Ar lorg na slí or an inquiry into the possibilities of narrative for adult educator growth or a conversational record of a precarious educator and his critical companion’s grand tour of their textured personal, educational, occupational and, indeed, epistemological landscapes or fragments of voices in a clearing or a textual performance of adult educator knowledge or the slow (un?)becoming of an adult educator or triskelion reflections or a creative inquiry into the adult educator subject or ... (Smyth, 1989) Jeremiah (Jerry) John O’Neill Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Maynooth University Department of Adult and Community Education October, 2015 Head of Department: Dr Tony Walsh Supervisor: Dr Bríd Connolly ver. 17 2 Acknowledgements First and foremost a big thanks to the adult educators who gave so willingly of their time to share their experiences and shape their stories with me in this inquiry. Thanks to the friends, colleagues and students who shared the dialogic space with me, at one time or another, over the years – this inquiry grew from the depth and richness of all those relationships and conversations. A particular thanks to all those from the doctoral group at Maynooth, students and staff, who listened and shared so much of their knowledge and helped me to shape my messy knowledge into an equally messy text. Thanks for the clarity of your thought – the mess is all mine. In particular, I would like to thank my supervisor, Bríd Connolly, for her always- generous support, scholarly advice, wisdom and the encouragement to walk off the beaten track with a critical head and open heart. Thanks to Stephen Joyce for allowing me to tap into his deep knowledge of the Irish language. A very special thanks to the big family: my parents, aunts, brothers, sisters and in-laws for their support, in so many ways, over the years. Big love to my children - Thomas, Michael and Aoife - for their bemused patience as I worked through this ‘big book about myself’. And a final word of love and gratitude for Emma – I wouldn’t have started, or finished, any of this without you. Abstract This thesis explores the possibilities of narrative approaches for adult educator growth. It is written and presented as a conversational walking tour between myself and a dialogic other through landscapes of personal, conceptual and occupational significance. This creative confluence of writing and walking is not merely a device to enhance reader engagement, but, after Richardson (1994); Speedy (2005); Gale & Wyatt (2006); Hall (2009); Ingold (2010); Shepherd (2011); McCormack (2013); and Gros (2014) is used here as a method of inquiry. Furthermore, these processes of embodied and contextualised dialogic practice perform a pedagogic function (hooks, 1994; Freire, 1997; Connolly & Hussey, 2013) which suggests our walking and talking tour can be seen as a research and learning text. Interpretive (Denzin, 2014) and polyphonic (Bakhtin, 1984) fragments from a fictional tutor anthology of educational and occupational biographies are interspersed with four creative, autoethnographically-infused walks which take place over the four parts of the text. Part One (Ways in) commences with tutor stories of their ways in to adult education before our first walk takes take us to Belfast to explore the theoretical ways in of this inquiry. On this walk we talk our way through the intersection between poststructuralist and postcolonial theories (Barthes, 1977; Kristeva, 1986a; Cixous, 1976; Bhabha,1994; Said, 1995) and cultural practice (Joyce, 1968, 1992a, 1992b; Morrison, 1992; Gilman, 1993; Duffy, 1994; Heaney, 1998; Welch, 2001) which reveals, for this inquiry at least, the significance of the discursive subject. In Part Two (Values, Struggle and Growth) fragments from tutor narratives on values, struggles and growth are interspersed with our walk through the western suburban and industrial landscapes of Edinburgh. It is here that we start to see the emergence of the educator subject and bear witness to an ever-emerging adult educator knowledge and practice (hooks, 1994; Freire, 1996; Brookfield, 2005; Connolly, 2013). Our third walk, Part Three (A Clearing), considers the possibilities of the convergence of the cultural and educational concepts and practices, which the first two walks have rehearsed, in a methodological space which is ethically and epistemologically consistent with our endeavours to explore adult educator experience (St. Pierre, 1997; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Ryan, 2001). Our final, culturally-cautious (Enright, 2015) walk in Part Four (Paths travelled; paths ahead) takes place in an autobiographically-resonant, unmapped valley in the west of Ireland. As well as reflecting on the worth and the significance of this inquiry, personally, methodologically and for adult educators, the inquiry subjects consider occupational futures in education and care within a broader socio-cultural backdrop of precarious and, often, invisible work. At one level this inquiry produces a