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- Convenors:
-
Anna Madeleine Ayeh
(University of Bayreuth)
Issifou Abou Moumouni (University of Bayreuth LASDEL)
Iris Clemens (University of Bayreuth)
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Short Abstract:
This panel investigates the nexus of learning and age. Learning is analysed as a vast array of ways, modes, and contexts of knowledge production, transition, and acquisition, while age is approached as an intersectional category of difference. How do they relate in theory and praxis?
Long Abstract:
The notion of lifelong learning is employed in two distinct ways: instrumentally and descriptively. Instrumentally, it's a fixed concept aimed at promoting learning throughout one's life, primarily used in educational policy-making, and aiming at enhancing employability and economic wealth on a societal level. Descriptively, it acknowledges that learning occurs throughout a person's life, with a focus on informal and non-formal learning. In social and cultural anthropology, lifelong learning is explored descriptively, emphasizing the contextuality of knowledge transmission as well as its different modes, as reflected in the debates on informal, practical, embodied, and tacit learning. Anthropology also critiques the global spread of institutionalized education as a Western model.
In attempting to carve out lifelong learning as an analytical concept, we are interested in the link between learning and power structures, with a focus on the socio-cultural embeddedness of knowledge practices. Analogously, we approach age as an intersectional axis of difference that informs knowledge production and acquisition.
We are interested in theoretically, empirically, and methodically exploring the relationality between learning and age. Thereby we invite contributors to explore three axes of the learning-age-nexus:
1. Age and types of knowledge: Exploring how are age and learning are interconnected, and whether/how specific types of knowledge are associated with different ages
2. Age and learning processes: Examining forms and tools of learning according to age, the impact of age as a category of difference, and the role of innovative learning technologies
3. Theoretical aspects: Investigating the theoretical relationship between age and the life course
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 28 June, 2024, -Dara Warchaizer Efron (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
This paper offers a look at an educational program for adults, in which participants hike for two months across the INT. I show how the temporal conditioning of this program creates a unification of life stages, so that young adults and newly retired adults are placed in a single social category.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I analyze the meeting between adults in different life stages in a two-month-long educational hike, and argue that the discourse about time and temporality in this project has important ramifications to the dynamics between learners of different ages. I show how the project is set up as an intense “time off” from the “normal” life course, in a way that allows learners in certain life stages to take part more than others. This, in turn, creates a unification of these life stages, the most prominent being the meeting and mutual learning of newly retired adults, and those fresh out of military and national service in Israel.
This argument is based on ethnographic fieldwork in two consecutive years with an educational hike from the south of Israel/Palestine to its north. Built as a program for adults, this hike includes daily discussion groups, lectures and ceremonies. The hike is organized in commemoration of fallen Israeli soldiers, and although professed to be apolitical, this almost exclusively Jewish hike across the land has a clear nationalist agenda.
I reveal how part of the means for meeting the educational and pedagogical goals and agendas of this project is by intentionally designing the temporal experience of the participants on the hike. I show how, in this ethnographic case, discourse around time and life stages becomes part of a unifying, ultra-nationalist message, thus drawing lines between theories of time, life course, nationalism, pedagogy and adult education.
Anna Madeleine Ayeh (University of Bayreuth)
Paper short abstract:
The understanding of Islamic learning as a non-gendered, life-long endeavour only implicitly refers to age. Yet in everyday practice of Muslim*as in Benin, age, intersecting with gender, matters regarding how girls and women can claim to know.
Paper long abstract:
The understanding of Islamic learning as a non-gendered, life-long endeavour only implicitly refers to age. Yet in everyday practice of Muslim*as in Benin, age, intersecting with gender, matters regarding how girls and women can claim to know. Using empirical examples from various settings of religious learning across Muslim Benin, I argue to apply a relational (and intersectional) perspective in order to analyse the situatedness and age-contingency of religious knowing.
Issifou Abou Moumouni (University of Bayreuth LASDEL)
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses the issue of knowledge management in the context of personality development in rural areas where traditional practices still survive. It concerns endogenous knowledge transmitted sequentially over time with a view to training responsible adults.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores knowledge management in the Baatonu environment in northern Benin. It is based on empirical data collected through field surveys in rural areas where endogenous practices are still visible. It focuses on the system of knowledge gradually transmitted to children at different ages, the mastery and adoption of which gives them the right to adulthood. My paper seeks to understand what knowledge and know-how are essential to be considered an adult? It therefore analyses all the methods and tools used to manage and develop a heritage of knowledge and know-how according to age, in order to build personality and social and political participation. In this paper, I argue that adulthood is a continuous process that cannot be separated from a set of specific knowledge systems transmitted according to age and particular domains.
Arturo Marquez Meza (Imperial Valley College)
Paper short abstract:
The community college system in the United States provides access to higher education to millions of people who might otherwise be left out of this vital pathway for social mobility. In this paper I present my analysis of a recent 2023-2024 project where I analyzed student data in anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
The community college system in the United States provides access to higher education to millions of people who might otherwise be left out of this vital pathway for social mobility. This paper is based on first-hand experience teaching in a Latinx-serving community college in Southern California where teaching anthropology helps students fulfill a new ethnic studies requirement while also providing an invaluable opportunity to expand their worldview, especially those solely seeking an AA degree. In this paper I present my analysis of a recent 2023-2024 project where I analyzed student data in anthropology and discovered older students (30 years and above) have a lower success rate compared to younger students (18 – 26 years). In this predominantly Mexican American community along the US-Mexico border, the lower success rates among older students raises important questions concerning the relationship between age, types of knowledge, and tools for effective learning later in life. This paper draws from scholarship on motivation among adult learners to theorize how teaching anthropology can validate lived experiences and embolden older students to draw from this experience to produce knowledge in the classroom and their community. Teaching anthropology in community colleges represents an opportunity to broaden students’ worldview and destabilize the deep-seated assumption that valuable knowledge is received rather than produced. I present findings from my data project and share teaching strategies to increase equity in my anthropology courses.