Confronting the Dilemmas: Accommodation and Resistance
This chapter explores the ways in which adult educators saw themselves as exercising agency, working with or against the thrust of policies and practices which they felt were not consistent with their values as professionals. Through the stories of four long standing adult educators it describes responses of accommodation or resistance and discusses how these different responses were linked to practitioners' past experience, their philosophical theoretical underpinnings, their assessment of the possibilities for manoeuvre within their work context and their view of the future. It suggests that the line between accommodation and resistance is not always easy to discern and that micro resistances are likely to be difficult to police, particularly for those who are newer to the field or whose practice is not firmly underpinned by theory.