Writing Across the Divide

One of my colleagues is preoccupied with defining the field of adult education. At various retreats and course meetings he sees that the first thing we need to establish, is how we are going to define the field. I am always confused by this idea of a single unitary field of adult education. Through my eyes, adult education, adult learning, adult teaching happens everywhere. The idea of containing adult education into a field, bounded, contained and separate, resonates with the concerns of who and where, privilege and power, and the work of protecting the borders. In my research into diabetes education and how we learn the body I looked at the link between the need to construct a bounded site and the construction of the individual autonomous and powerful subject. Here too I was struggling with issues of knowledge and privilege, teaching and learning. As an academic working in the adult and workplace education programme, as a PhD student, as a woman learning to deal with teenage children, as someone living with diabetes, and researching diabetes education I find myself positioned simultaneously both within and without various spheres of power.