practice was, over time, integrated into area-based teams of community educators with their specialist focus. These structural changes were important, as was the philosophy behind the service of community education. The Alexander Report (Adult Education: The Challenge of Change, 1975) also embraced a democratic imperative that valued and supported dissent, difference and diversity in a plural liberal society.
The report stated that:
Individual freedom to question the value of established practices and institutions and to propose new forms is part of our democratic heritage. To maintain this freedom, resources should not be put at the disposal only of those who conform but ought reasonably to be made available to all for explicit educational purposes. (SED, 1975: 25)
Today this democratic legacy may no longer carry much weight in policy circles but it still has ideological currency amongst some educational practitioners. This connection between adult literacy and community education, and the value attached to social and political participation in the latter, steered literacy provision towards social as well as personal change in communities.
The importance of the ties with community is that the concept is intrinsically ambiguous and ambivalent. It is ambiguous in the sense that it can refer to a wide range of settings: the home, neighbourhood, work, online groups, society, and transnational networks, where people relate to and interact with others. Thus community can be an appealing term with connotations of place, identity and active commitment. As social animals our sense of belonging to a community is important and desirable. But belonging for some can be exclusion for others, so the relational dimension of community and the wider inequalities of power that it can embody need to be recognised:
Is 'the community' everybody who lives in a certain area, is 'the community' a particular group conscious of itself as a grouping, or is 'the community', paradoxically, all those who have been excluded from feeling part of 'the community'? (Cain and Yuval-Davis, 1990:9)
The ambiguities of community can lead to ambivalent ends. As Raymond Williams (1983:76) noted, community can be dangerous particularly because of its tendency to be 'a warm and persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships.' It is hardly surprising that community is one of the most popular words in the lexicon of policy makers. On the one hand, community conjures up familiarity and, on the other, its parochialism in policy can mean addressing change at a neighbourhood level without really changing anything of wider significance that may cause local problems. Social divisions and inequalities in society can be fudged under the smokescreen of community and therefore ignored in policy “solutions”. Rather than trying to pin down what community is, which is to engage in a fruitless search for its true meaning, what is far more productive is to explore how community can be interpreted in policy and practice so as to maximise its socially just possibilities. The unintended outcomes of policy may be more important than the intended ones and practitioners have a role in this process. The more practitioners are aware of their scope for agency in this respect, the better.
If we fast forward, from 1975 to 2000, the policy context for adult literacy changes qualitatively as well as quantitatively as the newly formed Scottish parliament, following the devolution referendum of 1999, instigated adult literacy policy development. This subsequently led to the adoption of a social practice model of adult literacies as well as the introduction of significant new resources for practitioners. In 2008, £65m
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