Therapeutic stories in adult education: the demoralisation of critical pedagogy

Kathryn Ecclestone University of Exeter, England, UK Paper presented at SCUTREA 34th Annual Conference, University of Sheffield, UK. 6-8 July 2004

Introduction This paper summarises the key ideas emerging from what I see as a new story in adult education and is the latest instalment in a story that I am crafting around the themes of ‘therapeutic ethos’ and ‘therapeutic pedagogy’, currently emerging in parts of the post-16 education system. So the ideas here build on earlier work (Ecclestone, 2004a; 2004b; 2004c) and take the ideas to another audience. However, the paper is an overview of complex and controversial arguments in a word limit of 3,500 and does not develop its arguments in-depth; feedback and comments will therefore be welcome for refining and improving ideas for a longer paper.

Old stories about education and human agency Ideas about ‘privileging the learner’s voice’, exploring ‘narratives’, ‘biographies’ and ‘identity’ and creating ‘safe spaces’ have been powerful and enduring themes in adult education pedagogy and research over the past 40 years (see, for example, Jarvis, 2001; Preece, 2001). These notions offer stories in a literal sense, through compelling accounts of individual and collective lives, experiences and responses to education. At the same time, learners’ and researchers’ stories reflect educational, social and political aspirations as well as resonating with and arising from broader political, popular and cultural themes.

Four traditions have dominated these stories. From critical and feminist perspectives, notions of voice, narrative and biography create research methods, pedagogic activities and accounts that aim to be spring-boards for a politicised understanding of oneself and the world and of one’s capacity for agency (see, for example, Biesta et al, 2004). These perspectives challenge existing power structures, subtle forms of linguistic and structural oppression and offer a space for building a broader understanding (see Malcolm, 2004, for a summary of this tradition in adult education).

In contrast, liberal humanism offers a different, more individualised story, where being ‘reflexive’, self-aware and insightful about one’s life, one’s identity and experiences of learning are crucial to what Mezirow calls ‘transformational learning’ (Mezirow, 1991; Bennetts, 2003). More recently, thinkers such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck regard reflexivity as essential for helping individuals cope with new forms of subjectivity in an increasingly individualised and risk-full society (Giddens, 1991; Beck, 1992). From this perspective, creating and presenting individuals’ stories illuminate how transformational learning comes about but are also a crucial part of pedagogy and curriculum content.

SCUTREA Proceedings 2004 1 More recently, researchers have attempted to bridge the gap that emerges between critical and liberal humanist perspectives over an individual or social focus for analysis by using the work of thinkers such as Pierre Bourdieu and Lave and Wenger. Here, stories about adult learners weave a complex and fluid interplay of disposition, ‘habitus’ and action within specific fields and communities of practice. This aims to overcome a crude distinction between structure and individual agency and to embed experience and transformation in very specific contexts (see, for example, Colley, 2003; Crossan et al, 2000).

Finally, post-modern stories disrupt and subvert critical and liberal notions of transformation with more fluid, shifting notions of identity, place and voice. In this, they question the validity of collective transformation or resistance and old ways of representing these themes in education (see, for example, Satterthwaite et al, 2003; 2004).

The summary above does not reflect the complexity and nuances of these traditions, nor the links and overlaps between them. However, the important point for ideas in this paper is that they reflect a more or less politicised, optimistic view of individual and collective identity and experience, related to the impact of broader social, political and cultural conditions. And, with the exception of some post-modern strands, these traditions are rooted in optimistic ideas about human agency and the potential for individual and social transformation through education.

