Women learners and their virtual handbags: invisible experiences and everyday contexts in vocational education

Abstract

As more and more mature women return to vocational learning, the issues facing this group of learners are being acknowledged and attempts made to address these concerns. Many existing strategies, developed to address the needs of other groups of learners, are applied to mature women. These women are drawn into a formal learning environment in which their everyday lives and homeplace experiences are invisible or misunderstood. Based on research into the experiences of 12 mature‐age women learners in Australia, this paper explores some issues for mature women returning to vocational education. I use the notion of women’s virtual handbags to describe how, within the current framework of lifelong learning, women’s homeplace experiences not only continue to be invisible, but can also be misconstrued to effectively create problems for women learners.

Notes

1. Although as Cornford (2009) points out, 20 years on Australia still has no lifelong learning policy.

2. Pat Thomson (2002), in her critique of socio‐economic influences on children’s schooling opportunities, uses the term ‘virtual schoolbag’ to describe the ‘particular configurations of knowledges, narratives and interests’ (8), that is, the learned behaviours and acquired skills, that children bring with them into the classroom from home and other social contexts. I acknowledge that the concept of personal baggage as metaphor for human values and attributes has a longer history: for example in 1990, Peggy McIntosh wrote about the ‘invisible knapsack’ of white privilege (McIntosh 1990). My use of the term ‘virtual handbag’ has, however, been developed more closely in line with Thomson’s virtual schoolbag, and similarly in an educational context.