"White Practices" in Adult Education Settings: An Exploration

This paper draws together literature from the newly emerging areas of studies about Whiteness, and postcolonial theory to provide an alternative analysis of the Inquiry processes into adult community education undertaken in Australia over the last decade. Introduction In this paper I draw on the work of Ruth Frankenberg, Edward Said, Ann Laura Stoler and Ghassan Hage to push a little further the contemporary trend in research studies about Whiteness. My agenda, in drawing on these and other postcolonial writers, is to make more explicit the links between studies about Whiteness, the ongoing historical contexts of imperialism and colonialism within which these new research directions are set, and the overarching claims of benevolence and progress embedded in much policy and literature about Australian adult community education. Edward Said describes this work as “contrapuntal” (Said, 1993, p. 78), acknowledging the continuities of power, history and politics invoked by policy texts. Moreover it foregrounds a number of textual practices that have material effects on the ways in which adult community education is practiced in contemporary Australia. Such textual practices include the casual way in which references to marginalized groups and their agency orbits around a White enterprising center; the effort involved in disguising repertoires of Whiteness and their effects; the slipperiness with which issues of power and productivity are constructed around representations of normalized White “effective citizenship”. All of these textual practices are part and parcel of constituting what adult community education can and should be. Theoretical Insights Informing the Work Two areas of theoretical work underpin this paper and the data I analyze; first, literature specifically about Whiteness and studies of Whiteness drawn primarily from postcolonial and cultural studies; and second, literature describing and/or theorizing adult education. What do you mean Whiteness! Many researchers have begun to explore the concept of Whiteness as a social construction that is fleshed out in the daily contexts of our lives. Ruth Frankenberg describes it as “a location of structural advantage, of race privilege . a “standpoint”, a place from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at society . a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed” (1993, p.1). She identifies three aspects of “thinking through race” in her work on White women’s understandings of their racial locations: “it suggests a conscious process” (ibid. p. 142) that also may have differential effects on the way people engage around race in the future; it occurs within a field of understandings already permeated by assumptions about race; and third, it assumes that all bodies are “racially positioned in society” (ibid. p.142). Elizabeth Ellsworth (1997, p. 264) supports efforts to interrogate Whiteness, claiming it is a practice; a form of property; a performance; a constantly shifting location upon complex maps of social, economic, and political power; a form of consciousness; a form of ignorance; a privilege; something those of us who “are” White must unlearn; something we Whites fear, something that gives us pleasure, something we desire; something we must name and describe and understand; something we must change; an invisible something we must make visible, finally at this moment in history, to our White selves. This kind of thinking about Whiteness, as always-already located within a racialised, albeit shifting and partial, field of power, provides the ground for rethinking how White educators and scholars might understand our own Whiteness. It resonates, to a certain extent, with many Indigenous writers in Australia who have long been involved in demonstrating how Whiteness affects their lives. (See for example Holt, 1992, 1999; MoretonRobinson, 1998; Huggins, 1995; Langford, 1988; and the recent Human Rights Commission Report Bringing them home, 1997.) But some of these Indigenous people are also circumspect about the fluid and malleable ways in which understandings of Whiteness evolve in “Whiteness studies,” precisely because such work can elide the continuities and consolidations of white power hidden beneath the surface of “hybrid” White subjects. Invoking the notion of White hybridity may potentially reinscribe a form of Whiteness that is ever-changing, fluid, and malleable. Yet hybrid White subjects may take no responsibility for the “unearned privileges” (McIntosh,1988) they attract everyday. It is naive to think that all White people experience the same kind of privilege; privilege varies with the nuanced and changing dimensions of Whiteness experienced through gender, financial (in)stability, sexuality and mobility, and White folk living in poverty are te stament to this. At the same time, the racialised dimensions of privilege in relation to work and financial (in)security are evident in research which shows how poverty and poor working conditions are experienced differentially by Whites and our Others (Brodkin, 1999; Roediger, 1991). I am unable, in this paper, to rehearse the full complexities of this body of work, the effects of colonialism and imperialism embedded in contemporary government review processes, or the textual strategies that render invisible (to many White people at least) the power-knowledge dynamics of Whiteness in policy making. Nevertheless in this paper I refuse the assumption that Whiteness is an “invisible,” disguised discourse in ACE. I begin from the point established by many writers (Said, 1993; Stoler, 1995; Hage, 1998; Ellsworth, 1997), that Whiteness is indeed a set of visible discursive practices that have material effects. Furthermore, these discourses are enmeshed in the cultural practices and beliefs of a particular form of White, heterosexual civility that informs the masculine consciousness (cf. Miles, 1996) pervading many public institutions in Australia. Although the above discussion sets a broad context for investigating Whiteness, this project falls short for many educators and scholars, in that the forms of privilege invoked by Frankenberg and Ellsworth seem amorphous, intangible, overwhelmingly “large” in scope, and disconnected from a set of practical guidelines that may help to disrupt privilege on a day to day basis. In this paper I want to acknowledge this tension, demand even, in some adult education sites to provide “scripts” for practice. Yet I also know that the demand for practical advice and “facilitation techniques” is complicit with a set of “adult learning principles” that actively work against rendering visible, to White people at least, the effects of an invisible norm of Whiteness (Shore 2000) and the assumptions about control, power and the certainty of knowing which that norm presumes. In this paper therefore I want to resist the tendency to talk about Whiteness in the context of pedagogical strategies (See Durie, 1996; Johnson–Bailey and Cervero, 1998; and Barlas, 1997 for examples of this work.) Rather, I want to examine the effects of Whiteness in the sphere of policy making in contemporary Australia. “Adult Education” in Australia A second body of literature relevant to this study is the material produced about adult education in Australia. For the purposes of this paper adult community education (hereafter referred to as ACE) signifies those activities that occur in many neighborhood centers and technical colleges in Australia. These activities generally come under the umbrella of lifelong learning programs that are “learner centered, responsive to community needs, accessible and inclusive, diverse, varied and flexible” (Crowley, 1997). They are often distinguished from programs offering a vocational or tertiary curriculum to adult learners. The literature most relevant to this paper is the material produced from the two government Inquiries into ACE, carried out by a Senate Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training in 1991 and 1996/7. The 1991 Inquiry provided the first comprehensive report on Australian ACE since 1944 and aimed to map and describe, in a more visible way, the strengths and needs of the fourth sector. It produced a report Come in Cinderella (Aulich, 1991) and thirty recommendations to be table with the Senate to guide deliberations on future government policy. The 1996/7 Inquiry aimed to continue the mapping exercise, albeit with a more focused effort on reviewing progress related to the policy and structural changes that had been implemented since 1991. It produced a report Beyond Cinderella: Towards a Learning Society