Aspirations for human agency Optimism about agency is, according to Kenan Malik, at the heart of humanity’s drive towards the triumph of human beings over nature and notions of Enlightenment, progress and civilisation (Malik, 2001). In recent history, liberal, conservative and marxist visions of humanism each offer different ideas about what conditions create human agency or who is capable of it. Nevertheless, all three visions are optimistic about personal development, social and scientific progress and human emancipation. The ‘dignity of man’ and our desire to determine the future are crucial to a belief in human agency. In the past, all three visions of humanism:

… held to the idea of humans as conscious agents, who realise themselves only through projects to transform themselves and the world they inhabit. At the heart of humanism, therefore, is a belief in emancipation, the faith that mankind could achieve freedom, both from the constraints of nature and the tyranny of Man (Malik, 2001, p.6).

Since discourses of humanism are historically and culturally located, they offer different languages at various points in history for understanding what it means to be human. For Malik, humanism links our inner and outer worlds and depicts humans as agents in transforming both worlds.

A turn towards pessimism and the ‘diminished self’ According to Malik, growing interest in evolutionary psychology, post-modern philosophy and risk consciousness, together with the decline of civic engagement in politics, reveal growing disillusionment with transforming the outer world, together with a melancholy view of mind and nature in cultural and scientific arenas. For him,

SCUTREA Proceedings 2004 2 then, these trends offer an increasingly narrow, introspective view of humanness and encourage the idea that attempts to dominate nature are both dangerous and reactionary (Malik, 2001). This more pessimistic turn is reflected in Beck’s popular thesis of a ‘risk society’ and in what Frank Furedi sees as the inexorable rise of cultural fear about the future and about risk and progress (Beck, 1992; Furedi, 1999; 2001). For Furedi, fears and anxiety now permeate all aspects of cultural and political life, from concerns about parenting, many aspects of health and welfare, and even adulthood, to concerns about environmental and scientific progress. This climate creates increasingly emotional and irrational responses to risks, as well as creating spurious notions of risk (Furedi, 1999).

In this context, optimism that human agency is the most important outcome of education is giving way to a pessimistic shift towards what Frank Furedi calls ‘the diminished self’. According to Furedi, fears about the future, increased fragmentation and the elevation of emotion and vulnerability over rationality and resilience create empathy for ‘the diminished subject’ where:

… increasingly we feel comfortable with seeing people as victims of their own circumstances rather than as authors of their own lives. The outcome of these developments is a world which equates the good life with self-limitation and risk aversion (Furedi, 1999, p.147).

The premise of a diminished subject is a misanthropic view of the world and of humanity's ability to solve problems (see also Malik, 2001). Following these arguments, our empathy with others is invoked increasingly by these images rather than by those of resilience and agency.

It is hard to see how adult education can be immune from this broader cultural pessimism. On the surface, notions of safe spaces, privileging learners’ voices and reflexive identities are all couched in the language of empowerment, transformation and emancipation, as well as in terms of resistance, sabotage and disruption of new oppressive and reactionary froms of education (see Satterthwaite et al, 2003; 2004). Yet, it is possible to see them instead as what Dennis Hayes calls ‘ a comfortable verbal radicalism’ that is both spurious and pessimistic and which signifies the demise of serious political analysis of the real conditions for resistance and empowerment (Hayes, 2003).

Themes of pessimism and the diminished self mean that political and professional discourses in post-16 education and in popular culture resound with accounts of low self-esteem, battles with identity crises and fragile and images of vulnerable, fragile people. Yet, notions of self-esteem, inclusion and exclusion which permeate cultural and professional concerns are conceptually and empirically vague (see Emler, 2001; Alexandriou, 2002).

Despite these drawbacks, policy proposals and professional responses in education reveal strong concerns about people’s feelings and emotions, linked to their self- esteem. For example, Preece argues that social exclusion both causes and arises from loss of power, status, self-esteem and expectations (Preece, 2001). This emotional emphasis is also evident in the political and educational rationales of a

SCUTREA Proceedings 2004 3 growing number of initiatives, such as programmes for young mothers and their children, schemes to raise the self-esteem of ‘non-traditional’ entrants to higher education and personal mentoring programmes for disaffected, ‘hard to reach’ young people. In these programmes, people targeted by them are characterised as being ‘at risk’ or ‘vulnerable’, or suffering from ‘fragile learning identities’ (see Surestart, 2002; DfES, 2002; SEU, 1998).

