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Adult Education and the Struggle for Knowledge and Power:

Practical Action in a Critical Tradition
Arthur L. Wilson
Cornell University, USA

Ronald M. Cervero
University of Georgia, USA

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Power: Practical Action in a Critical Tradition," Adult Education Research Conference.
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 La Verneda-Sant Martí Adult Education Center:
Adult Education and the Struggle for Knowledge and Power:
Practical Action in a Critical Tradition

Arthur L. Wilson, Cornell University, USA

Ronald M. Cervero, University of Georgia, USA

Abstract: Along with others we argue that practical space can be found in
nearly all forms of adult education for the redistribution of knowledge and
power. The purpose of the paper is to describe a way of understanding
practical action in a world structured by the inequitable distribution of
knowledge and power.

An Issue of Practice

It is no longer a secret that adult education has moved to the center of much of our institutional,
cultural, economic, and political lives. Businesses spend billions on training; legislators mandate
policy on work and education; social movements throughout the world depend on adult
education. Less obvious is how crucial adult education has become to the inequitable distribution
of knowledge and power in terms of who benefits from such distributions and who should be
benefiting but typically do not. Where do we adult educators fit in this struggle for knowledge
and power? Put more bluntly, whose side are we on and how should we act? The purpose of the
paper is to construct a politically-pitched and normatively-inspired model for understanding the
context of adult education practice and to present our understanding of the practical action
required to negotiate and transform these conditions.

In the real world, of course, people solve problems; yet theory is helpful for reminding us of
what we care about and what we hope to accomplish (Forester, 1989). Likewise, theory should
not be seen as positing some transcendent truth but providing plausible grounds for politically-
pitched and ethically-illuminated practical action (Harvey, 1996). To practically confront the
world of inequity, we need to understand the way it is, have a vision for what it should be, and
have strategies for achieving our vision (Livingston, 1983). In that sense we align ourselves with
others (Newman, 1999; Walters, 1996; Youngman, 1996) who maintain that in nearly all forms
of adult education, practical space can be found for the redistribution of knowledge and power.
The model of adult education practice proposed here provides an interpretive lens for
understanding practical action in a world structured by the inequitable distribution of knowledge
and power. Thus the paper represents a call to action and the construction of a research agenda
for furthering this analysis and developing strategies for changing such distributions.

Choosing Sides

In everyday practice, of course, we all know that the opportunities and obstacles of practice
demand we take sides in terms of who we believe should benefit from our efforts as adult
educators. In this regard, three different traditions in adult education literature have addressed
whose side we should be on and how we should act (Cervero & Wilson, 1999). One tradition,
referred to as "romancing the adult learner," proclaims always to be on the learner's side. Yet,
even in the earnest willingness to be helpful, practitioners in this tradition see the "political as
personal" and thus end up typically supporting the status quo. A second tradition, the "political is
practical," recognizes the role of power in practice, but takes no deliberative stance on how
power should be used, for whom, or to what ends.

A third strand has emerged (some would say re-emerged) in adult education to say distinctly
whose side we should be on. This tradition, often referred to as the critical tradition, is clear
about the stakes of practice being the redistribution of power. While the debates continue as to its
origins and historical course, certainly the current conversation owes a significant starting point
to Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), whose echoing has continued to inspire numerous
critical analyses since then (e.g., Collins, 1991; Cunningham, 1989; Hart, 1991; Hayes & Colin,
1994; Law, 1988; Newman, 1994, 1999; Welton, 1987, 1995). The important contribution of this
critical tradition is its continuing analysis of how to understand adult education's role in the
production of benefits, the distribution of power, and the constitution of social life. These
analyses have not only made it clear what the stakes are but also whose side adult educators
should champion. Thus there is a continuing cry for recognizing and relieving oppression, often
through fostering emancipatory participation. As others have indicated (Apple, 1996; Gore,
1993, Walters, 1996), however, we need to know more about the "micropractices" necessary for
negotiating power and embodying democratic traditions. Recent empirical work has clearly
indicated that adult educators actively negotiate power relations and interests to intentionally
shape who benefits from their adult education work (Cervero & Wilson, 1994; 1998; 2001). Thus
our effort here is to theorize emerging lines of practical work (e.g., Fenwick, 2000; Gore, 1993;
Hart, 2001; hooks, 1994; Inglis, 1998; Sheared, 1998), which seek to intentionally alter who
benefits from adult education.

