Concept

The Benefits of Community- Based Adult Learning

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Introduction
This article aims to summarise research that demonstrates the positive impact of community- based adult learning (CBAL), especially in creating a more equitable education. The last decade has seen a considerable reduction in funding for CBAL internationally (Zhang & Perkins, 2022). One reason for this may be that its effectiveness as a way of reducing inequalities is not well-understood by policy makers (Webb et al., 2019). I hope that this short article may enable practitioners to provide evidence of the positive difference that participating in CBAL can make.

Towards an Inclusive, Critical Feminist Pedagogy

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For as long as I have been involved in adult education, this has overlapped with a commitment to feminism; in fact, my first paid job in adult education (after ten years working as a nurse) was to set up a consciousness-raising women’s group in North Dublin in the 1990s. This was one of hundreds of women’s group that emerged across the Island of Ireland from the 1970s onwards. Bríd Connolly (2001, p, 1) described these as spaces for “women to see themselves as active participants in Irish society, women who might otherwise, through socialisation, perceive themselves as operating within the private sphere only”. Women’s participation in Irish society had been severely curtailed up to this time, in the main by a deeply sexist, church-state coalition that culturally and legally carved out a post-colonial ‘Irishness’ where the ideal for a woman was to be married, a homemaker and largely silent (Fitzsimons and Kennedy, 2021).

A paradigm shift: Anarchism has entered the chat

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Introduction
Responding directly to Mayo’s (2022) article Covid-19 and Mutual Aid: prefigurative approaches to caring? published in Vol.13(3), this reflection seeks to further the conversation on the ways that ‘mutual aid’ has entered community development discourse in the aftermath of the global pandemic. It does so by drawing on the extensive legacy of the practice to suggest some of the limitations of sharing individual experiences, stressing the ways in which mutual aid rejects capitalistic self-importance (Roxburgh, 2021; Spade, 2020b).

Laura Bates (2022) Fix the System, Not the Women. London: Simon and Schuster, hardback, 208 pp., ISBN 9781398514331.

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In Fix the System, Not the Women, Laura Bates charts the pervasive sexism in society that shapes womens’ experiences from childhood to adulthood. She
questions and dissects the widely held and accepted notion that women are responsible for their own protection. This book is an excellent exploration and articulation of years of seemingly disparate yet interconnected experiences of sexism from around the globe and how they impact our daily lives.

Radical: Free or Token? Darren McGarvey (2022) The Social Distance Between Us. London: Ebury Press, hardback, 400 pp., ISBN 9781529104080

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Introduction
Few other recent events encapsulate the gulf between the ruling class and disenfranchised more fully than the Grenfell Fire of 2017. Tantamount to social murder rather than disaster, the litany is now well known: a rentier class fat on public contracts and cost-cutting on basic safety measures, with the full knowledge of a Chelsea and Kensington Council more concerned with generating commercial income from the sale of public assets, and a Prime Minister unwilling or afraid to console survivors. Even the Editorial Board (2017) of the New York Times saw that a British state “infatuated with austerity and deregulation” had “gone too far in shedding its fundamental duties to protect public health and safety”.

Darren McGarvey (2022) The Social Distance Between Us. London: Ebury Press, hardback, 400 pp., ISBN 9781529104080

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Darren McGarvey’s latest book The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain explores the idea that ‘proximity dictates how we identify and relate to society and the problems it faces - ultimately dictating how, and whether, we strive to resolve them’. Darren does this exploration in a book consisting of an introduction, two acts with an interlude between them and then a coda.