© Verein Orient Express

"There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives," poet, author, and activist Audre Lorde declared in her famous 1982 speech at Harvard University, referring to necessary alliances between struggles against sexism, racism, classism, and other forms of inequality. A few years later, U.S. lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality, capturing the interwoven nature of power relations. With this concept, she was able to highlight that Black women experience discrimination that they share neither with Black men nor white women and that cannot be reduced to either racism or sexism. She derived the concept of intersectionality as follows:

Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination

- Kimberlé Crenshaw                   

The recognition of mutual overlaps of power relations requires complex and differentiated analyses and counter-strategies. On the following pages, a brief presentation of three Erasmus+ projects will focus on possible intersectional perspectives in adult education. The learning center of the Viennese association Orient Express – Beratungs-, Bildungs- und Kulturinitiative für Frauen, which is involved in their implementation as project partner, takes its many years of experience in the field of basic education with educationally disadvantaged women as a starting point for its considerations.

Participants in basic education are usually affected by multiple discriminations (educational disadvantages, low economic resources, possibly precarious residence permits, experiences of racism, etc.), which mutually reinforce each other. In addition, many people have experienced war and flight in the recent past, which can have a negative impact on their mental and physical health.

Against this background, the question arises for adult education institutions working with persons with multiple disabilities, how the educational opportunities of persons in need of basic education can be improved through intersectional analyses and approaches. In this context, an emancipatory understanding of education is crucial, which puts the interests, the well-being, autonomous learning access, the resources and needs of the participants in the foreground.

Intersectionality: When Different Experiences of Discrimination Collide with Each Other

Of the three projects described on the following pages, EquALL(ING): EquALL(ING): Equality in Adult Education Lifelong Learning (Intersectionality and Gender) deals most directly with the concept of intersectionality. The two-year Erasmus+ project focuses on the interwoven forms of discrimination in the particular context of adult education. While intersectional theories and practices initially focused on gender, race and class, other social categories such as age, sexuality, dis/abilty etc. are increasingly being taken into account.

EquALL(ING) aims to share experiences in the field of gender equity at the European level and to formulate proposals on how to analyze and combat these disadvantages in adult education. In the coming months, it will also be a matter of identifying competencies of adult educators in the field of gender equality and intersectionality and of elaborating training approaches.

In the first phase of the project, discussion rounds were held (in Arabic or Dari in our learning center). From the experience of a feminist association, some all too familiar facts were confirmed: Women currently continue to have fewer educational opportunities globally than men. The probability of a (proper) school education is further reduced by economic disadvantages in the family. Care responsibilities for children and family members, as well as household chores, severely limit the time and energy that women can invest in their education. If a woman decides to migrate - for whatever reason - or is forced to flee as a result of war or persecution, she may face structural discrimination and racism in her new place of residence. An odyssey of visits to the authorities, bureaucratic hurdles, insults and verbal abuse as well as justified worries about her own future and that of her children have a detrimental effect on the learning situation; anyone who is mentally preoccupied with securing the immediate necessities of life cannot prioritize learning for perfectly understandable reasons. If the ability to concentrate is additionally limited by learning difficulties that might have been triggered by a variety of factors, such as massive educational disadvantage, negative school experiences, cognitive factors, but also violent experiences such as war, flight or trauma, for example, the language tests that are obligatory for many people become a distant prospect.

Furthermore, through the intersectional approach in the discussion rounds, we learned that some of the elderly women interviewed felt shame towards younger participants in view of their sometimes faster learning successes. Thus, despite the recognition that lifelong learning goals can be achieved, the category of age plays a certain role in social learning environments.

Although learning processes can involve great effort for educationally disadvantaged people, especially in the context of insecure life circumstances, many of the participants emphasized their voluntary commitment and appreciation of education and told us that they would like to have more everyday communication with people in German - statements that cannot be reconciled with the prevailing stereotypical discourses of "unwillingness to learn" and "refusal to integrate" among the participants. 

While on the one hand the project aims to identify commonalities with regard to (shared) experiences of marginalization and principles and guidelines for action for adult education that can be derived from them, this must by no means amount to generalizations. Neither "women" nor "migrants" nor "educationally disadvantaged women with a migration history" form a uniform group with regard to their needs and wishes for a successful educational path. In each person, experiences come together and resources are bundled in an individual way.

Inclusion in Basic Education from the Perspective of Disability Studies

While categories such as gender, race, class, and nationality have long been the focus of attention in intersectional approaches, disability has only recently been included as a marginalization axis. Indeed, people with disabilities face multiple risks, such as financial disadvantage, unemployment, and social exclusion, due in significant part to their limited participation in the formal and non-formal education system. Thus, adult education could be an important resource to increase the skills and quality of life of people with disabilities. Yet, only 10% of them take advantage of lifelong learning opportunities, which is half the participation rate of the general population at the EU level (Eurostat 2018). On closer inspection, this is also not at all surprising, as persons with disabilities face multiple organizational and spatial barriers.

