Susan Webb
Biographic Data
| ID | 3782008 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susan Webb |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susan |
| FAMILY NAME | Webb |
| SIGNATURE | WEBB S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Monash University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0833-959X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 52 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 120 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1961 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
‘It is a university where I felt welcome’
Current social and political arrangements of higher education are inequitable for students from asylum-seeking backgrounds. In many countries, their access to university is limited and if they are accepted, their status as forced migrants puts them at multiple disadvantages. This inequity is in contrast with the universal aim of higher education institutions to serve all people and their societies. Utilising a voice centred relational method (VCR…
Advancing the social role of college-based higher education
This systematic review aims to examine empirical literature about advancing the social role of college-based higher education (CBHE). A thematic analysis of empirical evidence from the 58 included articles offers insights into the social role of CBHE, and the characteristics of CBHE colleges, students, and lecturers. The review indicated a growing research interest in CBHE and an increase in the geographical spread of such research as the provisi…
Adult learning in a migration society
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)
Aligning skills and lifelong learning for human-centred sustainable development
Lifelong education research over 40 years
With this special issue of the International Journal of Lifelong Education, we complete a two-year celebration and critical examination of the field of adult lifelong education, prompted by the journal’s fortieth anniversary. In this editorial we provide a brief account of this celebration and its rationale, but also devote attention to the origins and early years of the journal itself
Forty years of the International Journal of Lifelong Education
Shaping the field of lifelong education through three critical debates in the International Journal of Lifelong Education
The editors approached the 40th anniversary of the International Journal of Lifelong Education as an opportunity to consider the field by exploring how a corpus of 1462 articles (the first 40 volumes of the journal) questioned and shaped the field. A subset of advisory board members and the editors gathered in 2021 in groups to analyse major topics. The records of the reading, analyses and discussions of these groups offer a unique snapshot of th…
Theorising adults, theorising learning
The irony of all theorising is its propensity to generate, not an understanding, but a not-yet-understood. (Oakshot, in Muller, 2015, p. 1) \n \nAdult learning theory is one of the central domains of lifelong education research. Anyone coming to the study of adults as they adapt to and change in life, work and education will encounter theories such as ‘behaviourism’, ‘cognitive psychology’, and ‘humanist psychology’, often expanded to include adu…
Capitalism(s) and the future of adult education policy
.
A year of Covid-19 pandemic
March 2021 marked one year since the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous editorials reflected on social inequality, a longstanding problem in lifelong education, in light of the pandemic (Waller et al., 2020), and on the role of learning cities and regions to make education systems resilient to the pandemic (Webb et al., 2020). Writing when a third wave of COVID-19 is being experienced in several countries, it is wo…
Reassessing the social benefits of lifelong learning in light of the Covid pandemic
This editorial focuses on what is widely regarded as a beneficial aspect of adult education, that is, increased opportunities for socialising, and how they may have been reduced by the general move to online learning in response to the COVID pandemic. Whilst some scholars have previously highlighted the potential negative social aspects of adults engaging with lifelong learning on relationships with those closest to them (e.g. Waller et al., 2011…
Lifelong education international
With this issue, the International Journal of Lifelong Education enters its fortieth year of publication. It was launched, under the editorship of Peter Jarvis and J.E. (Teddy) Thomas, in a different era. We are now embarking on a two-year project to mark the completion of this anniversary, and to launch us into our fifth decade. The project involves looking back and peering forward. It comprises two main elements, the outcomes of which will, we …
Who is ‘competent’ to shape lifelong education’s future
Lifelong education practice and research are about important processes but also generate visions of what those processes should be and lead to. Many are drawn to the field of lifelong education because of traditions that have articulated visions of adults and their communities as capable of growth, emancipation and empowerment, and look to educational policies, systems, institutions, and programmes in terms of how they can foster those visions. F…
Recognition and precarious mobilities
Widening University Access for Students of Asylum-Seeking Backgrounds
Lifelong education, social inequality and the Covid-19 health pandemic
What can lifelong education researchers learn from the COVID-19 pandemic? There are, of course, ‘quick’ lessons: societies, for instance, clearly learn from experience. East Asian societies, and governments, learned from SARS and the devastating effect it had in cities such as Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Beijing in 2003 (Abraham, 2004). Of course there was the general lesson that a new coronavirus should not be taken lightly: no doubt there was als…