In mainstream education, bodies such as the Assessment Reform Group highlight the effects of national testing on self-esteem and children’s stress while the Socialist Education Alliance regards the building of self-esteem as the most important foundation that schools can build (Assessment Reform Group, 2002; SEA, 2003). In adult and community education, bodies such as the National Institute of Adult and Continuing Education regard low self-esteem as a problem in motivating many adults to participate in formal learning (James, 2003).

New therapeutic stories The turn towards the diminished self has another twist. Both Nolan and Furedi analyse the rise of what they call a ‘therapeutic ethos’ in American and British cultures, across policy areas from justice, to welfare and education. In its most obvious form, a therapeutic ethos emerges through the direct extension of psychoanalysis or counselling into new areas of private and public life, with recent proposals in the UK, for example, to install permanent counsellors in primary schools. In both America and the UK, the number of private and publicly employed counsellors is growing rapidly. For example, Nolan calculates that:

… there are more therapists than librarians, firefighters or mail carriers in the United States and twice as many therapists as dentists or pharmacists. Only police and lawyers outnumber counsellors but only by a ratio of less than two to one in both instances (Nolan, 1998: p.8).

Dependency on counsellors, psychologists, advice workers and social services is growing in the UK. According to Hayes, the UK has almost one and a quarter million therapeutic workers, including guidance workers, mediators, counsellors (632,000) and therapists (2003: 33). (An unknown rapidly growing number of ‘life’ and ‘personal’ coaches increases this estimate). In post-14 education, the ConneXions strategy that aims to give every young person in the UK a personal adviser has strong therapeutic overtones in what Colley calls ‘engagement mentoring’ (2003).

However, the more significant impact of a therapeutic ethos is to provide a culture with a set of symbols and codes that determine the boundaries of moral life. Nolan presents a therapeutic ethos as: ‘a widespread cultural ethos or system of moral understanding … a way of understanding the nature of man and an ordering of human experience on the basis of this understanding’ (Nolan, 1999, p.2). He shows how a contemporary therapeutic ethos has moved during the 1980s and 1990s from Rogerian notions in the 1960s and 70s of innate capacity for agency and change, towards beliefs in the diminished self (Rogers, 1961; 1986). In his detailed analysis of therapy culture, Furedi argues that a therapeutic ethos encourages an emotional form of individualism that underpins a quest for understanding one’s own identity, and then a quest for affirmation and recognition of identity from bureaucracies and institutions.

SCUTREA Proceedings 2004 4 In this respect, it encourages dependency on professionals and state agencies to manage and deal with emotions and experiences that were once regarded as part of normal life (2003).

If these arguments are valid, a therapeutic ethos offers a new cultural script or sensibility, a more negative story about ourselves and others’ place in the world. In the context of the diminished subject, popular and educational perceptions emerging from these themes suggest that more of us are emotionally fragile, vulnerable and suffer from low self-esteem, and that bad life and educational experiences damage us, often permanently.

Therapeutic pedagogy A therapeutic ethos creates new stories about the purposes and practices of teaching, learning and research. Although these stories claim to be about empowerment, self-understanding, emotional intelligence and the building of self and communal esteem in the face of an increasingly atomised society and scary future, I want to suggest that they promote comfort, safety and introspection.

Three implications for pedagogy emerge from trends outlined so far. The first is a therapeutic emphasis in current ideas about identity and self, presented through the goals of empowerment. For example, Valerie Hey draws upon Ulrich Beck’s widely- cited analysis of the reflexive individual coping with a ‘risk society’ to argue for the importance of understanding identity formation in relation to gender and class. She regards ‘psychological capital’ as crucial to understanding these dimensions, arguing that this type of capital ‘differentiates us’ because it is formed by our unique memories, emotions, feelings, desires, rage, shame, resentment, power, pain and pleasure (Hey, 2003, p.324). For Hey, exploring these concerns enables public discussion of the ‘splits, shifts and dislocations’ involved and is politically compelling because it recasts the ‘stigma and shame of difference as voice’ (ibid, p.331). Educational transactions rooted in identity offer ‘immediate (therapeutic) recognition’ and, for her, are an empowering response to the disappearance of public discourses of class and class action and their replacement by the compulsion for ‘an intensely individualistic, self-regulating, responsive identity’ (ibid, p.329).

