Case study: adult learning and public health—a foundational training programme in field epidemiology with lessons and opportunities for collaboration

This article explores the first field epidemiology training programme(FETP) through a case study to understand its approach to learning andeducation. Field epidemiologists deploy to outbreaks to investigate, control,and prevent future epidemics and pandemics. Since the 1950s, theyhave learned their trade through FETP. FETP arose at a paradigmaticcrossroads, has endured for seventy years, and is now delivered in overninety countries. COVID-19 has highlighted the urgency for re-thinkinglearning in the health sector, hence the analysis of this case can informFETP, public health, and the adult education field. Inductive contentanalysis of this case using published accounts from the programmedesigner-leader and participants suggests the programme’s approach tolearning reflected Knowles’s andragogical assumptions, Kolb’s experientiallearning cycle, and Lave and Wenger’s legitimate peripheral participationin communities of practice. Alignment with such influentialcontributors to the field of adult learning clarifies the programme’s paradigmand explains its endurance. Now, given the lessons of COVID-19,critical learning approaches are needed to enable field epidemiologists toengage issues of culture and power as they investigate epidemics. Recentadult learning theories offer opportunities for adult educators to collaboratewith public health programmes. COVID-19 urges that we do nothesitate

Exploring the lives of women smallholder farmers in Papua New Guinea through a collaborative mixed methods approach

This paper analyzes the design, implementation, and challenges associated with mixing methods within a baseline study involving the collaboration of rural women smallholders and their families in three regions of Papua New Guinea. We first describe the context of the research and how the baseline study was conceptualized as part of a participatory research and development project designed to provide a rich collaborative learning exchange between participants and researchers. We explain how three qualitative participatory techniques used alongside a small-scale quantitative livelihoods survey to gain an understanding of the social, economic, and agricultural factors impacting upon the lives women smallholders and their families. We follow this with a critical discussion of the challenges and benefits of utilizing mixed methods in an international development contex

Making the best of life: aged women\u27s (re)constructions of life and learning

The oral histories of nine aged women provide the vehicle for this feminist poststmctural exploration of life-long learning in its formal, non-formal, informal and incidental modes. As personal nanativas are historically, culturally, socially and personally mediated, it becomes possible to see that the oral histories are at once individual and coUectiva. The women\u27s accounts illustrate that despite discourses providing competing and often contradictory subject positions, it is possible, indeed necessary, to speak as a rational, coherent self. I illustrate how this group of women (re)constmctad what I call \u27enabling fictions\u27. The poststmctural, multidisciplinary analysis consisted of four levels: the macro, the meso, the micro and the interactional. Through the macro analysis it was possible to locate the narratives in their cultural and historical time and place, revealing collective meanings as they relate to individual experience. The meso analysis drew on the personal level shedding light on individual values, interpretations and positioning. On the micro level, nanatives were examined for the subtleties of the telling, exploring emotions and voice in particular. Finally, the interactional analysis recognised that these nanatives were a product of the relationship between each of the women and myself. The poststmctural analysis of personal nanatives reveals that what events mean to a woman depends on her ways of interpreting her world from the discourses available to her at that given moment. I do not suggest that these women\u27s accounts illustrate \u27the\u27 women\u27s ways of learning, rather I argue that different discourses bring with them different ways of seeing one\u27s self and of speaking as a learner. As a result learning is seen not as a linear progression, but rather as a constant forming and re-forming situated within a particular discursive field. The nine women were able to utilise the discourses sunounding home and family to claim particular maternal competencies which they found to be transportable into their community activities. This group of women Ulustrate how it is possible to (re)constmct a subjectivity in a way that indeed \u27makes the best of life\u27