Overview

With Shifting the boundaries: feminist practices in adult education, Anita Devos has made a significant contribution to the literatures of Australian feminist and adult education studies. Drawing together the work of 15 women – consultants, trainers, teachers, managers, community workers, union activists, students and lecturers – actively involved with emancipatory teaching and learning in a wide range of sites including a women's prison, trade unions, TAFE colleges, an indigenous degree program, community development for Asian women, mothering, and Yoga classes, Shifting the boundaries opens an inclusive space for the writing of feminist research and collaborative practice in the adult education sector. From the opening chapters describing the work of feminist educators to the closing section developing the theoretical terrain of feminist practice in adult education, Shifting the boundaries foregrounds practical engagement with women's everyday lives and acknowledges the multiple interpretations and perspectives on practice.

In Shifting the boundaries the contributors engage collaboratively with issues which arose in their work, their reflection and their teaching. They are committed to providing women with access to information and support as they address the unequal power relations of their everyday lives. They are prepared to challenge conventional wisdom, as in the claim for separate spaces for women's learning or the dilemmas of critical pedagogy.

While Shifting the boundaries is immediately applicable to women's studies and adult education, it has a wider relevance to issues of politics, policy, equity and social justice. More, it will appeal to all who are committed to the unfinished project of what Eva Cox has termed 'a truly civil society'.

Table of Contents

Separate Spaces

• Struggle, recognition and inspiration: an Account of Women's Courses in the Australian Trade Union Training Authority
  Cathy Block and Fran Hayes
• NOW and then: Reflections on the New Opportunities for Women Courses in the Illawarra Technical and Further Education system
  Shirley Nixon
• Doing it for ourselves: Aboriginal women and education
  Gwen McGregor; Angela Phillips, Jenny Newman with Jane Durie and Anita Devos

Transformative impacts of education

• Inside stories: the creative process at work in a women's prison
  Margie Gow
• Yoga for women: learning and healing through the body
  Louise Watson
• Building community through Asian women at Work
  Anita Devos with Debbie Carstens, Sharny Chalmers and Qi Fen Huang

Researching and analysing practice

• Learning and knowing about mothering: exploring the disjunctures
  Catherine Fowler
• Emancipatory education and classroom practice: a feminist post-structuralist perspective
  Jane Durie
• Ironing out the creases? Gender bias in competency standards development
  Ann Reich

Reviews

"[Shifting the boundaries evidences] a paradigmatic shift from the dominant patriarchal and ethnocentric standpoints of much of the extant literature from the adult education sector... [Devos] weaves a tapestry of experiential narratives and theoretical engagements with the practical issues of emancipatory teaching and learning... In this time of unprecedented social, cultural, economic and technological change, [she] has successfully interfused a collection of concrete and situated analyses and interpretations of educational practices that interrogate and illuminate issues of current significance to the entire adult education sector in Australia."

Cushla Kapitzke