2 results
III.4 - Community Engagement: Cultivating Critical Awareness
-
- By Jim Crowther, Mae Shaw
- Edited by Eurig Scandrett, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh
-
- Book:
- Public Sociology as Educational Practice
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 02 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 14 September 2020, pp 287-298
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction: theorising practice
We are writing as teachers and academics with substantial experience over many years (50 years combined) on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes of professional community education. This chapter is derived from that experience and developed from Community Engagement: A Critical Guide for Practitioners (Shaw and Crowther, 2017), a practical resource intended to guide workers as they confront the contemporary challenges of community engagement.
The formation of professional community education services in Scotland was an outcome of the 1975 Alexander Report on Adult Education: The Challenge of Change (Scottish Education Department, 1975), which was adopted by most local authorities. It was not until early 2000 that the term went largely out of favour in the context of local government reform. Whilst the term ‘community education’ has been largely abandoned in policy in Scotland, and other parts of the UK, it still carries historical resonance as a form of educational work rooted in the lives of real people, whatever the contingencies of context. It therefore continues to raise expectations of a curriculum that draws creatively on people's experiences in order to enlarge the space for cultivating and sustaining critical community engagement.
These aspirations, however, are increasingly subject to competing rationalities. First, they are at odds with the realities of contemporary higher education in the UK. We are based in a research-intensive university, operating within a wider system of marketised higher education. In this context, the professional locus of our work, and the ideological commitments that inform it, tend to be marginal at best; at worst, surplus to institutional requirements. In addition, changing terms and conditions of employment – towards casualisation and competitiveness – do not engender confidence in the future of such programmes. On the other hand, legislative arrangements that have embedded ‘community engagement’ in much public policy (see Scottish Government, 2015 Institute for Government, 2015) continue to sustain a ‘market’ for these kinds of programmes, whilst policy commitments to ‘widening access’ and ‘lifelong learning’ continue to receive at least rhetorical support within the university sector.
Universities have always been contradictory places, harbouring critical knowledges as well as commodified ones and, whilst the space of the former is constantly under threat, it has not yet been entirely eliminated.
III.7 - Dialogue III: Public Sociology Practices, Privatising Universities
- Edited by Eurig Scandrett, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh
-
- Book:
- Public Sociology as Educational Practice
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 02 March 2021
- Print publication:
- 14 September 2020, pp 331-342
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
As a dialogue, this section engaged a wider range of participants than previous attempts. The email invitation to respond to the provocation and cases generated responses from contributors to four of the six cases, interestingly reflecting the contexts of England and Scotland; early career and recently retired academics, on more or less precarious contracts; and in ancient and modern universities. To what extent is public sociology as educational practice sustainable, even possible, within the neoliberal university? The challenges of engaging with integrity in educational practice within the neoliberal university, however that is mediated and experienced, has prompted an engaging and impassioned debate which will undoubtedly continue. Moreover, the personal cost of public sociology as educational practice has also been articulated. The context of the neoliberal university makes public sociology, and indeed educational practice with any integrity, a constant battle: exhausting, upsetting and demoralising. The medium of email exchange has mediated the emotional content, but the experience of rage, and tears, and indignation, is clearly shared by the dialogical participants.
The focus of this section is on the university, the institution in which many public sociologists are located, at least partially. To what extent does the neoliberal university provide spaces for public sociology education, for the generation of really useful knowledge with subaltern counterpublics? Elsewhere Scandrett argued that ‘The current crisis potentially makes universities privileged places for the realisation of mass intellectuality, because they are educational spaces in which the structural contradictions of neoliberal capital are so explicitly being played out’ (Scandrett, 2017: 83). Can this be argued for public sociology education? Should we understand these spaces, such as those documented in this section, to be because of (as opposed to despite) the structural contradictions of neoliberal capitalism? This assertion proved to be controversial in dialogue with the contributors.
Lena Wånggren, for example, questioned the assertion that the neoliberal university provides spaces for public sociology education, and ‘mass intellectuality’. Because (as the collection asks elsewhere) of who gets to enter this educational space of knowledge production? Who gets to be considered as knowledge producer? Many do not even have a chance to enter the university space because of institutional racism, sexism, border controls, and capitalism: tuition fees still apply in Scottish higher education institutions (HEIs) – it is only Scottish and (for now) EU students who do not pay them, and only undergraduate studies are free.