‘Workers’ Educational Association: A Crisis of Identity? Personal Perspectives on Changing Professional Identities.

This work is concerned with how the State’s general educational policy affects the structure, identity and practices of the informal adult education sector. The poster focuses on the Workers’ Educational Association, a voluntary movement established over one hundred years ago to provide purposeful education for the working class -and which today is the largest voluntary provider of adult education. However, regardless of the organisation’s expansion, there are fears for the WEA’s future as it increasingly relies upon government funds and processes which tend to promote and enforce the re-structuring of state education. It is this wholesale political re-structuring of education which is believed to be eroding the WEA’s distinctive identity and contribution to transformative adult education (Doyle, 2003). The Worker’s Educational Association has, however, always been a contested site of struggle; a struggle for existence, an ideological struggle against the State and other independent working class educational organisations and a methodological struggle to deliver really ‘useful knowledge’ to the disadvantaged. This qualitative research uses a broad critical realist approach to investigate the validity of this present struggle, looking at it over time through the personal lens of six long serving WEA Tutor Organisers. These men and women drawn from the Midlands and the North, give their own highly personalised, differentiated and reflexive perspectives of the WEA and reveal it to be an organisation that has to continuously renegotiate itself. Yet, past reflections of the whole cohort single out human agency as a defining WEA characteristic, one that informed personal, professional and organisational identity and it is clear from the narrative analysis that this has been compromised. Using Archer’s ‘morphogenetic’ insights (Archer, 1995) has allowed an analytical framework to be used to understand just exactly what is taking place in this multi-faceted crisis of identity.