About

What is the #AdultConversations hashtag about?

#AdultConversations was a national campaign that was ‘born’ in a #JoyFE ideas room in autumn 2020.

It was a campaign for 2021 which incorporated a set of events as listed below and resulted in the birth of a professional alliance for adult educators. The original aims were to:

1. (Re)define adult community education clearly for all sectors

2. Put ‘community’ back into adult education

3. Make visible the map of adult education and unearth - make very visible - community learning on / in that ecology and the part it plays in success of the whole. Make the infrastructure relations (currently damaged) to be made visible.

4. Find the places where community education is working well in its local microclimate - what are the conditions for effective community education?

5. Influence policy change - an understanding and respect for adult community education

6. Capitalise on micro community and mutual aid emerging in covid times - what's sustainable and can be harnessed?

7. Make clear the civic responsibility/social infrastructure/local nature of all adult community education - to be writ large in the freshly painted ecology

8. Stop the diffusion of what community is - give it back meaning

9. Challenge language of formal and informal learning and achieve parity/equal value for whatever people perceive as both types regardless

10. Make visible (and more readily available) the micro progression opportunities for learning

11. Work in partnership with and complement the work of the existing infrastructure of campaigning bodies and organisations.

12. Activate – each person attending the Big Conversation to commit to an action!

Activities that happened 2021

A 'Big Conversation' #AdultConversations (This was held on 28th June 2021)

We harnessed sector/communities and their thinking at this national event, the outputs of which included commitments to action (eg conversations in attendees’ spheres of influence). The mode of the Big Conversation was a Citizens’ Assemblies, 4 provocateurs spoke and you can read about these in our articles.

Keeping the #AdultConversations alive all year with #52weeks52speaks (you can see the articles and artifacts collated which became the year book for 2021).

We invited members of the adult and community education sectors to “talk about this stuff” - articles, press releases, tv, commentators. The target for the year was 52 outputs. All submissions ended up in the year book and on this site.

Contributions included articles, poems, stories, podcasts, photos, films, talks, blogs – anything about adult community education in any form and space.

Finding the word (We played around with words and continue to do so!)

At the Big Conversation, we launched a our word search. In the way Finland has sivistys and Germany has bildung, we sought to create a word for adult community education. We are still trying!

Representation

Lou, Jo and Mel along with allies wrote for publications and spoke at events over the year to build awareness of the aims of #AdultConversations and as a preamble to an alliance.

The ‘campaign’ element ended at the end of 2021 and the professional alliance was born 2022, starting with the publication of the year book and manifesto.

This site will become the home of the new alliance.

Website designed by @islaflood and @jfletchersaxon