In search of stability: women studying childcare in an English further education college

Abstract

This paper demonstrates how women who study childcare achieve congruence in their lives. Rather than simply juggling the needs of family, work and study in order to escape the domestic sphere, they choose to minimise dissonance, finding that parenting children, working with children and studying children creates a stable framework with reciprocal rather than conflictual links. The framework is captured as a model of ‘integrated lives’ and, drawing on Amartya Sen’s capability approach, further conceptualised as an example of a capability set for childcare students. The pattern of drifting into childcare, representing the students’ choices, is made visible through the creation of a set of occupational typologies. Qualitative empirical evidence is used to explore the educational and broader social implications of integrating lives, and how this congruence encourages the uptake of new ideas as learning is multiply relevant. However, shortage of time causes students to modify their approach to learning, causing many who espouse liberal values to favour knowledge transmission over more demanding styles, attracted to the former’s apparent efficiency. Time constraints also encourage a retrospective acceptance of criterion-based assessment because fragmented knowledge is more easily manipulated when study patterns are sporadic and college work confined to those moments free from other commitments. The findings are discussed in relation to concerns that full-time students now need to undertake part-time work and introduce some interpretive detail to this debate.

Keywords:

• adult education
• women’s education
• work–life balance
• childcare
• capability approach

Notes

1. English further education colleges can be described as ‘postmodern institutions with pluralistic, fragmented and diverse interests' (Hyland and Merrill 2003: 47). They are regional institutions providing educational opportunities outside of the compulsory sector and intended to serve local needs. They provide a broad range of full- and part-time courses catering for all sectors of the community: teenagers seeking an alternative to the formal school sixth form; adults seeking basic skills, access to higher education, vocational training or work-based degrees; and those seeking English-language qualifications. In times of prosperity, the range of courses may extend to include recreational and purely academic subjects; in times of austerity, funding restrictions focus provision on courses perceived to directly support economic growth.

2. The capability approach is a flexible, theoretical framework developed by economist Amartya Sen (e.g. 1985a, 1985b, 1987, 1992, 1999), which places individual choice at the centre of the decision-making process. It explains how governments could facilitate this by providing people with a range of opportunities rather than a single optimal option identified through the economic calculations of utility maximisation. It seeks to delineate a means of empowering societies, focusing primarily on the developing world where current practices keep many, particularly women and children, in positions of deprivation within patriarchal family structures. Sen theorises that choice is neither rational nor random, but bounded. Each individual has a ‘capability set' of potentially realisable alternatives from which to select compatible options for implementation, a process Sen describes as turning capabilities into ‘functionings'. Sen places the attention on this process of choosing. His discourse of people selecting ‘beings' and ‘doings' that matter to them individually relates to the present, on the achievement of functionings that support a current satisfactory lifestyle, rather than distant future attainments. The capability approach has an affinity with many liberal strategic positions in favouring diversity and being locally applied, each group determining their own priorities and thereby taking responsibility for their own lives (Wright 2009).