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Adult educators are often expected to fulfil a multitude of tasks: facilitate, inform, support, motivate, innovate. What can adult learning organisations do to support educators?

Adult educators seem to suffer from constant pressure. In the NGO sector, they tend to be project managers, therapists, financial directors and eventually also educators-joining different roles in one job position. It does not make their life easy. It does not make our life easy.

Following the discussion held at the workshop about well-being of adult educators at the gathering of the European Association for Education of Adults in Helsinki this June, I managed to collect a couple of interesting and informative insights about how adult educators see their well-being from individual and from the structural perspective, which I would like to share with the EPALE community.

First of all, the trouble of us all, including adult educators, is the pace of the development and the limited time we have. Being under constant flow of the activities, rush of life and rush at work, we tend to lose the focus on our well-being, we put it aside as a task which, among many, may wait. And it waits for long. Too long. Until we enter burnout and feel demotivated to work.

Second of all, we tend to have troubles with a ‘switch off’ button after work. It happens to be broken. Very often broken permanently. Adult educators are very often empaths,those who want to give, serve and support others and who get involved in personal challenges of the adult learners and their stories.hey happen to be multitasking ‘superheroes’, as it was named during the workshop. Acting in this way, we often lose the engagement borderlines and working hours limitations disabling us in stepping into the private life-with attention and focus it deserves. Empathy and wish to help everyone, stop us from closing down the stress cycle effectively and take care of ourselves properly. We keep producing hormones of stress nearly 24h/7. Then we wake up at 4 am with troubles to fall asleep again (unregulated stress hormones, especially cortisol, do this to us). We need to learn how to ‘leave’ this meaningful job and the responsibilities, and practice switching off to maintain our hearts and bodies in a good shape. 

Thirdly, adult educators, who happen to join together the multiple roles mentioned above, in most of the European countries suffer from precarious conditions of employment, where very often there is no financial stability with the ‘task - based’ contract employment. Adult education seems to be perceived as an ‘extremely flexible sector’ as it was said by one of the workshop participants, which in fact is a very nice way to name employment that is unpredictable, unstable and despite being a meaningful job, along with the high satisfaction brings frustration and fear.

What does not help either in maintaining well-being is the lack of recognition of the profession, both formally and in the society. While everyone knows who a school teacher is, not many understand the concept of an adult educator. Not many countries regulate this profession formally, either. In countries other than Scandinavian (to make it general), where the non-formal adult education has both structure and budget, in most of the countries the perception and understanding of adult education is limited to either academic teaching or to a vocational training of the unemployed. There is very limited or no mental space for cultivating the idea of lifelong learning of adults in practice (how many adults dare to take piano classes or participate in artistic workshop to support their skills, knowledge and personal development?). All these result is a limited idea about whom an adult educator in fact is.

More than that, adult educators feel a constant need to train themselves and develop skills, especially digital and related to technology, to stay up to date with the quality of their educative practices. Fair enough and wise, we would say, however, in the same time it is difficult to implement if the employment is precarious and the budgets very limited.

All of the above make it challenging for the educators to take care of their well-being, despite high commitment and sense making of their jobs. 

What would help the adult educators?

A monitored and ‘negotiated in dialogue’ workload of the adult educators, could be the first step. Since there is a high tendency to multitask and join different roles, employers as adult education institutions shall be open to hear, react and address what needs to be improved. A bit of occasional check up and a simple question on ‘How are you?’ and ‘How is the work going?’ would not be a bad idea either. Here enters an idea of collaborative educational leadership promoted by different structures and institutions on European level (like European Trade Union Committee for Education -ETUCE, European Association for Education of Adults- EAEA and Educational Leadership Network Europe - ELNE especially during European Education Leadership Week in February this year) as a way to work and lead in dialogue with educators 

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Further on, supportive supervision, a facilitated process of looking at difficulties at work with a dedicated and experienced expert would be helpful. A sense of feeling isolated and left alone with the troubles is a symptom of high stress - then having an opportunity to say things out loud, listen to different perspectives and interpretations broadens the view and leaves the feeling of not being alone. So if the management finds it hard to address particular challenges (in terms of time or idea), let the wisdom of the group and the experience of the supervisor work here instead. 

Such supportive monitoring measures may be undertaken along with additional training on empathy regulation and emotional regulation of those, who empathise ‘too much’ or with too high personal cost. Such training could include basic techniques of how to activate the ‘switch off’ button, how to manage stress and close a stress cycle effectively (not to wake up at 4 am), a couple of breathing techniques and could happen in a group of co-workers who could support each other with understanding and hints in the times of future struggles (giving additionally a supportive feeling of a community).

With all that interventions, reactions and improvements, taking care of the well-being on the individual level as well as on the institutional level, we may support adult educators in the most important aspect of their work-in reconnecting with their passion which eventually boosts their motivation for work and supports battery charging and burning of their inner sparkle.

End words

The workshop has been short but insightful. It gave us issues to reflect on, and it gave us ideas for solutions that are within reach of our hands. This is empowering, even if the 'to do list’ appears to be long.

Nevertheless, there is one more challenging aspect we shall all reflect about. 

In contemporary culture, we are constantly challenged by social and economic paradigm of productivity, performance measuring indicators and focus on income. This does not help us to focus on a person, individuality, seen as both the educator and the learner. This paradigm we need to address and modify - socially and culturally.

We need to modify it so that adult education institutions feel entitled, mandated and socially supported to implement well-being measures and procedures in their working structures, so that the well-being is monitored, considered and validated and the needs are addressed so that eventually, an educator in a good shape offers a quality, energy balanced and supportive service to the adult learner in need. 

At the end, we all want to live harmonious, meaningful, balanced and happy lives.

Anna Skocz, EAEA Board Member, International affairs officer and trainer in STOP