Practical Action Within a Critical Tradition

In our everyday practice we always answer the questions of who benefits from our work and in
what ways (Cervero & Wilson, 2001). By aligning ourselves with the critical tradition we are
saying there are specific benefits we should pursue, namely, the redistribution of knowledge and
power. To do that we have to theorize the social conditions we both work in and create in order
to understand how to practically pursue such redistributions. Thus our understanding of the
context of our work figures prominently in understanding what we can do with that work. To
respond, we propose a model that has three dimensions. To depict what politically-informed,
ethically-illuminated practical action looks like within a critical tradition, we must first see adult
education relationally as deeply embedded in and constitutive of wider social settings in which it
is both participant and embodiment; second, we describe that relationship between adult
education and society specifically as the struggle for knowledge and power; and third we see
adult educators as social activists within a democratic tradition who broker knowledge and
power in order to intentionally alter adult education's dominant patterns of distributions.

Understanding Adult Education Relationally

Asking the practical question of who benefits means also asking how we understand social
realities and our roles in creating them. Much adult education (particularly American) is typically
viewed in humanist, psychological, and instrumental terms. Following on the work of Williams
(1961), Giddens (1979), and Apple (1990; 1996), we see adult education in relational terms as a
social activity "tied to the larger arrangement of institutions which apportion resources so that
particular groups and classes have historically been helped while others have been less
adequately treated" (Apple, 1990, p. 10). Thus we fundamentally see adult education as a
reciprocal social process: not only is the practice of adult education a precipitate of general social
relations, its practice simultaneously helps to produce those social relationships. So, rather than
limiting our understanding of the context of adult education to humanist traditions of
psychological development and expressions of facilitative professional expertise, we propose
instead that these social relations are reciprocal in that the effects go in both directions. First, the
social, economic, political, cultural, racial, and gendered power relations which structure all
action in the world are played out in adult education. These systems of power are an inescapable
facet of social reality and almost always asymmetrical in that they privilege some people and
disadvantage others. Regardless of its institutional and social location or the ideological
character of its content, any policy, program, or practice of adult education represents this
embeddedness in a structuring (but not pre-determined) social reality. In a real sense, the power
relations that structure our lives together do not stop at the doors of our classrooms or institutions
that provide adult education. Second, in the other direction, our education efforts always play a
role in maintaining or reconstructing these systems of power (see Giddens, 1979). Through our
educational actions as policy analysts, programmers, or teachers we continually reproduce or
change these societal power relations; that is, our policy, program, and practice actions provide
more life chances for some adults and fewer for others. As we have argued elsewhere (Cervero
& Wilson, 1994, 1998), adult educators both act in educational situations to produce
instrumental effects (e.g., substantive negotiations such as conducting needs assessments) and
act on those situations either to reproduce or change the systems of power structuring those
situations (i.e., meta-negotiations).

Understanding the context of adult education relationally and reciprocally allows us to recognize
that adult learners exist in the structurally defined hierarchies of everyday life and that these
differences matter at a most fundamental level. Thus, although the individual psychology of the
adult learner remains an important dimension of adult education practice, we argue that the more
significant dimension is that adult learners enter this educational process marked by their
location within larger systems of power and privilege that have shaped their experience. Like
adult learners, adult educators also enter educational practice as participants in larger systems of
power and privilege, and their actions are both enabled and constrained by their place in these
systems. In order to understand the nature of adult education practice and what is at stake when
we do our work, we have to see these relational and reciprocal connections between the systems
of power in society we embody and the way in which our work produces and reproduces these
systems. Thus adult education is neither marginalized nor inconsequential as often supposed but
central to the constitution and reproduction of social life. A relational analysis enables us to see
the reciprocal role adult education plays in the distribution of knowledge and power.

Adult Education as the Struggle for Knowledge and Power: The Politics of Practice
Within this relational context of production and reproduction, we see adult education as a site
for the struggle for knowledge and power because it has become a central component of social
life (even as we as a professional class may be diminishing). In the "politics of practice" adult
education always benefits some groups more than others, and in structural terms it typically
reinforces the way things are (Rubenson, 1989). If power relations provide the context for action,
then the politics of practice has to do with the means by which adult education as a social and
political activity produces and reproduces access to and the distribution of knowledge and power.
Thus in our policies, programs, and practices, the struggle for knowledge and power is always at
stake. This is no small claim, for adult educators are used to imagining themselves as
marginalized and powerless (not inaccurate as far as it goes, yet such perspective fails to see the
function of adult education in constituting social reality by only considering our role in that
functioning). Once we have situated adult education relationally within the wider society and
economy, we must then locate it "on the ground" in the material world. In a number of settings
we have been able to demonstrate that no matter how seemingly technical or facilitative or
esoteric the activity of adult educators seems to be, adult education practice routinely represents
situations in which people with specific interests actively use adult education to not only
maintain or transform relations of power but also to specifically affect who benefits from their
activity (Cervero & Wilson 1994; 1996; 1998; 2001). Behind our professional demeanor of
technical expertise and neutral facilitation, behind our espoused humanist ways of tending to the
adult learner lie these questions for which we must take responsibility: Who gets to learn what,
and who gets to decide who learns what? By deciding such questions, which are directly linked
to societal systems of power, we not only enact these systems of power but also affect who gains
from the use of adult education and who does not. Thus there is no neutral or innocent space
from which to "practice" or do adult education, for all spaces in which adult education is enacted
represent the confluence of systems of power which shape attempts to distribute the benefits of
knowledge differentially.

