Abstract
As adult educators reach a broad and diverse audience of learners while teaching in a variety of venues, in Contested Spaces of Teaching and Learning: Practitioner Ethnographies of Adult Education in the United States, Hurtig and Chernoff (eds.) present a varied range of topics, contexts, and spaces of adult education. Through ethnographic studies contributors demonstrate how to challenge conventional teaching and learning practices in adult education. The term “contested spaces” refers to the social, political, and educational agendas that often go unexamined in educative spaces and further perpetuate a certain type of education.
Each of the 11 contributors practices in a different context, bringing a unique perspective to the culture they describe in their ethnography. Thus, the volume in three parts presents different values, beliefs, and politics in three contested spaces—Community Education, Institutional, and Public. The book offers a framework for uncovering the social and political heteronormative forces in spaces of adult education and learning.
In Chapter 1 of Part 1 on Community Education, contributor Jill Koyama examines adult refugees’ resettlement and educational experiences. In Chapter 2, Silvia Noguerón-Liu discusses the role of technology and the politics of digital literacy in a computer class.
In Chapter 3, Janise Hurtig, a practitioner ethnographer and one of the book’s editors, explores the interactions in a writing workshop in a community center informed by writings and teachings of Paulo Freire, Myles Horton, and others.
Part II on Institutional Spaces opens with Chapter 4. Contributor Sara K. Schneider describes complex and inherent issues and perspectives associated with teaching yoga in a male prison.
In Chapter 5, contributor Tryphenia B. Peele-Eady describes her work in a Black church Sunday school in northern California using warm demander pedagogy and high demand for learners’ academic success.
Chapter 6 by Gretchen Wilbur focuses on the author’s efforts to better understand her own learning about “unconventional teaching methods” while she taught a course to adult undergraduates. Rounding out Part 2 is Chapter 7 by Joseph Zanoni, which focuses on the peer educator process through a health and safety educational program.
Part III on Public Spaces begins with Chapter 8, which takes the reader inside a rehearsal space and vividly describes the musical and ethnographic nuances of an LGBTQ chorus.
In Chapter 9, co-authors Sofia A. Villenas and Carolina Osorio Gil examine the public pedagogical creations of a Latinx cultural programming space. They prefer to use the term “Latinx” denoting “a non-binary gender inclusive term” (p. 193). In Chapter 10, contributor Katherine Silvester examines a refugee community through the learning lens of a married Bhutanese couple in a refugee camp.
Rounding out Part III of the book is Chapter 11 by Carolyn Chernoff, the second editor of the book. This chapter focuses on how parades can create spaces for marginalized and other disenfranchised groups. The author contends “a parade is a way of teaching and learning identity, of working for direct democracy and social justice, and a site of tacit education about individual and collective value” (p. 214).
This collection offers a unique and multilayered sociological and anthropological perspective to adult education, employing ethnography to inform readers of contested adult spaces for learning. Throughout this edited volume, readers can see how contested spaces unravel the hidden and not so hidden educational agendas that are often taken for granted. The contributors use an academic writing style that tends to be dense, with sometimes complex language and longer sentences that may limit their audience to those within the walls of academia. Hence the book appears to be suited for institutions of higher learning and for community activist’ organizations. All the authors provide thick descriptions of the context of their study.
While every author focuses on a practitioner ethnography, there is variety among their methods of data collection, length of study, extent and details of their data, and interpretive lens of the ethnographies they present. Together, they comprise an informative collection that provides rich in-depth descriptions and evaluation of the contested spaces in which adult teaching and learning takes place.
