Gender and Lifelong Learning: Critical Feminist Engagements

This insightful book is ideal for students, researchers and policy makers wanting a sound overview of the critical issues of gender in lifelong learning. Asking pertinent questions relating to discourses on policy, the authors offer the reader a rare view of lifelong learning from a gender-focused perspective, filling a gap in the literature and moving current debate on into new areas. Questions addressed include: To what extent can the policy discourses and institutional contexts of lifelong learning be seen as masculinised and/or feminised? What are the gender implications of lifelong learning policy? In what ways are learners’ identities constructed through lifelong learning? Does lifelong learning provide opportunities to challenge or transgress gender binaries? What are the implications for practice?

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Gendering Lifelong Learning Section 1: The Policy Context 1. Unprotected Participation in Life Long Learning and the Politics of Hope: A Feminist Reality Check of Discourses Around Flexibility, Seamlessness and Learner Earners 2. Locating the Learner within EU Policy: Trajectories, Complexities, Identities 3. Gendered Constructions of Lifelong Learning and the Learner in the UK Policy Context Section 2: Accessing Lifelong Learning 4. Troubling Trajectories: Gendered ‘Choices’ and Pathways from School to Work 5. Masculinities, Femininities and Resistance to Participation in Post-Compulsory Education 6. Fair Access? Exploring Gender, Access and Participation beyond Entry to Higher Education Section 3: Experiences of Lifelong Learning 7. Community Education: Participation, Risk and Desire 8. From Childcare Practitioner to FE Tutor: Biography, Identity and Lifelong Learning 9. Disability, Gender and Identity: The Experiences of Disabled Students in Higher Education 10. The In/Visible Journey: Black Women’s Life-Long Lessons in Higher Education 11. Older Women as Lifelong Learners 12. War and Diaspora as Lifelong Learning Contexts for Immigrant Women

About the Author :
Ipse University North London, UK Roehampton University, UK

Review :
'With this book, the criticism is complete and perfect, the arguments very well built and attractive and the situations and examples are so real.' - Studies in the Education of Adults