Interview with Alan Tuckett – new elected president of ICAE and participant in the intergenerational panel at the EAEA General Assembly

During the conference “A world worth living in” we heard the messages that adult education probably can not save the world, but change it. Still, we are witnesses of a lack of real changes today. So, what do you think, what should we as adult educators do? Is it a matter of time, should we keep trying as we did, or we need to change our approach?

I think the challenge is that adult education is a marginal part of the wider education system. It is a catalyst, a change agent for the achievement for lots of other social policy goals: in health, in justice, in the economy, in preserving effective citizenship in later life, and so on. The challenge for us is to make that change agent role visible enough to policy makers. The real language problem adult educators have is that we can not dothis whilst we carry on talking in our own comfort zone. We have to use the language of the economists, the sociologists, and health prevention specialists and we need to accumulate evidence and stories.

So do we need to learn how to influence policy makers, how to approach them, but our approach to learning is fine?

Our vision is fine. We are not as good as we think we are in reaching the full range of our communities and in serving the interests of people. We like to help them in ways that suit our structures. I think we have to be skeptical about our own approach. But I do think that there is a problem in most governments in understanding benefits that work not just within one policy area. For example, if you spend some money on adult education and that have some positive effect on mental health - that saves money for the health department. The Education Department then says: Well that's great, but Health should pay for that, and Health says: Well, that’s Education, you should pay for that. So who takes responsibility for recognizing the benefits? Our job, I think, is to somehow create public understanding which you can see in Scandinavian countries where learning is normal and it touches all of the areas of life really.

You are very experienced in being a critical friend of the government. So you did it your way and it was a good one. Is it something that you would recommend to us? Would you change anything in your approach?

The thing that was good was that we have systematically collected quantitative evidence, evidence based on numbers, and qualitative evidence at the same time. We have deliberately explored storytelling through Adult Learners’ Week, through diaries of learning, through learner’s voice as a way of bringing alive adult education to busy decision makers who do not understand the details. We have been good in doing that, but you can't do that without collecting the numbers. Where we have been less successful and I wish Id seen it earlier, was in developing the skills of economists to use analysis on the wider benefits of learning. How to show what is the benefit to public spending of learning? What happens if you don't educate people in care homes? How much more does that end up costing the state? We've done quite bit a work on that in the last year or two. I wish of course that I had started that twenty years earlier.

What would be your message to the young colleagues?

The positive message is this work really matters, but your measure has to be: who doesn’t find it possible to join in and what can we do about it. That is the positive message to say, like Gita Sen said this morning at the conference, learning is always unsettling, but we should always do the work we can do, as well as we can, and keep an eye on what we are not doing and imagine different ways of doing it. So the worst thing is to stop imagining alternatives.

What was also interesting what Gita said was that we as adult educators shouldn’t fall in a trap that we knew something and provided it to others who do not have it. How to avoid that trap?

You need to keep a sense of the ridiculous and a sense of your own vulnerability. Of course, it is not that simple. There are things that you can teach people. It is also an important question to ask: What can I learn from your experience. It is not that my experience or your experiences are right or wrong. If you tell people: This is the answer, how will you ever find what the question might have been? I would say that I am a reflective practitioner. I have learned a lot by thinking about the work, I have written a lot, but I am not formally trained in any of these things. I started literacy work before there was formal training, and have gone on from there.
 

Is it a message: If you a natural born adult educator, you do not need training? Do we need professionalization?

Of course you need professionalism but where does it lay? The real question is what is there to learn about it and how can I do it better? That's what you train people for, to ask good questions. Adult education has two traditions of that and I suppose I came from one. My wife is from professional body for further education so you can imagine what a disaster I am to her. :) It is obvious, there are things to learn and I wish I had learned a few of them earlier. However trained you are, if you do not reflect on your practice, working in a dialogical way with people, open to change, if you do not have a sense what your vulnerabilities are, as well as your strengths, then you can’t be an educator really, because education is dialogue, thinking together and discovering.

How have you been changed through that process?

Very early on in our literacy scheme we were attacked by a politician for political bias, he even called for three public inquiries into our work... We could have collapsed, or given up or given in. The public inquiries decided that the work was not only not biased, but our materials we re the bestanyone had in the country, and they published them. That changes you; it means that you are just a bit braver next time the crisis comes along. Then they decided to cut the entire budget for adult education where I worked, so we organized ae week long day and night teach-in where everybody taught free. People could pay how much they wanted to. It was fantastic festival and it was the ispiration for adult learners’ week later on. It absolutely changed the social relation of the learners’ center. I came to NIACE with a real belief that adult learners deserve someone to translate what they needed so that policy makers could understand and that is what I am trying to do. And you win only for a while. It is like you are on the escalator just going the wrong way. Sometimes you seem like you are ahead a little, but then you are back where you were. You have to keep on fighting the same battle.

Do you plan to learn something new when you retire?

Yes, actually, I do. I intend to improve my Spanish, to learn to play piano and to learn about healthy eating, but I still don’t know much about that. And, of course, I will work with ICAE!