Educational research in authoritarian times
Across the world, political winds are filling authoritarian sails. From China to Hungary, Brazil to Poland, Turkey to Egypt, Russia to the USA, ‘strong leaders’ hold the helm. Democratic institutions creak or crack. Elections are ‘managed’, postponed, abolished; voters are suborned by ‘fake news’; opposition is harassed, banned, branded treasonous or terroristic. Checks and balances on executive power are ignored or derided; leaders’ terms of off…
Adult education, vocational education and economic policy
Adult education and vocational education have a long and complex relationship. At many levels, they remain distinct ideas and each is the focus of a dedicated body of research and theory. At the same time, overlaps have always been acknowledged. This relationship and how it plays out in economic policy settings is the focus of this editorial. The Australian case is taken up as illuminating especially when viewed through the lens of Bourdieu’s ana…
Learning cities and implications for adult education research
Writing this editorial whilst many people are experiencing a second wave of the global COVID-19 pandemic, it is interesting to reflect on learning and the role of education providers. Arguably, in some countries such as the UK, the media has constructed a bad-news story about online learning in these times. Rather than discuss areas of community and adult education provision that have been neglected or the potential of formal, informal and non-fo…
Social Capital and the Career Adaptability of Refugees
This study examines how people from refugee and asylum‐seeking backgrounds draw on their social capital to develop their career adaptability. To examine this issue, we drew on interview data from twenty‐five people based in Melbourne, Australia, who have sought asylum between 2008 and 2016. The present study examines the influence of different dimensions of social capital on individuals’ career adaptability. Findings revealed that a more nuanced …
Unsettling equity frames in Australian universities to embrace people seeking asylum
Transnational migration, especially the growth of forced migration is unsettling the literature on widening access to university education. Equity definitions and understandings that frame social inclusion have presumed stable domestic populations within nations and targeted redressing historic internal social inequalities. Refugees and people seeking asylum have high aspirations to access to university education to gain recognition or update qua…
An inseparable aspect of citizenship”
This year we mark a major adult education centenary: the publication, in November 1919, of the Final Report of the British Ministry of Reconstruction’s Adult Education Committee. This was a landmark in our field – probably the first major official report on adult education in any country to be based on serious empirical research. More important, perhaps, it set out a strong political case for a broad – lifelong and lifewide – adult education curr…
Conceptualising lifelong learning for sustainable development and education 2030
Lifelong learning has been identified as crucial to the achievement of sustainable development and quality education in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. By incorporating the need to promote lifelong learning opportunities for all in the sustainable development goal 4 (SDG4), which was agreed by the United Nations member states in 2015, policy makers have recognised that education should reach beyond the formal institutional arrangemen…
Data, artificial intelligence and policy-making
A few years ago, the European Commission commissioned and published an influential report, reviewing what adult education policy-makers could learn from research – chiefly research funded by the Commission itself under successive Framework research programmes (now rebranded ‘Horizon’) (Federighi, 2013). The report covered a range of areas, including the aims of continuing vocational education and training and adult education, how adult education …
Skilled Migrants and Negotiations
Issues of identity, home and belonging underline most transnational and transmigrational experiences. Globally, there is increasing interest in issues related to the settlement of migrants; yet there is growing evidence on a quotidian basis that migrant settlement into a host country is not a smooth experience. Drawing on qualitative empirical work, involving a large cross section of ethnically diverse skilled migrants located in a regional Austr…
Shaping the field of lifelong education through three critical debates in the International Journal of Lifelong Education
The editors approached the 40th anniversary of the International Journal of Lifelong Education as an opportunity to consider the field by exploring how a corpus of 1462 articles (the first 40 volumes of the journal) questioned and shaped the field. A subset of advisory board members and the editors gathered in 2021 in groups to analyse major topics. The records of the reading, analyses and discussions of these groups offer a unique snapshot of th…
Skilled Migrants and Negotiations
Issues of identity, home and belonging underline most transnational and transmigrational experiences. Globally, there is increasing interest in issues related to the settlement of migrants; yet there is growing evidence on a quotidian basis that migrant settlement into a host country is not a smooth experience. Drawing on qualitative empirical work, involving a large cross section of ethnically diverse skilled migrants located in a regional Austr…
