Book Description
Access courses were developed in Britain to promote equality and social justice. This research study of access education draws on the views of academics, access practitioners and, most importantly, the accounts and critiques of access students themselves. It notes how access as now provided within the dominant discourse is often intimidating to the students it is meant to serve and how current approaches can reinforce poverty and exclusion and reproduce unequal power relations. Dr Burke and her students argue for a collaboratively developed pedagogy for access courses that includes theory and practice, teachers and students - a pedagogy which addresses difference and context while remaining committed to anti-classisist, anti-sexist and antiracist approaches to teaching and learning.

About the Author
Penny Jane Burke did her PhD at the Institute of Education, University of London, where she now teaches on the Gender Studies and Education programs. She is an Associate Lecturer at the Open University, an Open College Network moderator on a range of access courses in London and she won the Cosmopolitan Woman of Achievement Award for Education in 1998. Accessing Education grew out of her multiple experiences of access education, as a student, teacher, external moderator and researcher.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Equality and social justice were the prime objectives of the first access courses. But the government's current lifelong learning policy has shifted the position of access students in ways that often impede their educational opportunities." "This research study draws on the views and experience of academics, access practitioners and, above all, access students themselves. Their accounts reveal how access as currently provided within the dominant discourse can intimidate the students it is meant to serve, reinforcing exclusion and poverty and reproducing unequal power relations." Dr Burke and her access students show how a collaboratively developed pedagogy for access courses, committed to anti-classist, anti-sexist and antiracist approaches to teaching and learning, would empower students to succeed.

SYNOPSIS