Seeing adult education as a struggle for knowledge and power recognizes that there are multiple
interests at stake in any adult education activity. Because adult education is about many things
(not just adults learning), there is almost always conflict (even when we choose not to see it)
among the agendas of the many people who might benefit from the efforts of adult educators.
Thus, in the struggles that constitute and define the political practice of adult education,
negotiating power and interests is what adult educators do (Cervero & Wilson, 1994, 1998). It is
out of these struggles that adult educators negotiate a particular purpose, content, and audience
for any given educational effort. In negotiating these conflicts, those responsible for adult
education address these perennial political questions about their efforts: Who benefits and in
what ways? There is no neutral or objective response to these questions. As a central dynamic of
practice, our perspective on power in practice sees people acting in struggle as the focus of
attention.

Adult Educators as Knowledge-Power Brokers: The Practice of Politics

Adult education matters, or else why would any one care about it. The evidence is overwhelming
that many do care because of the struggle for controlling its benefits. So, what is it we negotiate
and negotiate about? Within the broad notion of social construction, we negotiate the production
and reproduction of social practices. Specifically, following on our earlier work, we see adult
educators as negotiating power and interests in seeking to redistribute knowledge and power
(using substantive and meta-negotiation practices). In the "practice of politics," we position adult
educators as social activists who directly intervene in people's lives to determine who benefits
from adult education and in what ways. Asking the question "Who benefits?" is an important tool
for understanding the politics of adult education in any setting. Out of the struggles that define
the politics of practice comes a specific adult education policy, program, or practice. Thus
through their actions adult educators answer the ethical question of who should benefit from their
work. At the heart of practice, we must understand that every adult educator is a social activist,
regardless of his or her particular vision of society. We cannot be released nor escape from our
responsibility for affecting the wider world in which we live.

Given the relational dynamics of struggling for knowledge and power, there is no politically
innocent position from which to act; that is, we must say whose side we are on and what we
intend to do. Ensconced in the critical tradition, we characterize adult educators as knowledge-
power brokers who intentionally seek to alter the distribution of knowledge and power in order
to change who historically and typically have benefited the most from adult education. We
describe such action as strategic (as opposed to instrumental or procedural) because the
knowledge-power-brokering image indicates a willingness to name who should benefit and takes
responsible action that redistributes knowledge and power within a social justice context. In such
a politics of power, we must see what matters: that the struggle for knowledge and power is
about the constitution of individual lives and the society we create. In that struggle for
constituting social life, we must create opportunities for taking control of and changing our lives
and the conditions in which we live.

The Practice of Possibility

So what does practical action within a critical tradition look like? As a knowledge-power broker,
the adult educator sees what is at stake and is willing to act to change who benefits and who
should benefit from adult education. Such a practice of possibility in adult education depends
upon two significant issues. First, many of us recognize that much adult education practice tends
to benefit those already endowed because of their location in our systems of power and privilege.
Struggle ensues because those in privileged positions typically are unwilling to share the material
and social benefits of power and knowledge. Naming and aiding who should benefit requires a
clear ethical sense. In that regard, we invoke the critical tradition in adult education that says that
social justice is what adult can and should be about. It's an important tradition, rich in situational
strategies, that never loses sight of the central question of social justice in enabling people to take
control of their lives. Second, a practice of possibility depends upon the following: by
understanding that adult education represents a central social arena for vying for knowledge and
power we can see that the political practice of adult education is about changing some part of the
world, specifically about what we do to change knowledge-power relations. In that regard, we
argue that because we cannot change what we don't see we need a new way to see in order to act
to address injustices of the world. That premise depends upon this: Because knowledge and
power are socially constructed, they are disruptable and changeable. We can change who
benefits, and furthermore we have a responsibility to change our practices to fit our views of
justness.
Because we live in a world where power and knowledge are continually negotiated, adult
education offers hope and possibility to many people. In order to realize these possibilities for
creating a more just world, we need to recognize how power operates even through the most
extraordinary as well as mundane educational activities. We believe that by bringing greater
visibility to the political and ethical choices, contradictions, and consequences of adult
education, we can better understand how to create educational practices, programs, and policies
that provide opportunities for people to develop and exercise more control over their social,
cultural, economic, and political lives.

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