Collecng and sharing knowledge: migrant women and family learning


Sarah Foster Sarah Foster is an adult educator who has worked in adult and community educaon in London for over 30 years. She worked as an ESOL teacher and co-­‐ordinator for a long period and for the past 10 years has worked in the field of Family Learning. In 2011 she returned to learning and completed an MSc in Educaon Power and Social Change at Birkbeck, University of London. She is interested in community-­‐based adult educaon as a field for challenge and resistance, for both praconers and students.


Introducon


This arcle presents some key findings from a research project into the learning experiences of migrant women in community-­‐based Family Learning courses in North West London. It focuses on the element of my research which examined the relaonship between instuonal audit and assessment pracces, driven by wider policy priories, and the lived experience of these women as learners and knowledge builders.


Family Learning and the Policy Context


The policy context for Family Learning is changing as the historically broad flow of adult and community educaon provision is channeled into the increasingly narrow policy stream of ‘employability’. Although Family Learning, and some other strands of adult community educaon, have yet to be completely absorbed into this stream, the assessment and recording requirements associated with the employability agenda are lapping at the edges of our provision, as outlined below.


The image of community educaon as being relavely informal and responsive to community needs can mask underlying policies heavily weighted towards individualism, oen ignoring deep and persistent inequalies associated with factors such as class, race and gender. Policy themes such as social cohesion, inclusion and parcipaon, along with terms such as ‘parent empowerment’ and ‘empowering communies’, have been used loosely and unreflexively in many policy documents. Though sounding benign, such discourse is steeped in an ideology where inclusion is only achieved through adherence to the prescribed norms of the dominant culture. Increasingly this means parcipaon defined as economic parcipaon through employment, and empowerment only within safe boundaries (Jackson, 2011, Johnston, 2003). Empowerment is limited to an acve cizenship which sll complies within an oen very unequal system, rather than empowerment to challenge it.


In the Family Learning context there is an emphasis on reaching out to parents perceived as excluded. Clarke (2006) describes a cultural and moral discourse in which these marginalised groups are too oen negavely represented, and much has been wrien about the importance of challenging this (Clegg & McNulty, 2002; Clarke, 2006; Bagley & Ackerly, 2006, Thompson, 2005). Many policies aimed at families increasingly throw the responsibility to break the cycle of poverty back on to individuals. There is a tendency to see individual empowerment as the route out of exclusion and poverty. The building of individual ‘confidence’ is oen cited, and, in my view, overused as a posive outcome. For those seeking evidence of policy success it is an easy and convenient slippage of meaning to equate confidence with power. The parcular relevance of these policies for this study, is that, in the sengs under consideraon, the deficit view of families that do not adhere to the norms of the dominant culture, and the individualisaon of soluons to what are conceived as their social problems, are oen closely idenfied with migrant women.


Situated on the margins of mainstream policy and pracce, Family Learning courses have been more likely to be exempt from the more stringent regulaons for assessment and for monitoring outcomes, and the requirements of the employability agenda have been addressed with a lighter touch. Where there is no accreditaon, the RARPA process (Recognion and Recording of Progression and Achievement) is the required method of assessment. In some cases, however, documentaon such as ‘route to work plans’ have been introduced, and ‘so’ outcomes such as increased confidence are claimed as being early-­‐stage employability outcomes. This sets up a contradicon in the messages women may be receiving through this kind of provision, in terms of inclusion and parcipaon. On the


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