These ideas draw on feminist and radical traditions that encourage democratic processes for mutual learning, where teachers are equal participants in ‘confessional narratives’ (hooks, quoted by Preece, 2001, p.10). In the radical tradition outlined above, ‘starting where learners are’ is a spring-board for subverting or challenging prevailing norms and structures, challenging how people’s identities have been previously constructed and confined by power structures and discourses, and creating new identities (see Jarvis, 2001; Burn and Finnigan, 2003). Some educators see the notion of self-esteem as a focus for promoting social justice. For example, Mowena Griffiths argues that the notion of self-esteem enables students and teachers to question how life experience meshes with material outcomes of inequality to produce collective forms of low self-esteem, thereby challenging the typical presentation of self-esteem as an individual pathology (see Griffiths, 2003).

Other post-16 educators seek to place students’ concerns and their ‘learning careers’ at the heart of an empowering curriculum and democratic, trusting partnerships

SCUTREA Proceedings 2004 5 between teachers and students (see, for example, Bloomer, 1997; Harkin et al, 2000). For Burn and Finnigan, individual experience, the emotional dimensions of identity, biography and students’ own narratives challenge ‘elitist’ forms of assessment, teaching, oral and written critique in higher education that ‘damage’ learners’ self-esteem and ‘silence’ academics and teachers from non-traditional backgrounds. From this perspective, pedagogy resists the imposition of teachers’ authority and academic conventions and subverts the division between the rational and emotional. In this scenario, ‘producing shared stories is a political act’ (Burn and Finnigan, 2003, p.132) and a starting point for critical understanding of the ways in which institutional practices and policies validate certain types of students at the expense of others.

In response to instrumental, regulated curricula, ‘pedagogies of resistance’ emerge by helping teachers and students understand how ‘signs, images and virtual representations of everyday life construct us in particular ways’ (Baudrillard, cited by Gale, 2003, p.173). The joint creation of maps and journeys to explore these constructions resonates with interest in educators’ professional identity as something that is ‘always fragmented, fractured and in process’ (Harrison et al, 2003, p.61). From this perspective, pedagogy helps individuals analyse how identity is discursively constructed through everyday metaphors, symbols and language. In a similar vein, opportunities to explore biography and identity enable professional educators to reach out authentically to communities which suffer from collective low self-esteem (see, for example, Gordon, 2003).

The second implication is that, like pedagogy, research approaches based on life history and biography become a form of therapy in themselves, a way of helping people make sense of their lives. In some respects, such approaches have always performed this therapeutic function but, in an older radical tradition this was a springboard for a deeper understanding of oneself in a wider context. In contrast, a contemporary therapeutic ethos offers diminished expectations, making it difficult for education to be about risk, challenge and transformation or for it to respond to people’s own quest for recognition. Instead, therapeutic pedagogy seeks to confer recognition on people deemed to be too vulnerable and disaffected to ask for it for themselves. Such trends erode aspirations for agency.

The final implication is that injunctions for teachers’ empathy and authenticity are likely to resonate increasingly with notions of vulnerability and damage, and low self- esteem if these become more prominent in the ways that educators depict learners or in learners’ own depictions of themselves (see Ecclestone, 2004c).

Conclusion This paper offers the lens of preoccupation with the diminished self and a therapeutic ethos through which to view contemporary stories in adult education. A key question is whether these arguments resonate with practice and what empirical evidence might be offered to support or reject them. This is the next instalment of the story offered here.

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