Lifelong education, social inequality and the Covid-19 health pandemic
What can lifelong education researchers learn from the COVID-19 pandemic? There are, of course, ‘quick’ lessons: societies, for instance, clearly learn from experience. East Asian societies, and governments, learned from SARS and the devastating effect it had in cities such as Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Beijing in 2003 (Abraham, 2004). Of course there was the general lesson that a new coronavirus should not be taken lightly: no doubt there was als…
Widening participation, social mobility and the role of universities in a globalized world
A university education has long been seen as the gateway to upward social mobility for individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds in countries the world over, and a well-educated working pop
Widening University Access for Students of Asylum-Seeking Backgrounds
Unsettling equity frames in Australian universities to embrace people seeking asylum
Transnational migration, especially the growth of forced migration is unsettling the literature on widening access to university education. Equity definitions and understandings that frame social inclusion have presumed stable domestic populations within nations and targeted redressing historic internal social inequalities. Refugees and people seeking asylum have high aspirations to access to university education to gain recognition or update qua…
Adult education and learning
At the outset of the world economic crisis in 2009 the representatives of 144 UNESCO Member States met at the Sixth International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA VI) held in Brazil, and adopted the Belém Framework for Action (BFA) to guide them ‘in harnessing the power and potential of adult learning and education for a viable future for all’ (art. 6). Moreover, they called upon UNESCO and its satellite structures to review and update th…
A year of Covid-19 pandemic
March 2021 marked one year since the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous editorials reflected on social inequality, a longstanding problem in lifelong education, in light of the pandemic (Waller et al., 2020), and on the role of learning cities and regions to make education systems resilient to the pandemic (Webb et al., 2020). Writing when a third wave of COVID-19 is being experienced in several countries, it is wo…
Global policy agencies and visions for twenty-first century lifelong education
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has recently published a vision for education for the twenty-first century Rethinking Education: Towards a Global Commo
Lifelong education international
With this issue, the International Journal of Lifelong Education enters its fortieth year of publication. It was launched, under the editorship of Peter Jarvis and J.E. (Teddy) Thomas, in a different era. We are now embarking on a two-year project to mark the completion of this anniversary, and to launch us into our fifth decade. The project involves looking back and peering forward. It comprises two main elements, the outcomes of which will, we …
Adult education, mental health and mental wellbeing
Engaging or continuing to engage with formal education in adulthood has long been seen as being beneficial to learners in a number of ways (Field, 2009; Schuller, Preston, Hammond, BassettGrundy, & Bynner, 2004). These include the obvious social ones – classes are good ways to meet others with similar interests – and economic benefits including enhanced knowledge, skills general employability are often cited as being important too – the encourage…
Lifelong learning for quality education
The sustainable development goals (SDGs) adopted by the leaders of the United Nations member states at the 70th session of the UN General assembly in September 2015, set out an agenda for global transformation. These SDGs, known as global goals, build on the strategy set by the millennium development goals (MDGs) to end all forms of poverty and focus even further on inequalities and climate change. In contrast to the MDGs, SDGs have been designed…
The Mooc phenomenon
Aligning skills and lifelong learning for human-centred sustainable development
Recognition and precarious mobilities
Educational research in authoritarian times
Across the world, political winds are filling authoritarian sails. From China to Hungary, Brazil to Poland, Turkey to Egypt, Russia to the USA, ‘strong leaders’ hold the helm. Democratic institutions creak or crack. Elections are ‘managed’, postponed, abolished; voters are suborned by ‘fake news’; opposition is harassed, banned, branded treasonous or terroristic. Checks and balances on executive power are ignored or derided; leaders’ terms of off…
An inseparable aspect of citizenship”
This year we mark a major adult education centenary: the publication, in November 1919, of the Final Report of the British Ministry of Reconstruction’s Adult Education Committee. This was a landmark in our field – probably the first major official report on adult education in any country to be based on serious empirical research. More important, perhaps, it set out a strong political case for a broad – lifelong and lifewide – adult education curr…
Economic theory, neoliberalism and the interests of educators
Critical commentary on education policy frequently resorts to the term ‘neoliberal’ to describe the influence of economic theory on the way we understand, measure and reform practices and institutions. This influence reaches a wide range of activities funded by governments such as health care, welfare, and public services in general. The appeal of economic theory to policymakers can be readily appreciated. As Edwards (2007) explains, governments …
