Socializing Higher Education for Sexual and Gender Minorities: Using Critically Progressive Education to Enhance Recognition and Accommodation

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has emphasized lifelong learning for all, spearheading various educational policy initiatives that expect the involvement of all sectors of education including higher education (Grace 2013; Milana 2012; Wildemeersch and Salling Olesen, 2012). Despite these initiatives, the notion has not been sufficiently translated into critically progressive education expressed as inclusive forms of lifelong and lifewide learning that interweave instrumental, social and cultural purposes. As I argue in my recent book Lifelong Learning as Critical Action (Grace 2013), globalization and the neoliberal tendency to prioritize instrumental learning over social and cultural learning have created a contemporary lifelong-learning paradigm that is limited in scope. As omnipresent and synchronous forces, neoliberalism and globalization have tapered our view of education and what it ought to encompass, shrinking parameters for using lifelong learning as a way to navigate life, learning and work contexts. This narrow modus operandi has been pervasive in higher education, where instrumental learning, pragmatically and decontextually shaping such notions as evidence-based practice, often dominates learning for social and cultural purposes. In this milieu, holistic learning for vulnerable populations—including sexual and gender minorities as a multivariate population across sexual, gender, ethnocultural and other relational differences—is often sidelined amid the commodification of higher learning. This reality raises issues and concerns regarding social inclusion, cohesion and justice for those undervalued and underserved in education and culture.