Abstract
Wilma Fraser has spent nearly 35 years in adult education in teaching and research roles in the university and working in the influential Workers Educational Association (a voluntary body established in 1903 which has been a major provider of adult education in the UK). This book is a reflection on her working life and what she has learned through the pleasures, disappointments, and challenges she has encountered as an adult educator. In making an account of her life’s work, she also gives careful consideration to current developments and the future prospects of the field.
This description does not do full justice to the particularity, passion, and creativity of the Seeking Wisdom in Adult Teaching and Learning. It is an innovative and formally ambitious piece of work based on autoethnographic inquiry, which explores what she has learned from her work in an open-ended, nonlinear, recursive way. In this sense, the content and presentation of Fraser’s reflections also make a case for a particular epistemological position and what constitutes “really useful knowledge.” The book is premised on the idea that open, highly personal, and reflexive writing affords freedoms and insights which more traditional approaches to scholarship do not.
As such, it is a roving, wandering book that weaves together autobiographical, literary, and theoretical material alongside photos and art by friends in detailing Fraser's search of wisdom. Besides the discussion of autoethnography, there is an account of the author's family history; reflections on Trump, Brexit and the “darkening present”; notes of the reconfiguration and partial degeneration of adult education in the UK; a review of wisdom literature and spirituality; thoughts on feminism and religion; and reflections on classes, courses, and conferences as well as research conversations with other adult educators. Across the book’s nine chapters, Fraser offers a fascinating, layered account of life in adult education and outlines how she views wisdom based on these experiences.
In keeping with the book’s aims and concerns, wisdom is explored and inquired into rather than defined or explicated systematically. Wisdom, Sophia is Fraser’s preferred term, is described as a holistic form of understanding which has affective, cognitive, moral, and practical dimensions and depends on the ongoing deep reflection of what is truly meaningful and valuable. This is a paradoxical form of understanding, Fraser says, which also depends on an awareness of the limits of what we know and even embracing what she terms “unknowing.” Fraser links the pursuit of wisdom with epiphanies and insights of particular clarity and intensity that she has experienced and also a type of transcendence—a connection with the ineffable, mysterious, even divine. The book illustrates the various ways this might be understood as an open-ended process of meaning-making. Fraser also argues that valuing this critical, holistic, aesthetic, reflexive, non-instrumental, spiritually searching type of understanding has important implications for teaching and curriculum, which she sketches out in broad terms in the final chapter.
Fraser’s passion for adult education, her candor, and her lack of dogmatism ensure this layered and complex book is also very readable. The book is also sustained by a pulsing, almost hungry, curiosity, and Fraser draws on varied disciplines and areas of research including adult learning theory and research, philosophy, theology, literature, psychology, and politics.
I must admit I started reading the book with deep interest but also with a couple of reservations. I was intrigued to see how Fraser would use her chosen methodological approach and drawn towards the text because she deals with many topics I am profoundly interested in, such as education for democracy, biographical learning, and documenting the richness of practitioner knowledge in adult education. On the other hand, I am not at all persuaded by the merits of postmodern thinking about the nature of knowledge and the dynamics of political, cultural, and scientific change. Besides this, as someone who grew up in Ireland where religion has played a very conservative role in public life, I remain a little jaundiced when it comes to discussions of transcendence in religious and spiritual terms (even in the feminine form of Sophia). But my reservations were misplaced. The democratic and generous spirit of Seeking Wisdom in Adult Teaching and Learning creates a space for dialogue with readers across such differences.
Fraser has especially fascinating things to say about the politics of memory in adult education. The whole book is infused with a sense of fragility and, at times, even a “profound sense of loss” (p. 146), much of which is linked to the degeneration of adult education in a neoliberal era. For Fraser—and this is something which I think will resonate widely—the field of practice she has given her life energy has been hollowed out by an instrumental focus on employability and skills. In these circumstances, playing close and careful attention to her life learning and the values, relationships, and organizations that have sustained meaningful adult education, the book is best understood as an act of love, recovery, and in a critical sense resistance.
In sifting through and remembering Fraser is making a case for the continuing value of democratic, holistic adult education for students, educators, and society. I want to mention one particularly remarkable chapter (Chapter 5). In this section of the book, Fraser links her search for Sophia to delving into her family history. As part of this she goes back in time and recounts the experience of a rural community in the Scottish Highlands where they lived in the early part of the 20th century. She details this community's experience of dispossession from the land and culture and the various ways this was resisted and explored. Deftly and very sensitively Fraser also links these episodes in family and social history to her relationship with her mother and the pain of “her gradual, gathering absence” (p. 115) through dementia. I found this discussion of memory and forgetting, power and resistance, dispossession and belonging moving, original, and intellectually rich.
This book will undoubtedly be of keen interest to a wide range of readers, not least researchers, and students who are exploring the “narrative turn” in education and the social sciences (Bruner, 1986) and who are searching for novel and engaging ways of presenting research. Fraser also makes a valuable contribution to the literature on storytelling biographical learning and wisdom in transformative learning (e.g., Dominicé, 2000; Formenti & West, 2018; Kroth & Cranton, 2014; Tisdell & Swartz, 2011, inter alia). I think it will also appeal to readers beyond these specific lines of scholarship and methodological interest because it poses profound questions about how we are transformed through life, not least by our losses, and how we might document and learn from these processes in order to renew adult education.