Neo-liberalism and the shifting discourse of ‘educational fairness’
Can ICT reduce social exclusion? The case of an adults' English language learning programme
Strong claims are made for ICT‐based lifelong learning as an effective way of reducing the exclusion of various groups in society, yet, there is very little research to support these claims. Empirical research is needed, including qualitative studies of the experiences of socially excluded learners using ICT. This article reports the findings of such a study in relation to learners from one socially excluded group, adults from ethnic minority bac…
Lifelong education research over 40 years
With this special issue of the International Journal of Lifelong Education, we complete a two-year celebration and critical examination of the field of adult lifelong education, prompted by the journal’s fortieth anniversary. In this editorial we provide a brief account of this celebration and its rationale, but also devote attention to the origins and early years of the journal itself
Reassessing the social benefits of lifelong learning in light of the Covid pandemic
This editorial focuses on what is widely regarded as a beneficial aspect of adult education, that is, increased opportunities for socialising, and how they may have been reduced by the general move to online learning in response to the COVID pandemic. Whilst some scholars have previously highlighted the potential negative social aspects of adults engaging with lifelong learning on relationships with those closest to them (e.g. Waller et al., 2011…
Who is ‘competent’ to shape lifelong education’s future
Lifelong education practice and research are about important processes but also generate visions of what those processes should be and lead to. Many are drawn to the field of lifelong education because of traditions that have articulated visions of adults and their communities as capable of growth, emancipation and empowerment, and look to educational policies, systems, institutions, and programmes in terms of how they can foster those visions. F…
Social Capital and the Career Adaptability of Refugees
This study examines how people from refugee and asylum‐seeking backgrounds draw on their social capital to develop their career adaptability. To examine this issue, we drew on interview data from twenty‐five people based in Melbourne, Australia, who have sought asylum between 2008 and 2016. The present study examines the influence of different dimensions of social capital on individuals’ career adaptability. Findings revealed that a more nuanced …
Data, artificial intelligence and policy-making
A few years ago, the European Commission commissioned and published an influential report, reviewing what adult education policy-makers could learn from research – chiefly research funded by the Commission itself under successive Framework research programmes (now rebranded ‘Horizon’) (Federighi, 2013). The report covered a range of areas, including the aims of continuing vocational education and training and adult education, how adult education …
Effects of familiarity with a controversial issue on acceptance of successive persuasive communications
Psychiatric Problems of the 1970's
This paper describes some of the social trends of the 1970's that may be affecting patterns of psychiatric needs and presents data showing their impact. It suggests possible psychiatric and sociopolitical responses to meet these needs. Patients were studied in the outpatient and inpatient services of the Shands Teaching Hospital and Student Mental Health Services at the University of Florida. The main findings were that single youth, both females…
Challenging democracy
Can ICT reduce social exclusion? The case of an adults' English language learning programme
Strong claims are made for ICT‐based lifelong learning as an effective way of reducing the exclusion of various groups in society, yet, there is very little research to support these claims. Empirical research is needed, including qualitative studies of the experiences of socially excluded learners using ICT. This article reports the findings of such a study in relation to learners from one socially excluded group, adults from ethnic minority bac…
Challenging lifelong learning policy discourse
Can adult educational research on learning and identity counter the individualising of neoliberal government policy that seeks to constrain educational ‘choices’ to those that contribute to government economic agendas? This article notes the recent move within post-compulsory education research towards an engagement with Bourdieu because of perceived limitations in the research and analysis of learner identities. In particular, Bourdieu is drawn …
Exploration, discovery, learning
We were upon a Coast where every step was to be considered, where no information was to be had from Maps, either modern or ancient; confiding too much in the former we were frequently misled to our
Skills assessment, Piaac and the adult literacy agenda
Lifelong education and transnational migration
Lifelong learning has failed to integrate cultural difference and diversity into educational environments. Rather than facilitating immigrant adaptation, lifelong learning has been a vehicle for as
The Mooc phenomenon
Widening participation, social mobility and the role of universities in a globalized world
A university education has long been seen as the gateway to upward social mobility for individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds in countries the world over, and a well-educated working pop
Journal listing and rating
Do we know enough about learning? Can we learn without knowing it
Many years ago Polanyi (1967) claimed that ‘I know more than I can tell’. Of course he was right, but the question remains: How do we learn those things that we cannot tell? Even, does the fact tha
