Listening to the voices of learners: Intended and unintended policy outcomes

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Listening to the voices of learnersIntended and
unintended policy outcomes

• Iain Jones, University of Salford,
• i.r.jones_at_salford.ac.uk.
• ECE Conference
• September 2007

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My purpose and stance

• Context
• Use of particular experiences as a practitioner
  researcher to ask research questions about
• The analysis of specific policy texts
• The voices of learners as participants in the
  construction of these policies
• Insider research

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Research questions and policy texts

• Research Questions
• Relate to different dimensions of the policy
  process
• Designed to explore how social relations
  structure knowledge
• My argument
• Role of adult learners minimised in the specific
  policy texts analysed
• Either marginal or represented as homogeneous
  group
• passive recipients of given good

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Example Policy Text

• HEFCE Prospectus Foundation Degrees (2000)
• Learners defined
• In terms of student supply
• As evidence of marketing opportunities
• Policy actors defined as
• HEIs
• Colleges
• Employers

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Analysis of policy texts

• Ozga (2000 94-95)
• Policy texts significant in messages they convey
  or seek to convey - in relation to
• sources
• scope
• patterns of policy
• I argue policy texts not neutral.

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Policy Texts Critical Social Science

• Ozga (2000) argues that
• If policy is understood as the closed preserve of
• the formal government apparatus of policy making,
  then
• it follows that the social science project will
  make little
• impact.
• If, however, we understand policy as involving
• negotiation, contestation and a struggle between
  competing
• groups, as a process rather than output, then we
  can see that the
• social science project may indeed act as a
  resource (200042)

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Focus groups and the identities and purposes of
learners

• Focus groups conducted between May 2002 and
  November 2003.
• Explored implications of
•  
• 1. Why learners joined Foundation Degree and
  associated peer mentoring project
•  
• 2. Their experiences of it/ them
•  
• 3. Whether, and if so how, their experiences of
  being a learner made them more active as a
  citizen
•  
• Relationships between Foundation Degree and work
  given that overall focus of Foundation Degree was
  on community governance and learners were either
  employees of local authorities and/or community
  activists

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Contributions of learners as participants in
theconstruction of policies

• Life history research has tended to connect
  agency and structure at an individual level. My
  research follows Merrill (20025) in extending
  this to a group/collective level where the
  mutual benefit for learners and research is that
• Life history reflection can foster the
  dialectic between the personal and social aspects
  of learning.
• Focus groups explored implications of learners
  participation in those groups as part of their
  collective learning.

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Objective and subjective dimensions of learning
careers

• Following analysis uses notion of the learning
  career to explore conflicts of expectation and
  experience for these adult learners and how the
  ambiguities and volatilities of these experiences
  (Merrill et al, 2001), at a particular point of
  time, are shaping their learning careers
• Objective Career progression
• Subjective Changing experiences and identities

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Objective dimension of learning career

• It is because of the Foundation Degree that I
  have got a secondmentwould not have got it
  without the course (6 month secondment
  investigating the opportunities and barriers into
  work for adults with disabilities). The course
  may be a deciding factor in keeping me with the
  Council.

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Subjective dimension of learning career

• I wanted to start using my brain. I was pleased
  to have the opportunity I went with it. I
  deliberately did not have too many
  expectationstoo many expectations can be
  limiting. I wanted a little more confidence.
  achievements for myself .I wanted to be
  stimulated and challenged. my job was not giving
  me that

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Subjective dimension of learning career

• It makes you more critical. It gives you more
  ammunition to make judgements concrete reasons.
  It gives me lot more credence more
  confidencechallenging people. I have learnt more
  in the last 6-9 months than in the last 10 years
  at work. it has made me think differently about
  work and myself. There have been changes in my
  negotiating, listening, and management.

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Martins discourses of citizenship Economistic
and political discourses of citizenship

• Tensions between economistic and political
  discourses of citizenship
• Useful knowledge and an economistic discourse?
• Learners as workers and consumers
• Really useful knowledge and a political
  discourse ?
• Learners as social actors

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Emerging experiences and interpreting a policy in
which they are participants 1 From useful
knowledge to really useful knowledge?

• Learners expectation in joining the Foundation
  Degree were located in the economistic discourse
  of worker/ producer or consumer
• Emerging experiences suggest moving beyond an
  understanding of
• how and what of useful knowledge to
  why of really useful knowledge, within
  political discourse of political agent/social
  actor.
• Complexity of dynamics in relationship between
  local authority and voluntary sector and own
  active roles in processes as local authority
  employee or voluntary sector representative.

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Conclusion

• Combined Ozgas work on policy texts to suggest
  that the
• language of specific policy texts constructed a
  narrow emphasis on
• individual employability
• Merrills work on learning careers and Martins
  notion of the
• discourses of citizenship
• Analysis of focus groups with adult learners on a
• Foundation Degree to trace tensions between
  intended and
• unintended policy outcomes