According to UNESCO (2013), two thirds of the 781 million adults who cannot read or write, are women. Post-school challenges such as women’s illiteracy due to interrupted schooling or lack of access to formal education systems remains a persistent issue in Africa, and in South Africa. South Africa has a history in which its discriminatory laws created environments that were not education friendly for the black races, and complicated their access to basic education.  Pre 1994 black children’s education was not government mandated. Many rural black children grew up illiterate because in rural areas government’s investment in education through providing facilities such as building schools, was almost non-existent.  The 2001 census showed that more than 14 million adults never completed their general education (Statistics South Africa, 2003; Rule 2006), while other sources (Aichinson, 2005; Baatjes, 2003; Statistics South Africa, 2003) state that more than 4.5 million of these adults never attended school  in their lifetime. When South Africa’s government of national unity came into power in 1994  Adult basic education became part of the educational discourse. Section 29(1(a)) of the South African constitution defends every citizen’s right to a basic education (Constitution, 1994), and adult basic education became part of the educational debate, as is evidenced by the Adult Basic Education and Training (2001) policy document, the White Paper of 1995, the National Education Policy Act of 1996 and the South African Qualifications Act of 1995.  The transformation of adult basic education was conceptualised with the illiterate adult in mind, which requires a social justice orientated theoretical positioning that links education to political accountability by the state. It would seem that the state’s redistributive response to adult basic education’s past marginalisation was to incorporate AET in the National Qualifications Framework (NQF), as a system parallel to basic education for children (DOE, 2000; DHET 2013). AET’s formalisation for the first time created the possibility for adult basic education students to experience educational continuity beyond the General Education and Training band.

Since South Africa became a constitutional democracy in 1994, its educational department  has focussed on educational transformation and access for the country’s educationally marginalised. However, research has mostly concentrated on formal educational access and inclusion of South Africa’s children. Limited educational research has been undertaken on the inclusion of marginalised adult learners, and the challenges embedded in their journeys to become literate. Though the majority of illiterate adults are black, it cannot be assumed that second chance black learners are a homogenous group with a shared educational history. In this presentation I engaged with second chance opportunity for three women students who did not complete their basic education. I sought to develop an explanation of the ways in which they navigated adult education and training in search of a general education and training certificate (GETC) in order to establish viable productive lives. Part of this account is an exploration of the networks within AET that made it possible for these adults to achieve educational success.

The study’s contexts are two public adult learning centres (PALCs) where the three women were enrolled as adult learners. By studying the women within the context of the PALCs I was able to enhance my understanding of the social practices that these adults engage with, to gain a basic education, and how these practices were being facilitated by strategic role players. Fataar (2008) notes that it is such observations that helps researchers understand what people become when they inhabit these spaces, as well as how individuals use social spaces and what they produce out of such spaces. The argument that I put forth, is that adult learners’ perceptions, knowledge and understandings are fashioned and moulded by the social and cultural environments that they are part of. My exploration of the three women’s life worlds allowed me to reflect on how advantage and disadvantage play out in their lives, and how such experiences influenced their childhood educational journeys then, and the journeys that they are now on, now. In an overwhelmingly patriarchal South African society, the stories that are told about women are often stripped of their agency. As a feminist researcher I am mindful of how experiences of inequality, discrimination, and marginalisation shape women’s experience in a patriarchal society. For this narrative inquiry I worked within a social constructivist paradigm (Mertens 2014; Creswell 2003) in my exploration of Karlien, Gabieba and Blanche’s educational journeys as vulnerable second chance learners,. These middle-aged women were enrolled for a General Education and Training certificate (GETC) in Adult Education and Training. I conducted semi-structured interviews with the women and their adult learning facilitators and engaged in non-participant observation at the PALC sites. My analysis of the data was informed by Intersectionality theory as I engage with race, class and gender as forms of oppression and discrimination that can overlap and intersect with one another (Crenshaw, 1989) when making sense of their childhood experiences with education as coloured girls growing up during apartheid. I bring into critical focus the ways in which the energies within AET contexts and their personal worlds come together to advance their quest for an education. The data was collected through semi-structured one-on-one interviews (Patton 2002) with the women, two educators and the PALC manager/educator. The primary question guiding this research was, “What are the stories of educational agency in the women’s stories about gaining the General Education and Training certificate?

My findings show that the socio-economic circumstances and migration patterns of the participants’ childhood home contexts served as debilitating factors in their experiences of education. Their struggles in school were not always the result of them being intellectually incapable; nor were they disinterested in their education; rather it was that their families’ socio-economic circumstances and their social class placed barriers in their way. The situational challenges of unemployment and poverty, and the families’ uncertain housing arrangements were major threats to their children’s education. Cultural and social capital accumulation under such circumstances was difficult because these students did not stay in one school long enough to get to know the context and establish social networks. As adult learners they were exercising their second chance opportunity to gain the GET certificate. In my analysis of their experiences within adult education, I found that there were many dispositional constraints that stem from disempowering childhood experiences. However, whereas formal schooling misrecognised their societal challenges, the AET social space embraced it. My experiences of the PALCs were of spaces that were supportive and emancipatory. The women experienced the spaces as non-threatening and their educators as supportive and encouraging them to complete their basic education. My findings confirm the agentic role of the PALC as represented by the AET culture, the facilitator actions and the pedagogical engagements. In this educational space, the community cultural wealth (Yosso 2005) that adult students had accumulated in their lives were mined and up valued through emancipatory pedagogies and actions by the educators. In AET they were inducted into a culture that promoted self-efficacy. In this type of environment the three adult students experienced success and found their educational purpose in life.

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