Global policy agencies and visions for twenty-first century lifelong education
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has recently published a vision for education for the twenty-first century Rethinking Education: Towards a Global Commo
Neo-liberalism and the shifting discourse of ‘educational fairness’
Niace
A year ago, on 4 November 2015, a few dozen British adult educators gathered in London. They were there to attend what turned out to be the last annual general meeting of the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education: NIACE. Legally speaking, the organisation was merely changing its name, rather than ceasing to exist, but the rebranding was more than trivial. Only two of the words in its name remained (‘national’ and ‘institute’). ‘Adult’,…
Refugee migration, lifelong education and forms of integration
As we write this editorial, the political landscape that has shaped European policy and structures over the last 40 years is being questioned in the UK following the recent referendum result to leave the European Union. One of the central issues in the UK referendum debate was how to respond to the challenge of increased migration. With the free movement of labour being a core tenet of the single European economic market, the enlargement of this …
Academic journals and the politics of publication in adult, continuing and lifelong education
On 9 September 2016, the Triennial Conference of the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA) hosted a symposium on ‘The politics of publishing in research journals within the field of adult education and learning’. For the occasion, the editors of five research-based journals in adult, continuing and lifelong education had been invited to reflect on and debate two issues: How do articles submitted to and published in thes…
Learning to manage the self and the hidden injuries of migration
Global migration is increasing to unprecedented levels, especially from non-OECD countries to OECD countries. One of the new challenges for lifelong learning is that migrants are expected to be responsible for ensuring that they have the capabilities and learning to adapt to new contexts but qualifications and experiences obtained in one national system are often not recognised in different national systems. This article draws on an empirical stu…
Lifelong learning for quality education
The sustainable development goals (SDGs) adopted by the leaders of the United Nations member states at the 70th session of the UN General assembly in September 2015, set out an agenda for global transformation. These SDGs, known as global goals, build on the strategy set by the millennium development goals (MDGs) to end all forms of poverty and focus even further on inequalities and climate change. In contrast to the MDGs, SDGs have been designed…
Political populism and adult education
Although it is subject to considerable current media scrutiny, populism, the political movement which may best be characterised by an anti-establishment appeal to the masses, is actually nothing new, although the form it takes has varied over time and between national contexts. Previous examples include in the United States the People’s Party from the late nineteenth century, South American political movements around ‘charismatic’ leaders such as…
Adult education and learning
At the outset of the world economic crisis in 2009 the representatives of 144 UNESCO Member States met at the Sixth International Conference on Adult Education (CONFINTEA VI) held in Brazil, and adopted the Belém Framework for Action (BFA) to guide them ‘in harnessing the power and potential of adult learning and education for a viable future for all’ (art. 6). Moreover, they called upon UNESCO and its satellite structures to review and update th…
Vocational education and the field of lifelong education
A survey of the contents of this journal – in this edition and over time – reveals that an interest in vocational education commingles with strands of the lifelong educational discourse that could be regarded as inimical to it. Just as there are papers that describe and conceptualise adult learning in the service of personal aspirations, economic goals and employer interests there are those which contain criticism of those arrangements that threa…
The Palgrave International Handbook on Adult and Lifelong Education and Learning
An authentic and generous adult educator
Peter Jarvis, who died on 20 November 2018 aged 81, was not only founding co-editor of the International Journal of Lifelong Education, but a theorist of adult education and lifelong learning whose influence has been felt in every continent. Two years ago we were able to publish a special double issue on his work and contribution: although already ill, he was delighted to be presented with a copy, signed by all the contributors, at his 80th birth…
Economic theory, neoliberalism and the interests of educators
Critical commentary on education policy frequently resorts to the term ‘neoliberal’ to describe the influence of economic theory on the way we understand, measure and reform practices and institutions. This influence reaches a wide range of activities funded by governments such as health care, welfare, and public services in general. The appeal of economic theory to policymakers can be readily appreciated. As Edwards (2007) explains, governments …
Sociology (48 works) · Pedagogy (36 works) · Political science (36 works) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (26 works) · Adult education (25 works) · Psychology (23 works) · Lifelong learning (22 works) · Law (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Public relations (11 works)