The Ideology of Access: Young Adult Experiences in Transition from Literacy and Basic Skills to Postsecondary Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Access to education remains a popular area of research, policy, and practice within adult education. Expanding the forms of educational access available and widening opportunities for adults to learn are both responses to crises in unemployment, housing, migration, pandemics, wealth disparity, and discrimination. Young, racialized, immigrant adults are often the target of these projects for educational access. Their experiences invite questions about the contradictions of human capital development as young adults enhance their knowledge, skills, and credentials but are still subject to the actualities of capitalism. I analyze the constitutive relations that organize the experience of educational access using anti-racist, Marxist, and feminist theories that draw from historical materialism. I consider educational access from the standpoint of young, immigrant, racialized adults in basic literacy programs who pursued a transition to postsecondary education in the Greater Toronto Area. Through their accounts, I argue that educational access is ideological. Access to education entails ideology as young adults are reduced to a fragmented consciousness and reproductive praxis in human capital development that maintains the social and material relations of class struggle. Using an anti-racist feminist methodology, I conducted semi-structured interviews with eight young adults and nine adult literacy workers, all engaged in seeking or facilitating educational access for transitions into postsecondary education and work. I walk through the journey of registering for, participating in, and exiting access programs from the standpoint of young adults to explicate the relations that organized their reproductive praxis, with special attention directed to the Canadian state. The neoliberal capitalist state, having formed in the complex of capitalist social relations, organized young adults to access education through ‘barrier-free’ participation that was promised to individuals through Canadian multiculturalism. Young adults were also subject to the state’s use of competency-based pedagogies and performance management tools, mediating young adults’ experiences in under-resourced, publicly funded adult learning. The work of young adults and adult educators embodied reproductive praxis as individuals considered going ‘back to school’ when educational access did not resolve the immediate contradictions of their lives. I conclude by considering a transformative praxis for educational access that is constitutive of class struggle.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".