9. Punishment Discourses in Everyday Life

Khum Raj Pathak exposes the subliminal power of violence in controlling behaviour, drawing upon language from the workplace, politics and the media in Britain and narrative research in Nepal. He shows how violent language becomes embedded in a culture and how the experience of violence promotes conformity indirectly through fear, before challenging us to consider how educators and the whole of society might speak differently.

4. Understandings of the Natural World from a Generational Perspective

Hazel R. Wright uses a recall approach to gather and compare the distinctive views of nature held by four members of different generations within the same family. The narratives collected are examined for evidence of residual learning, to judge the respective importance of formal schooling, real experiences and family practices when forming individual worldviews of nature.

20. Participatory Approaches in Critical Migration Research

Annette Sprung discusses a participatory research project that created a documentary film about the experiences of migrants working as adult educators in Austria, and then analyses this collaboratively to consider issues of stereotyping and ‘otherness’ from multiple perspectives.

5. Opposing Cultures

Marianne Høyen and Mumiah Rasmusen explore C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ perspective of education through interviews with four newly trained teachers about to enter the profession for the first time. They ask what professionalism means within their disciplines and examine how childhood and family influences shape the desire to teach. It is clear that disciplinary cultures are firmly embedded, because the humanity students offer ‘why’ responses to questions, the scientists ‘how’ responses.

18. The Needs of Low-Literate Migrants When Learning the English Language

Monica Mascarenhas considers language-teaching provision for migrants to Britain, its instrumentality, its universality and its oblivion to their backgrounds, concerns, losses, and aspirations. A former language lecturer, she collected the life stories of students with low-level or no literacy in their home languages in order to seek ways to better motivate them to learn. She finds that fundamental changes are needed if such teaching is to be effective.

26. Using Journaling and Autoethnography to Create Counter-Narratives of School Exclusion in Britain

Helen Woodley describes an insider study of a pupil referral unit (for excluded children) that challenges the orthodoxies that are commonly attributed to such facilities. She seeks to give the pupils a voice, and thereby to modify the views of the public and policymakers. Helen discovered the power of journaling and autoethnography as methods of data collection and interpretation, and demonstrates their value as research tools.

24. UK Senior Citizens Learn Filmmaking as a Creative Pathway to Reflection and Fulfilment

Teresa Brayshaw and Jenny Granville offer a non-conventional treatment of a project that supports pensioners to engage in collaborative film making. Their performative approach is fairly radical and, in keeping with this, the chapter is multi-faceted. It includes a transcript of the film and its QR code to enable you to view it yourself, feedback from viewers, elements from a conference presentation and selections from the email exchanges between and among editors and academics that illustrate the difficulties when different views collide.

25. Diversifying Discourses of Progression to UK Higher Education Through Narrative Approaches

Laura Mazzoli Smith considers widening participation in higher education in the light of Williams’ notion of resources of hope. Taking an autoethnographic approach, Laura demonstrates how her reading of Iris Murdoch as a young person facilitated her own entry into higher education. Through understanding Murdoch as someone who challenged orthodox worldviews, she found the confidence to develop a personalized counter-narrative to allow her to break with family tradition and open up new pathways of progression.

16. Adult Education as a Means to Enable Polish Citizens to Question Media Coverage of Political Messages

Marta Zientek offers a rhetorical exposition of the political system in Poland, and shows how an adult education course provided a space to analyse and reflect on the veracity of the messages put out by the dominant governing party. Course members critically examined the speeches of a political leader to see how linguistic devices were employed to attract public support.