Description
Book SynopsisContested Spaces is an edited collection of critical ethnographies that examine the educational experiences of adults as cultural practice. These practices take place in diverse settings -- from the formal and subtly negotiated educational contexts of school classrooms, parent or adult education programs; to the institutionally interstitial realms of a worker training program, Bible study class, prison yoga class, or refugee resettlement program; to fluid and explicitly contested everyday spaces: an LGBTQ choir, a public parade, or Latinx cultural programming.The compilation includes twelve richly rendered case studies written from the perspective of practitioner-ethnographers -- individuals who straddle the roles of educator and ethnographic researcher. A central premise of the book is that, even as the terrain of adult education is increasingly infused with the aims and ideologies of neoliberal capital, participants in specific educational programs and activities are continuously f
Trade ReviewThe editors and authors of this essential volume deliver an ethnographic tour de force. Somehow, both gently and forcefully, using language of vernacular and theory, they contest our facile dichotomies of teaching and learning, practitioner and academic, school and out-of-school, adult and child. This remarkably diverse set of case studies introduces a panoply of enriching practices and understandings of adult education in the United States. It also enables readers to see afresh the dynamic cultural production that meaningful teaching and learning always entails. -- Bradley A. Levinson, Indiana University
In this groundbreaking book, we see the start of a much needed conversation on the often neglected, yet critically important, ways that adults fight against the commodification of their experience. Eschewing a focus only on formal settings, the contributors explore multiple activist spaces in which adults are trying to exercise their collective power. This is a must-read for anyone interested in critical resistance and adult educational processes that animate people's agency. -- Stephen D. Brookfield, University of St. Thomas
Through luminous, critical ethnographic vignettes, the contributors to this edited collection deftly explode dominant, pragmatist notions of adult education and demonstrate how educative practices and policies in the United States are riven with cultural politics. -- Lesley Bartlett, University of Wisconsin-Madison
This collection of critical ethnographies of adult teaching and learning is an exhilarating journey across educative spaces that contests conventional practices and definitions of teaching and learning. Through the examination of diverse settings in adult education, this anthology insists on the conceptualization of community spaces as locations where new social identities and learning communities are co-constructed within meaningful and enduring relationships. -- Norma Gonzalez, University of Arizona
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Contesting Adult Education Carolyn Chernoff and Janise Hurtig Section 1—Contesting Curriculum: Teaching and Learning in Community Education Spaces Chapter 1: Maps, Flyers, and Notebooks: The Materiality of Experts and Novices in Refugee Education Jill Koyama Chapter 2: Rethinking Digital Resources in Adult and Family Literacy: Immigrant Parents’ Perspectives in Digital Literacy Program Silvia Noguerón-Liu Chapter 3: A Space Within a Space Janise Hurtig Section 2—Contesting Contexts: Teaching and Learning in Institutional Spaces Chapter 4: Insider Yoga: Bodily Cultivation in Yoga at the River, a Hermetic Male Prison Yoga Community Sara K. Schneider Chapter 5: The Call to Wisdom: Warm Demander Pedagogy and the Black Church Sunday School Teacher as Learner Tryphenia B. Peele-Eady Chapter 6: Every Voice Matters: Taking Action for Equity Gretchen Wilbur Chapter 7: Organizers Leading Learning: Transforming Training at the Latino Union Workers Center Joseph Zanoni Section 3— Contesting Community: Teaching and Learning in and across Public Spaces Chapter 8: “All I Want Is to Breathe. . . . Won’t You Breathe with Me?” The Individual and the Collective in an LGBTQ and Allies Community of Practice Char Ullman Chapter 9: Latinx Cultural Programming as Public Pedagogy: Mobilizing Cultura (Culture) in a Small Town Community in Upstate New York Sofia A. Villenas and Carolina Osorio Gil Chapter 10: Transnational Lives and Lifelong Learning in Mutual Assistance Katherine Silvester Chapter 11: Identity On Parade: Teaching and Learning Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Public Carolyn Chernoff Index About the Editors and Contributors
