This article concerned with Lifelong Learning with a focus on seniors is from PIMA Bulletin 18, the whole of which can be found at this link [2].
My most recent writing, signaling deep professional and civic interest, is Addressing the global demoralization of education and society: Towards an informal lifelong education resolution to the experiential learning dilemma.
I first visited Chulalongkorn University (Chula) in Bangkok where I also met PIMA member Dr. Archanya Ratana-Ubol at a non-formal education conference in about 2003. At this time I started to develop a wider interest in sustainability studies in education and beyond, which is now central to my personal and civic as well as academic life and work. At this conference I also met Neil Anderson. A year later we both returned to present a paper with local relevance at Kon Khaen University in NE Thailand: The unfulfilled promise of lCT in education: Teacher education, new learning, and 'classrooms of the future’ in the Asia Pacific region.
Since then I have returned regularly to assist with main areas of expertise and interest – assisting through workshops, talks and mentoring with both postgraduates and also academic staff on strategies and techniques to assist the most effective designs for academic writing and inquiry. As outlined in a recent paper, Getting ‘lost’ doing academic research and writing?: Negotiating the four key ways and stages, this involves (a) the importance of a central focus problem and related outcome (especially in educational inquiry, action research and professional development) and (b) tools and methods to overcome what I call four ways and stages that academics often get lost when undertaking research or attempting academic writing.
On one such visit I noticed that Dr. Archanya’s unit had changed its name from a focus on ‘non- formal education’ to ‘lifelong education’, another long-term interest of mine also. This seemed problematic: some colleagues expressed frustration about dismissive comments about lifelong education often made by others from the Faculty of Education; and their own difficulty in responding to such comments. Specifically, it might be argued that teacher-based education should really be a Department in a Faculty of Lifelong Education and not the other way around. I found myself in discussion about better addressing the challenge of promoting lifelong education, informal learning and non-formal education in relation to formal models and practices of teaching and learning. Around this time I published a paper entitled Socrates learning Tai Chi: Cross-cultural communication and what China and the West can learn from the other in the 21st Century.
In 2015 I ran a course for Chula postgraduates in lifelong education and had regular mentoring sessions with other students and also staff. I used a ‘short and sweet’ concept paper model organized around three exemplary sections: global concept, local example, and critical discussion, to assist with refining PhD designs at every stage of the process and with producing papers. This linked to a related paper that I had been working on since the last visit, The eight pillars of a lifecycle model of lifelong education: Application to future learning societies. We decided to try to also connect this with a proposed book. It would use my model to exemplify how all the PhDs and academic staff in the Dept might fit in with and support a powerful collective demonstration for the relevance of lifelong education. This might simultaneously be relevant to ageing but also to young and increasingly modern Thai society in terms of a model which might also have cross-cultural and global relevance. The result was The eight pillars of lifelong education: Thailand studies, co-edited with Dr. Suwithida, with 27 by lifelong education postgraduates and also staff. This is also distributed by AsiaBooks in Thailand and beyond with Mary Martin.
I also collaborated on a paper with Dr. Archanya about the particular relevance of a lifelong education perspective to Thailand: as another ageing society in general, but also apropos the growing numbers of Thai seniors often struggling with a fast-changing world. Third age learning: Adapting the idea to a Thailand context of lifelong education’ was published in 2016 in theInternational Journal of Lifelong Education. With ‘later life learning’ being a pivot of my lifecycle model and also a key section of our book on lifelong education in Thailand, I also collaborated with Thomas Kuan from Singapore, whom I also met at Chula University lifelong education conferences and seminars over the years, on a paper about the critical importance of ‘life reviews’ in all lifelong learning, but especially in the later Third Age and Fourth Age stages. We produced a chapter together for the book titled Seniors lifelong learning, life reviews, and life-cycle completion.
More recently I joined with Thomas to assist another Thai University, Silpakorn in Nakhon Pathom, an initiative led by Dr. Jittra Makaphol, with a related aim. This is to set up a University of Third Age national networking centre using a locally relevant model to help support an emerging network of U3A centres across nearby provinces - and indeed it is hoped across the country. We discuss this in a chapter Seniors lifelong education vs. learning: A U3A formula for the Thailand context? in the upcoming book edited by Martin Formosa, The University of the Third Age and Active Ageing: European and Asia-Pacific Perspectives.
These fifteen years of working together across borders, cultures, systems and traditions have proved immensely stimulating and rewarding as ‘lifelong learning on the ground’. Long may it continue.