Value commitment, social change, and personal narrative

Abstract

McLaren: Can you tell readers of the journal something about yourself as an educator and about the geographical context in which you operate? Mayo: I have for years been formally involved in education in a variety of ways. I was a school teacher for a number of years, having taught at Primary (elementary, in the United States), Secondary (junior high), Higher secondary (post 16, which is equivalent to the last two years of high school), trade school (vocational schools-read: alternative schools for those working class students who are "pushed out" of the mainstream academic system) and University levels (with my home department being in the University of Malta's Faculty of Education, but I have taught also in the same university's Department of Sociology). I was also exposed to some administrative experience, as coordinator of adult education programs in the Department of Education, and undertook graduate studies in Canada, both at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, and at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto. I wrote a Ph.D thesis in the latter institution's Department of Sociology in Education (now the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education) focusing on Gramsci, Freire, and Adult Education. My mentor there was David W Livingstone. The initial grounding for this work occurred during my Master's program at the University of Alberta, in the mid to later eighties, and this is an institution to which I returned a few years ago to teach a graduate course, "Adult Education and Social Change."