6.3 Adult education through institutional and policy frameworks in EDF
6.3.5 Emerging issues on the institutional and policy frameworks
The institutional and policy frameworks in EDF open up new insights for the understanding of adult education. These insights relate to the profession and practice of adult education, community development work and the training of adult educators. These insights, emerging from the institutional and policy of frameworks of adult education in EDF, are discussed below.
6.3.5.1
Adult education as a service discipline to other professional disciplines
It emerges, from the case of EDF, that adult education is seen more as a service to other disciplines than as an independent discipline. In other words it a necessary component of other disciplines required in community development work such as, agriculture, health, environmental studies, water development and perhaps entrepreneurial skills development. In an interview, one member of senior management noted:
We have been able to train agriculturalists into CDWs, veterinary professionals into CDWs and so on. Therefore you don’t really need to have adult education skills ... but of course it [adult education] would be an added advantage at the time when a new staff member joins us. That means even the mentoring process will start a step higher than usual but we believe ... we are now talking about community development facilitators
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because if you have to achieve holistic development and not to fatigue community members, you need to have all-round staff who are getting down to the people (Kwaga).
Even though senior management takes cognizance of the fact that EDF’s work is largely educational, the major skills sought after are those that directly relate to the development focus such as in agriculture and health. Senior management in EDF contend that their major interest is to help people improve their lives by focusing on core development areas such as health, agriculture and the environment. Senior management believes that it is easier for them to retrain professionals in agriculture, health and water development, as adult educators. It is not enough to just be an adult educator without having a specific specialization in development work. This thinking explains why EDF hardly considers adult education as a prerequisite for recruitment.
6.3.5.2
Community development work as adult education
According to the discussion above, the work of EDF can be described as adult education. It was noted that although staff recruitment is based on specific disciplines relevant to the core development focus of EDF, the major job specification is more about adult education. It is perhaps for this reason that community members often refer to the staff of EDF as abasomesa ba EDF or EDF educators. This view in EDF resonates with the literature, which holds that community development work is adult education (see chapters 1 and 2).
6.3.5.3
A shift from specialist adult educators to generalist educators
The literature talks of ideal adult educators as those who are multi-skilled and knowledgeable in many spheres of life (Nyerere, 1973, 1982; Freire, 1972, 2004; Seaman & Fellenz, 2002;
Youngman, 2000; Vella, 2002). Nyerere (1982) notes that adult educators ought to be multi- disciplinary professionals, when he states:
The most appropriate adult teachers are often those who are also engaged in another job, who are practitioners of what they will be teaching. But it is necessary to have some
people whose full-time work is teaching adults, or organizing the different kinds of adult education. (Nyerere, 1982, p. 44).
According to Nyerere, society is best served by two types of adult educators, that is, generalists and specialists. Nyerere describes generalists as those educators that give general guidance on issues of a general nature such as hygiene and best practices in agriculture. He describes specialists as those adult educators with special skills to lead communities through demonstrations of how to improve their lives. In terms of how the two groups of adult educators relate to each other, Nyerere notes:
But none of these branches can be self-contained; their work must be coordinated and linked. The work of the agricultural specialist must be linked with that of the nutritionist and that of the people who train villagers to be more effective in selling or buying; and he may himself find the need to call upon - or lead the villagers towards - the person who can teach literacy. Adult Education in fact must be like a spider's web, the different strands of which knit together, each strengthening the other, and each connected to the others to make a coherent whole … If the people's felt need is improved health, the health specialist must lead them into an awareness of the need for improved agricultural techniques as he teaches the elements of preventive medicine, or helps them to lay the foundations of curative health service. And the health specialist must have organizational links with the agriculture teacher, so that this new interest can be met as it is aroused, and so on. (Nyerere, 1982, pp. 41-42).
Equally Freire (2004) stresses the importance of adult educators having multiple skills that help to touch the various needs of learners, by noting that:
And let it not be said that, if I am a biology teacher, I must not “go off into other considerations“ – that I must only teach biology, as if the phenomenon of life could be understood apart from its historic-social, cultural, and political framework. As life, just life, could be lived in the same way … If I am a biology teacher, obviously I must teach biology, but in doing so, I must not cut it off from other frameworks of the whole (Freire, 2004, p. 65).
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What then does the categorization of adult educators mean to EDF? What skills are valued and why?Educators in EDF can be described as both generalist and specialist. The initial focus of EDF was to boost people’s standards through health improvement and improved incomes through agriculture. Therefore the recruitment of specialists in health and agriculture was to meet those targets. However, along the way EDF came to realize that people’s problems cannot be isolated or treated in bits. In an interview, one member of senior management noted:
If you [PI] have been monitoring quite well, we [EDF] are trying now to build our team [staff/educators] to move away from the traditional extension workers and we are talking about community development facilitators because if you have to achieve holistic development and not to fatigue community members, you need to have all round staff who are getting down to the people. Development is not in bits, it is interrelated and it involves so many things, so really you need somebody who has wide knowledge to be able to … can address agricultural issues not so deeply but at least the basics that is issues of water, income generation, issues of gender, environment (Kwaga).
The thinking expressed above has led to the ongoing retraining and re-orienting of staff to assume multiple skills as generalist educators called CDFs. The two factors necessitating this shift are responding to local needs and conditions and also benchmarking against best practices nationally and internationally. It was noted that other organizations, such as World Vision, use the title of CDF for field officer, to reflect the multi-tasking such a position entails. The influence of national and international policy frameworks in EDF’s understanding of adult education is discussed extensively in chapter 9.