Tightrope walkers and solidarity sisters: critical workplace educators in the garment industry

Abstract

This article focuses on the complex negotiations of critical workplace educators positioned amongst contradictory agendas and discourses in the workplace. While philosophically aligned with critical pedagogical agendas of transformation and collective action for workplace change, these educators perform an array of pedagogic articulations in everyday practice to secure their continued presence in the workplace. What becomes evident in these seemingly opposing articulations are various strategic political positionings of educators alongside their juggling of demands, attachments and inter‐identifications with both learners and managers. The pedagogy that emerges challenges conventional binaries of ‘transformative’ and ‘reproductive’ learning. Dynamics of transformation and liberation as well as reproduction and subjugation appear to be interlinked, along with expanding nets of social relations that blur power hierarchies and spatial boundaries, in a pedagogy that ultimately appears to mobilise hope and agency among workers. The workplace educator works a delicate balance of these dynamics to survive. The argument is based on a case study of a garment factory in Canada in which an adult education programme managed to thrive for 17 years: both workers and educators were interviewed in depth.

Acknowledgments

The assistance of Joan Schiebelbein, former University of Alberta graduate student, is gratefully acknowledged. I am also indebted to the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped to strengthen this article.

Notes

1. While many accounts now exist of just what comprises ‘Freirian’ pedagogy, typically this phrase refers to literacy pedagogy developed by Paulo Freire that emphasises dialogue as learners working with each other, praxis or informed action to make a difference in the world, conscientization or consciousness of having power to transform reality and situating educational activity in the lived experience of participants (Taylor 1993).

2. Partners included Catherine Cole Associates, Ground Zero Productions, Edmonton Community Foundation, Provincial Museum Archives, University of Alberta and the Provincial Museum of Alberta.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tara Fenwick

Tara Fenwick is professor and Head of Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada. Her research interests are learning in work with particular focus on ethics, knowledge politics and identities in changing work arrangements.