Abstract
The book focuses on the link between adult education and enhancing participation in communities. The author challenges the European tendency to reduce lifelong learning to schooling for employability or learning for earning. It contributes to ongoing debates in Europe on how adult education addresses exclusion by gender, race, ethnicity, and immigrant status. The book illustrates how adult education links with people’s daily lives to foster social justice, democracy, and liberation. He draws from John Dewey, Antonio Gramsci, Paulo Freire, and Raymond Williams to demonstrate how participation can help communities create real knowledge and generate social change. The book constitutes of a preface by Jim Crowther, six chapters, and a combined author and subject index.
Chapter 1 argues that adult education has shifted focus from emphasizing full development of an individual to stressing the “acquisition of skills and competencies to access the labor market” (p. 1). Adult education should be conceived as social relationship that enables learners to engage in dialogue in a social milieu. He criticizes European lifelong learning policies and practices for using managerial approaches that emphasizes learning for employment over active citizenship. He argues that the current education system ignores traditional knowledge systems and lacks principles of social justice, equity, and solidarity. The author proposes that adult education be delivered based on principles of dialogue, participation, and recognizing diversity. However, the chapter remains elusive on how precisely these ideals would be operationalized.
Chapter 2 proposes a multidisciplinary approach to interpreting literacies. He contends that both written and oral literacy allow people to construct social knowledge. He notes that teachers confuse linguistic difference for deficiency, thereby perpetuating dominant ideologies. He argues that literacy needs to enable learners to read the word and transform their world. The author explores illiteracy and argues that people use it to differentiate between written and oral literacy, with orality being diminished. By contrast, he sees orality as a basis for engaging communities in democratic processes. He portrays literacy positively and does not critically appraise its limitations.
Chapter 3 introduces the epistemology of everyday knowledge and stresses the place of knowledge and science in society. He draws from “ecology of knowledge,” which illustrates how diverse types of knowledge are colonized by the so-called valid knowledge. He contends that equally valid knowledge can be recreated when participatory researchers engage the grassroots in dialogue. The challenge is that he overlooks inherent unequal power relations between researchers and participants.
Chapter 4 examines the role of participatory research in facilitating community participation. Participatory research has to be rooted in people’s daily lives. He portrays researchers using principles of enlightenment as agents who could preserve people’s history and culture. Lucio-Villegas views action research as instrumental in linking social sciences, knowledge, and social action. However, he proceeds from a questionable assumption that researchers are willing and able to empower communities.
Chapter 5 contends that adult education facilitates community participation through participants becoming active citizens and creating egalitarian communities. He assumes that adult educators are themselves empowered, which could be questionable. He examines representative democracy and urges educators to convert communities into democratic spaces to restore people’s political and economic rights. He views Participatory Research as critical because it “appears to be an intentional path towards giving people the power to take action” (p. 98). However, he does not problematize citizen participation from the perspectives of both participants and counterhegemonic forces.
Chapter 6 examines the way adult educators serve as guides and counselors when they accompany lifelong learners in their journey of life. He urges teachers to motivate learners and facilitate their access to learning. He views them as experts capable of fostering empowerment. This contradicts his argument that such professionals lack formal training and their roles are vague. He points to the need for adult educators to relate content to people’s lives. Consequently, he delineates contradictory roles of the state in delivering both empowering service and asserting social control. He does not critically appraise structural challenges faced by teachers and leaners.
There is no doubt that Lucio-Villegas views adult education as essential to challenging dominant ideologies. However, the book has limitations; for example, the author fails to suggest concrete ways in which educators could engage learners, which makes him prone to criticism. He makes references to different disciplines such as philosophy and psychology without explaining some concepts, which makes it difficult for novice readers. For example, on several occasions in the book he makes reference to Vygotski’s zone of potential developments without explaining its key tenants for readers who are not familiar with it. Finally, the book would have benefitted from editing by a native English speaker to weed out repetitions and grammatical errors, which detract the smooth flow of ideas. In spite these limitations, I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in using learning to enhance community participation particularly in developing countries where community development is still very a pertinent issue.