global policy agencies and visions for twenty-first century lifelong education

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has recently published a vision for education for the twenty-first century Rethinking Education: Towards a Global Common Good? (2015). Building on the spirit of two previous landmark UNESCO publications, Learning to Be: The World of Education Today and Tomorrow (1972), known as the Faure Report, and Learning: The treasure within (1996), the Delors Report, this latest text claims connections to the earlier policies and poses new questions and concepts to inspire debate and dialogue relevant to present contexts. In keeping with one of UNESCO’s main tasks as a global observatory of social transformation and stimulating public debate, the text is scholarly, as well as provocative. The process of producing the text appears to have modelled the iterative exchange of ideas that the observatory hopes will develop among education stakeholders following its publication. A core group of international experts under the co-chairs of Ms. Amina J. Mohammed and Professor W. John Morgan ensured the inclusion of perspectives from people located in Europe, the Middle East, Central America, India and Japan, whilst the wider group included people not only from these locations, but also from North America, Korea and Hong Kong. The structure of the text also demonstrates that the writers valued the need to discuss and understand the experiences of different educational settings and contexts using the format of boxed inserts to illustrate and discuss examples of research and practise from different parts of the world. Surprisingly though, given the rise of the newly advanced economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, few or no international experts were involved in the text production from some of these BRIC countries. Nevertheless, given that it is more than three decades since this global policy agency (UNESCO) provided a review and vision for the purposes of education, the question is: Will this text become top reading for policy developers, researchers and practitioners or will it be largely ignored? Among researchers, the study of how education policies travel from one context to another has been the subject of intense scrutiny in recent academic research. Globalization has been associated with an increase in policy travelling, prompting researchers to question how education policies become borrowed, lent or modified across national contexts (Steiner-Khamsi & Waldow, 2012). Additionally, researchers have asked whether the nation state is the most appropriate unit of analysis for understanding education policy (Lingard & Rawolle,

Listening to Learners to Investigate the Viability of Technology-driven ESOL Pedagogy

Policies for second language (L2) learning have moved to centre stage in many postindustrial societies as economic and political migration has increased. This paper presents an overview of this shift in education policy and uses empirical work with learners to examine the way that technology is being used as a solution to support second language programmes for adult immigrants in some Englishspeaking countries. The paper examines the viability of technology-driven pedagogy for ESL/ESOL using qualitative research conducted on learners taking an ESL/ESOL CD-ROM-based programme offered by a national basic skills provider in the UK. After setting out the context relating this UK policy intervention to existing CALL theory and to similar technology-based projects in Australia and North America, the paper discusses the findings in relation to the four language skills, motivation and learning relationships. This research identifies some potential benefits of technology-driven pedagogy for language learning, provided it is supported by a principleoriented ESL/ESOL pedagogy.

Reflecting on ‘what works’ in education research‐policy/practice relationships

There has been a policy push in several countries to encourage more evidence‐based practice in education, although current knowledge shows that the relationship between education research and policy‐practice is problematic. In spite of this, educational organizations have to respond to the challenges of globalisation with new pedagogic models to teach new things to new people in new ways. Therefore, researchers are being asked to consider new ways of relating with users. This article examines these ‘new ways’ in the context of a policy initiative for English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) in the UK where, as in other countries, there is a need to provide access to learning for migrants. A qualitative methodology has been used to reflect on the outcomes of a project that researched the experiences of learners and tutors in order to outline pedagogy for learning computer‐based ESOL. Characteristics of research‐policy relationships that ‘work’ by building a researcher‐user community of practice are identified.