Local Volunteering, Adult Learning and Social Change in the Philippines: Everyday Learning, Everyday Literacies (Adult Learning, Literacy and Social Change)

Millora, Chris

ISBN 10: 135034561X / ISBN 13: 9781350345614

Published by Bloomsbury Academic, 2025

About this Item

Seller Inventory # V9781350345614

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Local Volunteering, Adult Learning and Social Change in the Philippines: Everyday Learning, Everyday Literacies (Adult Learning, Literacy and Social Change)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 135034561X
• ISBN 13: 9781350345614
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this book explores the learning and literacy dimensions of local volunteering for social change in the Philippines. It tells the story of youth and adult volunteers who experience vulnerabilities yet play central roles in local development efforts in housing and sexual health. Why do people who themselves experience vulnerability volunteer to help others? And what are their learning experiences in the process? In its unique application of a literacy lens to the study of volunteering, the book unravels how marginalised groups, often seen as ‘thankful receivers’, (re)use texts, words and labels to (re)define their roles in shaping social change and for whose benefit. Chris Millora provides an in-depth look into the volunteers’ everyday activities such as delivering community health classes, filling out donor forms and applying for government approvals. In doing so, this book reveals how volunteers’ voices and agency were constrained to fit a certain bureaucratic way of working. It offers powerful case studies on how global development agendas such as value-for-money, upskilling and professionalisation – through bureaucratic literacies – impact the experiences of volunteers at the grassroots level. Arguing that literacy and volunteering could enhance inequalities within groups, this book calls for a renewed focus on the role that power and identities play both in adult/youth literacy and volunteering research.

About the Authors

Chris Millora is Lecturer in Education at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, and Academic Associate with the UNESCO Chair in Adult Literacy and Learning for Social Transformation at the University of East Anglia, UK.

Anna Robinson-Pant is Professor of Education at the School of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of East Anglia, UK.

Alan Rogers was Visiting Professor at the University of East Anglia, UK and University of Nottingham, UK. He was a teacher, trainer and author in the field of adult education and international development with many years of experience working in Asia and Africa.