Working for Equality and Diversity in Adult and Community Learning: Leadership, Representation and Racialised ‘Outsiders Within’

Abstract

This article uses empirical material from a qualitative study of adult and community learning (ACL) to explore issues around leading for equality and diversity in educational organisations. What the author is interested in is the way that the commitment to a ‘community’ context in ACL opens up (or keeps open) certain possibilities for ‘diverse’ educational leaders because of the connection it draws between pedagogic practice and the politics of equality. By calling for a mainstreaming of political knowledge around unequal social relations, participants problematise notions of leadership currently circulating in education. Whilst homogenising tendencies in their accounts may be read as going against the very grain of contemporary debates around the recognition of ‘difference’ and diversity, they also pose significant challenges to neo-liberal imaginings of diversity.