Adult Education Quarterly

This article reports on research with eight board members and eight directors of 10 feminist, nonprofit organizations. A Foucauldian poststructuralist reading of the data gives voice to undertheorized aspects of learning in feminist organizations and makes visible the power relationships. It explores women’s learned practices of resistance and offers an in-depth and paradoxical view of women’s learning in nonprofit organizations. In focusing on women and on particular organizational sites, this study contributes to a contextualized and gendered reading of Foucault.

This study examined a 25-year period of African Americans in adult education by accessing the archival holdings of three major data centers: the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Moorland-Spingarn Archives, and the Hollis Burke Frissell Library. The sociopolitical context of the data was analyzed using a Black feminist theoretical framework. Three themes emerged from the data and were seen to be representative of the major issues found in adult education for African Americans: education for assimilation, education for cultural survival, and education for resistance.

Education policy in sub-Saharan Africa is predicated on human capital assumptions and therefore promotes the expansion of formal education as a way to promote economic growth. As a result, formal education is valued primarily as a private consumer good, a form of cultural capital that allows some to get ahead and stay ahead, rather than as a public good that also benefits the overall society. In the absence of vibrant industrial labor markets, job prospects for school leavers are poor, which places an inflated premium on educational credentials. The collapse of formal economies combined with high population growth rates suggests that higher social rates of return might accrue from more investments in nonformal adult education aimed at improving the skills and labor productivity of rural populations.

This qualitative study examined how eight adult degree program administrators negotiate power and interest while planning programs in specific higher education settings: small, private, nonprofit, higher education institutions. The conceptual framework was grounded in Cervero and Wilson’s program-planning model in combination with Bourdieu’s concept of cultural and social capital and Raven’s consideration of types of power at play in organizations. The primary means of data collection were in-depth interviews and qualitative questionnaires. There were four primary categories of findings dealing with how these adult degree program planners negotiate power and interest, centering on (a) moving the institutional interest in adult learners from the margins closer to the center, (b) gaining influence by drawing on multiple forms of capital, (c) building a bridge of common interests among key players as a way of leveraging power, and (d) balancing institutional expectations for growth with resource limitations.