Abstract
Although lifelong learning has become a catchphrase for government bureaucrats and policy makers in Canada and elsewhere (see Boshier 1998), their funding priorities continue to be restricted to institutions of higher education and ad hoc literacy programmes. The informal learning sphere has been both underfunded and neglected, despite the fact that most adults ‘are active learners, and very little of this learning is registered through specific education and training courses’ (Livingstone 1999, p. 68). Women, for instance, have traditionally pursued learning through craft organisations, suffrage and temperance movements, cooperative ventures, and libraries, along with state-sanctioned higher education . Informal routes continue to attract them, even though the types of learning venues may have changed. In recent times feminist nonprofit organisations have become popular public learning spaces for women. In order to document some of this informal learning, this chapter focuses directly on a qualitative study of 16 female employees and board members of such nonprofit organisations to explore how they have learned about feminist pedagogical practices, funding opportunities, grassroots organising, and leadership, and how to actively pursue a social change agenda.
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‘Higher education ’ is the term used in Canada to denote much post-compulsory education , including trades college, university, community college, nurses’ training etc.
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Acknowledgement
The author would like to acknowledge the research assistance of Nicole Woodman Harvey in carrying out this study. This study was supported by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council grant.
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English, L.M. (2011). Power, Resistance , and Informal pathways: Lifelong Learning in Feminist Nonprofit Organisations. In: Jackson, S., Malcolm, I., Thomas, K. (eds) Gendered Choices. Lifelong Learning Book Series, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0647-7_17
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