‘Adult literacy and liberal-progressive pedagogy: Australian contexts’, by Steven Black and Barbara Bee. Research in Post-compulsory Education, 23(2), 181–201.
In this article, the two authors contrast the two key adult literacy discourses of ’empowerment’ and ‘compliance’ and their related policy and practice that were a feature of what he calls the ‘socio-democratic’ era from the end of the 1970s through the 1980s and following this period up to the present, the ‘neoliberal era’ of the 1990s. They claim that, currently, there are ‘few spaces’ in which ’empowerment’ of learners and other stakeholders can be enacted.
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