Document(s) 6 of 16

With the advantage offered me as group scribe, now after the consultation, I am adding another perspective. To be clear about my subjectivity, I start with some personal work history. I have worked for many years in an area of development, for which I have found the concept of adult education, specifically nonformal adult education, to be helpful and explanatory. Because my earliest work (1971 and on) was with the Extension Service of Memorial University, Newfoundland, I considered learning in natural societal settings (the rural communities of Newfoundland) and use of media (such as the Fogo Process and its later incarnations — citizen's television in Buchans, Newfoundland, for example) in those settings as the very essence of nonformal adult learning. That form of adult education I learned and lived experientially in Newfoundland for quite some time, both before I embarked on graduate degree programs in adult education at institutions of higher learning, and between those degrees. In those graduate programs, and in practice, I saw the full spectrum of activities in adult education. I saw, too, how polarized the field of adult education could be, with the revolutionary-radical wing at one pole and the reformist-liberal at the other. (Of course, these terms are gross oversimplifications and do not speak of the glue that holds the field together). Some of the complexity can be read in the works of Bhasim, Collins, Freire, and Youngman for the former, and Knowles and Houle for the latter. But to continue to oversimplify, it is the former — a critical perspective of adult education — that most nourishes my work and thinking.

From inside that perspective on learning, I have focused on media in development and communication for social change, thereby importing heavily from communication theory and practice. As a result, my practice and my position have grown fundamentally interdisciplinary. When I scoured the databases of literature in communication for two years, it was no accident (although surprising at the time) that I was led back repeatedly to the Fogo Process (although I knew it as informal adult education) and allied developments in community and alternate media, radical media, and emancipatory media. Then and now, when reading the development communication literature, I am forcibly struck by the absence of learning as a central and illuminating concept in development communication, and how often I could and can substitute progressive or critical nonformal adult education for participatory communication in the literatures I was reading and not destroy or take away from their meaning.

The two disciplines of communication and adult education (the term discipline being one with which neither communication nor adult education is entirely comfortable) have substantial common terrain, but for the most part go forward in practice and scholarship as if the other did not exist. For example, development communication repeatedly cites Freire, but does not focus on his context of critical pedagogy, a special approach of adult education. The key issues for both fields are the same — empowerment, development, social change, democracy, participation, access, social justice, civic society, and structural analysis. The focus of the work of nonformal adult education and participatory development communication is also the same — people at the margins in some way — the least privileged, the peasants, the poor, and those with less purchase on political, economic, and social power. Of late, adult education has been infused with new energy and powerful conceptual tools by more attention to critical social theory. A major contributor to critical social theory, sociologist Jurgen Habermas, has offered some tantalizing thoughts about communicative action and the utility of technical skills of basic media to an ideal speech situation — the essence of a vibrant civil society or participatory democracy. His work is fuel for emancipatory education, such as that envisaged by Freire. Some critical pedagogues inside adult education share my conviction that unless adult education imports or blends insights from communication, the work of critical pedagogy on behalf of these groups will be the poorer.

Since I am familiar with the literatures and practice of nonformal adult education, I write inside that perspective to persuade other colleagues to join me in interdisciplinary inquiry and to reform graduate programs in adult education so that communication is given more attention. Although my interdisciplinary stance is frequently affirmed in practice from many parts of the world and by scholars outside North America, only recently in Canada has development communication looked towards adult education in an interested fashion. Much of the recent interest from communicators in adult learning has been confined to distance education, and distance education technologies in particular. Since the bulk of Canadian distance education is inclined towards the transportation model of communication, (i.e., a channel for delivering a message from the centre to peripheral locations — in spite of rhetoric about interactivity), I am alarmed to see distance education taken up uncritically by development communicators.

In meetings such as those sponsored by IDRC in Montreal in November 1994, and Toronto in February 1995, I met people who subscribe to the idea of communication as culture, and I mentally note the obvious bridge between that view (shared by me) and Freire's philosophy of education as cultural work, a philosophy which has informed progressive adult education for twenty-five years. In groups like these, I hear an interest in issues of participation which are remarkably allied to another area of progressive adult education — participatory research. I hold no illusion that nonformal adult education has prefabricated answers for participatory development communication (or vice versa), but the similarities of the struggle to define essences of our respective practice are stunning. The benefits of collaboration appear considerable. Both fields of study and practice have much to gain if each devotes a portion of effort and resource to a searching but structured dialogue for an understanding of how the two interface, and how one can strengthen the other.

The discussions for which I was the reporter gamely took on that task, although my group pragmatically reframed it in terms of something manageable under the meeting's circumstances. The discussion group made a useful beginning, but the essential issue could not be completed there. Indeed, it requires a different process and a longer time frame. It also requires a higher level of risk from participants in leaving the familiarity of home turf and stepping onto a different one. We began, and we began well, but there are the proverbial miles to go. The journey will not be a cool intellectual one on which already solidified and erudite theories are exchanged. Instead, it will be a journey to explore fundamental assumptions about how people, communities, and nations learn, grow, and develop as well as a journey in which we push past comfortable ideology and fuzzy rhetoric to create and articulate a synthesis, which is a nexus or conjuncture for participatory communication practice. On the voyage, we will inevitably stumble, or even fall, but we can make some degree of falling a legitimate and acceptable part of the exploratory interdisciplinary process for each other. As Freire says in a conversation with Miles Horton (another progressive adult educator), in circumstances like these, "we make the road by walking."

Document(s) 6 of 16