Against this background, the project IEDA: Inclusive education: ensuring participation of persons with disabilities in non-formal adult education addresses the causes and consequences of these barriers in the field of non-formal adult education. The consortium is composed on the one hand of organizations working in the field of counselling persons with disabilities or in the development of assistive technology (AT), and on the other hand of adult education providers that will be trained in the inclusion of persons with disabilities.

The barriers that people with disabilities face in adult education institutions are as diverse and varied as there are forms of disability. They range from premises that are not or only partially accessible for people in wheelchairs or with visual impairments (lack of signage in Braille), to a lack of competencies and sensitization of adult educators, to the lack of use of assistive technology (AT). Assistive technology (AT) includes technical tools designed to facilitate the participation of people with disabilities in communication processes - i.e. hardware or software such as text-to-speech converters, computer peripherals adapted for people with physical disabilities, induction loops that facilitate indoor communication for people with hearing disabilities, to give just some examples.

By participating in this project, Orient Express aims to expand its competencies in terms of target group-specific educational offers and to increase the proportion of people with disabilities in basic education in the long term. At the same time, from our point of view as a migrant organization, this raises the question of future approaches to support people with, for example, visual or hearing impairment that did not grow up in a German-speaking environment. How can people with no or little school education be supported in their educational process, who may not have had the opportunity to learn sign language or Braille? What competencies do trainers in adult education and specifically in basic education need in order to take into account these intersections of experiences of discrimination and what alliances are needed to help shape innovative approaches here?

While the project aims at the inclusion of people with disabilities in basic education in the short and long term, the engagement with perspectives from disability studies however goes far beyond this and offers the opportunity to reflect more broadly about accessibility and inclusion in basic education and to provide important insights regarding participant-centeredness in general.

A Critical Understanding of  Resilience

Finally, the last project presented here, RESET: Building Resilience in Basic Education, addresses the issues of building resilience and self-care in basic education.

By anchoring resilience as a key competence in basic education, the project aims to broaden the scope of action of educators as well as participants according to their personal needs. The crucial question was how people with experiences of violence, intersectional discrimination and trauma (which are often related to experiences of war and flight) can find a safe place in basic education where they feel comfortable, can develop autonomous and self-determined learning strategies for themselves and can experience self-efficacy. Approaches and methods in this regard build on the existing resources and not on the supposed deficits of learners.

However, the project partner’s focus lies on a critical approach to the concept of resilience, which is currently on everyone's lips. Against the backdrop of intersectional discrimination, it must be clear that resilience does not mean accepting untenable conditions and adapting to them, but rather an appreciative attitude towards oneself and others, the strengthening of existing resources, self-determined learning processes and the development of a safe working atmosphere.

First and second language learners were deliberately targeted together with trainers. Thus, self-care practices are not only aimed at participants but also at basic trainers. In a virtual training we exchanged approaches and exercises in the field of self-care with about twenty course instructors from Germany, Italy, Austria and Greece. For those who want to remain committed, capable of relating and regulating in the often precarious adult education work and who want to be able to convey confidence to participants and offer them a safe space, should consider integrating strategies of demarcation and stress reduction into their personal everyday life.

Summary: Forging Broad Alliances Against Discrimination

Intersectional approaches have shown that social relationships do not emerge and exist in isolation from one another, but are interwoven. From the perspective of critical educational work, the question arises as to how the heterogeneous perspectives of persons subject to multiple discrimination can be taken up and integrated into the development of approaches and methods. In this context, the training and further education of basic educators, which could include these topics and questions, plays an important role: Practical knowledge about the effectiveness of asymmetrical power relations in society and the educational system; reflection on personal localizations and privileges and/or discriminations and their effects on the activity and self-image as a trainer; elaboration of self-determined learning processes instead of paternalism; orientation towards participants' resources instead of victimization, and many more. These efforts could envision a space "where different voices can share their realitites and be heard, but also an active integration of differences" (Ghai 2002).

Including an intersectional perspective in (adult) education, in any case, means forging alliances between different emancipatory efforts and people, initiatives and organizations that strive for the inclusion of women, people with migration histories, individuals facing educational disadvantages, persons with disabilities and diverse sexual identities, that are members of different age groups, etc. and creating synergies from their heterogeneous perspectives. 

Literature:

Audre Lorde (2021) Sister Outsider »Nicht Unterschiede lähmen uns, sondern Schweigen«. Dt. v. E. Bonné und M. Kraft, Hanser.

Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989): Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex, in: The University of Chicago Legal Forum 140, S. 139-167.

Anita Ghai (2002): Disabled Women: An Excluded Agenda of Indian Feminism, in: Hypatia, Vol. 17, No. 3, Feminism and Disability, Part 2, S. 49-66