Lifelong learning and the new educational order

Many adult educators are familiar with the term dialogue ‐akey concept in education guided by a sense of social justice. In this paper I want to reclaim some of the political agendas which are lost when the term is incorporated into education paradigms which present justice as a product to be distributed to the ‘disadvantaged’. This approach seems to ignore the role ‘advantaged’ groups play in maintaining ‘disadvantage’ (Lankshear, 1991). It also evades the issue of relations of power; relations which remain unchanged through the simple redistribution of resources. In recent times an orientation to competency based teaching has encouraged educators to focus their energy on identifying the learning outcomes one might expect from a course of study and to gear teaching behaviour to meet these outcomes. While learning outcomes are important I believe it is unrealistic to create simplistic links between teaching acts and learning outcomes. My concern is that complex and highly political processes like dialogue are being reduced, at least in some training discourses, to a series of orderly steps. This has two consequences. First, it falsely presents classroom life as a relatively predictable event. Second, these orderly steps imply that educational success lies in efficient and effective delivery techniques which may or may not take account of the political and social context of learning settings. If the techniques do not “work” educators may be left wondering what they did wrong rather than considering the viability of the steps in the first place.