troubled text – a messy product, or maybe, more accurately, a draft, of a theoretical, methodological and pedagogic practice which reveals itself from the slow process of the inquiry itself. And what does emerge, eventually, is, a ‘writerly text’ (Barthes, 1992), a textual something that sets the reader to work in the creative, playful, critical and perambulatory performance of knowledge and practice of a dialogic and intertextual adult educator subject in hard times: times of occupational and contractual precarity (Sennett, 1998; Standing, 2011; Courtois & O’Keefe, 2015) and times of significant structural, ideological and discursive shifts in adult education in Ireland and further afield (Connolly, 2013; Murray, et al., 2014). The journey comes to a pause in the end in, quite possibly, a post-qualitative space (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; St. Pierre, 2013; 2014), which resists demarcations between research, personal and professional development and creative acts. And in this space there may just be some hope for adult educators struggling to exist and to grow in these hard times of educator precarity and professional invisibility – a hope that lurks around critical and creative acts of narrative reflexivity which draw from triskelion flows of personal, theoretical and communal epistemologies to produce more plural, polyphonic and politicised texts - texts which unashamedly sing the fractured and unstable occupational ontologies in their very form and style. 6 Off the beaten track - a guide to this walking tour In 2011 I enrolled on a doctorate programme with the Department of Adult and Community Education at Maynooth University. I was returning to study after several years working in adult and further education in Scotland and Ireland. It was my second time returning to education as a mature student. In the 1990s I returned to full-time education as a mature student at Queen’s University, Belfast. The difference, when I returned this time, was that I was returning as both an adult learner and an adult educator. Throughout my years as a practitioner, I had become increasingly involved and engaged in various activities and roles which attended to my own growth as an educator. This interest was reflected in the area which I hoped to explore in my PhD: the developmental experiences of adult educators. In particular, I was interested in the experiences of my adult educator peers working, as it seemed to me, at the institutional margins of VEC/ETBs in Ireland. As a humanities graduate and teacher of English and communications, I was aware, or rather I felt, that I was entering into a different epistemological space as I commenced my doctoral studies. I had, what now seems, a naïve notion that I would need to dispense with my interest and passion for the arts and humanities and, instead, become a serious researcher in the social sciences. And, more, given the responsibilities of family and work, that I had no time to lose to rush off and learn all I needed to become such a researcher. But what I didn’t appreciate then was that I was stepping into a learning space on the doctoral programme that was deeply informed by critical and feminist educational philosophies (hooks, 1994; Freire, 1997; Mezirow, 1997; Connolly, et al., 2007). This pedagogic space, wisely, held me back from my linear rush into becoming something I had never been, and instead, encouraged me to slow down and pause for a bit. Or rather, to take a deep and critical look at the ways of knowing that were embedded in my own educational and occupational biography. To consider, as Alheit might see it, the epistemological potential in the story of my own life (2009). What emerged from this deep and prolonged act of reflection is the text that follows. My inquiry didn’t shift from its original focus on the development and growth of adult educators. But the way in which this was conducted, and the form and style of the text which emerged from the inquiry, was shaped and re-shaped by the slow emergence and convergence of old and new knowledge flowing from, and through, personal and collective occupational and educational stories. And so, although my PhD is concerned with the experiences of adult educators, in the end, it has also become an inquiry into the ways that story and narrative have 8 significance for practitioner research, growth and development and, as such, is as much a story of methodological discovery as it is the story of adult educator experience. Unravelling narrative positions It is probably important to state that this text performs as much as represents this developing methodological understanding. And while I believe that this may be useful, and possibly refreshing, for adult educators to bear witness to the working-out and working-through of knowledge – to see the process as much as the product of meaning- making, I am also aware that you, the reader, willingly or not, becomes a fellow-traveller through a slow and messy epistemological wandering through personal and broader social landscapes.