(Boeren & Holford, 2016; Boyadjieva & Illieva-Trichkova, 2017; Patterson, 2018) all contribute to the participation pattern in adult education. Cropley (1989, p. 146) calls these factors “framework conditions,” which “are largely a function of the circumstances in which people live, especially of factors such as the values, attitudes, habits, priorities and the like of the social groups to which they belong, the economic structure of their society, even features of the education system itself.” The result is that “some individuals are more equal than others in the choices available to them” (p. 146).
By way of illustrating how these framework conditions can determine who is more likely to benefit from adult learning opportunities, where and how one lives make a difference. It is common knowledge that there is less accessibility in rural areas than in urban or suburban centers. The picture is a bit more complicated than just a rural-urban split, however. Those in small-town rural areas are better off than those living in isolated areas, and some urban centers are as impoverished as the most rural areas. Worldwide, access to learning opportunities in rural areas is a problem at all levels of education. Further, there are those who lack a geographical place altogether—migrant, transient, homeless, and refugee populations. Migrants, for example, “are the most undereducated major subgroup in the United States, with a high school dropout rate larger than that of any other group. Their mobility, their language differences, and the cultural differences experienced as they move from one community to another combine with health and nutritional problems to negatively affect school achievement. Migrant lifestyles revolve around working, moving on to find other work, and working again” (Velazquez, 1996, p. 28). For any of these geographically mobile groups, there is little more than sporadic access to education or social services.
Age is another condition that often determines who benefits from learning opportunities. Older adults not only have the lowest levels of participation in adult education generally but also receive far less training in the workplace than younger workers (Czaja & Sharit, 2016). In some settings and in other parts of the world, age in combination with gender makes for another condition affecting access. For example, in the United States, because managerial and professional workers and all nonmanual workers receive more training than manual workers—and women are underrepresented in these positions—women, and older women in particular, are much less likely to receive employer-sponsored training than are men (Stacy & To, 1994).
There Are Barriers, Not Resistance
Readers will recall that there is a section of this chapter on barriers to participation. In that section we reviewed the studies that identify personal barriers such as lack of interest, personal problems, thinking one is too old to learn, and so on as well as situational barriers such as lack of time and money. We also pointed out that the individual's motivation, beliefs, and behaviors and life situation explain only part of the picture. Social structural factors such as family of origin, class, race, and so on shape one's level of participation in formal adult education.
What Crowther (2000) is proposing from a critical theory perspective is that nonparticipation can be construed as an act of resistance. Rather than being prevented from participating because of some insurmountable barrier, the learner chooses not to participate—that is, resistance is a matter of deliberate choice. Although resistance has been studied more frequently with secondary school populations, several adult educators have written about this phenomenon, especially in reference to literacy education (Belzer, 2004; Quigley, 1990; Sandlin, 2000).
In summarizing this notion of nonparticipation as resistance rather than barriers, Crowther (2000, pp. 489–490) writes:
It seems reasonable to surmise that many people find adult education unattractive and irrelevant to their daily lives. Despite many well-intentioned efforts to attract people the sense of frustration felt by their failure to respond to what is offered is often evident. It is easy thereafter to assume people are “apathetic” and have limited horizons. Redefining non-participation as a form of resistance may, however, open up the possibility of rethinking what adult education is for and where it occurs. … If we started to think about participation in these terms then the problem of participation could be faced the right way round—that is, that adult education is part of the problem rather than simply the solution.
Summary
Participation is one of the more thoroughly studied areas in adult education. We have a sense of who participates, what is studied, and what motivates some adults and not others to enroll in a course or undertake an independent learning project.
Although there were numerous small-scale studies of participation in the 40 years between the inauguration of the field of adult education and the 1960s, it was not until 1965 that the first national study of participation was published. Johnstone and Rivera's study, with its care in defining participation and selecting methods of data collection and analysis, remains a benchmark contribution to this literature. Subsequent surveys by the NCES, UNESCO (Valentine, 1997), and Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies-USA's (PIAAC-USA) (Patterson, 2018) have contributed to this database. Regardless of the study, the profile of the typical adult learner in formal educational activities remains remarkably consistent: White, middle class, employed, younger, and better educated than the nonparticipant. Further, employment-related reasons account for the majority of participant interest in continuing education.
Why adults do or do not participate in adult education is an important question, having implications for both theory and practice. Surveys have uncovered both reasons for, and barriers to, participation. The work on determining an underlying structure of motivational orientations begun by Houle (1961/1988) has been carried on most notably by Boshier's research using the EPS. Further, explanations of participation have been advanced from a sociological rather than a psychological perspective. In these analyses, people's decisions to participate have less to do with their needs and motives than with their position in society and the social experiences that have shaped their lives.
Finally, we “problematized” the current understanding of participation by questioning and critiquing four assumptions about participation presented by Crowther (2000). These four assumptions are that participation is a good thing, that participation equals formal learning, that learners are abstract, not socialized individuals, and that there are barriers, not resistance, to participating in formal adult learning activities.
Part II Adult Learning Theory
The accumulation of information and experiences grounded in practice often leads to thinking about how the parts of what we know might fit together to form some sort of explanatory framework. In Part II of Learning in Adulthood, we review a number of attempts to explain adult learning. Some of these efforts, as in the work on self-directed learning, are tentative frameworks for ordering research—that suggest future directions for theory. Other efforts can properly be labeled models, if we define model as a visual representation. A theory, which may have a model accompanying it, is a set of interrelated concepts that explain some aspect of the field in a parsimonious manner.
We begin Chapter 5 with a discussion of Knowles's (1980) concept of andragogy, which he originally termed a theory of adult learning. Probably the best-known set of principles or assumptions to guide adult learning practice, andragogy actually tells us more about the characteristics of adult learners than about the nature of learning itself. The first half of the chapter is devoted to a thorough review and critique of andragogy. Also reviewed in Chapter 5 is McClusky's (1970) theory of margin, a theory that resonates with adult learners, perhaps because the theory considers adult learning in relation to other activities of adult life.
Since
