By Jo Lynch, long-time ACE Aotearoa Newsletter editor
Well, I’ve got old! It was nearly 50 years ago that I was going to meetings at the National Council of Adult Education (NCAE) at 192 Tinakori Road, Wellington. At the time I was the Women’s Advisory Officer at the Vocational Training Council, and my special interest was the informal ’Re-entry to the Workforce’ courses that were popping up at polytechnics and school adult education programmes all over the country. It was 1975, International Women’s Year, and many women were struggling to liberate themselves from what was then called suburban neurosis and get a job. They were also challenging the limited and low-paid employment opportunities available to women. The re-entry programmes were designed to give them the confidence to take the first steps for themselves. Community education, or adult education, has always been for the less privileged: take the WEAs, which were the first ACE
organisations in Aotearoa.

The first ACE Aotearoa newsletter I produced was the March 2005 issue. At the time the publication was all about what was happening within the organisation – meetings, and pieces on issues like the response to the government’s funding strategy. It always started with a reflective piece by one of the co-chairs.

After a while, a check with the TEC revealed that they would prefer a newsletter that told them about “what is going on out there”. Was funding making a difference? So, the newsletter became a vehicle for ACE provider- and ACE learner-stories. It also, I think for the first time, gave practitioners a chance to read about what providers were doing in other parts of the country. It became a vehicle for spreading information about new ideas and good practice. Stories about what ACE does best – changing lives.

The last issue I was responsible for was in March this year. When you compare the content with those earlier newsletters you can see how much the provision of ACE programmes has changed. In the early newsletters there were very few stories about Māori and Pacific Nations ACE programmes. In the March 2023 issue, there were five. It’s a sign of the times.

I can’t resist ending with a quote about Paulo Freire. In Wikipedia’s= entry, their section of Freire’s pedagogy begins with this:

There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the “practice of freedom”, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.

P.S. Retirement (finally) is great, but I wouldn’t have missed hearing all those amazing stories. Kia kaha ACE!