Learning Trajectories, Violence and Empowerment Amongst Adult Basic Skills Learners, by Vicky Duckworth
Author: Vicky Duckworth Title: Learning Trajectories, Violence and Empowerment Amongst Adult Basic Skills Learners Cost: £90 214 Pages ISBN: 9780415828727
Reviewed by Shelley Tracey Shelley Tracey was a teacher educator in HE specialising in adult literacies. She is now developing her practice of using poetry with adult learners in a range of community arts settings. Shelley has recently completed her PhD on teacher creativity and is training as a Poetry Therapist. She is interested in multimodal literacies and their capacity for inclusion. Despite living in Northern Ireland she has made valuable contributions to RaPAL and supported RaPAL's work for many years.
Many of the learners in adult basic skills classes arrive there as a result of challenging experiences in their schooling or personal lives or communities, or perhaps all of these. Focusing on the stories of 16 learners from Oldham, Duckworth explores the complex factors which have impacted on the research participants' learning trajectories. She frames their experiences in terms of Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence. The learners' experiences are located within a carefully constructed theoretical framework, which establishes the foundations of the stigma which these learners have endured. At the same time, the distancing effect of theory is counteracted by Duckworth's references to her own experiences as a member of the community to which the learners belong.
The dual positioning of the author as insider/outsider researcher (Stringer, 1999) poses a challenge for the discourse of this text. It has to negotiate between the academic analysis and the emotive stories of learners who have experienced disempowerment and also found ways to renegotiate aspects of personal power. Duckworth manages the dichotomy between the analytical and personal effectively, setting the learners' stories at centre stage in each of the chapters and then standing back and reflecting on their experiences, relating them to the concepts of symbolic violence.
The use of not only social, cultural and economic capital in this book as well as “glamour” and “muscle” capital might, on the one hand, be seen as an over-elaboration of Bourdieu's notion of capital in this text. However, the notion of linguistic capital is clearly explained, and adds a useful layer to Bernstein's elaborated and restricted codes (1971). Overall, the operations of these different aspects of capital are explained effectively through the text.
This is a courageous book which requires courageous readers. It is not for those who might believe that the process of transformation that occurs through involvement in lifelong learning is simple and straightforward. Nor is it for those education policy makers whose technicist policies manifest a belief that those who are unsuccessful in their learning are somehow responsible for their own failures. If your perception of literacy is of a school-based set of competences, unrelated to social practice, then you might well leave this book off your reading list.
I recommend that you read this text if you are a researcher or educator concerned about the relationship between education and social justice, and the injustices and disadvantages with which the majority of adult basic skills learners have to contend. You will also find enlightening the insights into learners' literacy practices and the beliefs and values which these practices embody. This text carries on the ethnographic
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