An examination of procedures for educational needs assessment of farmer education programs in the Department of Animal Production and Health in Sri Lanka reveals a lack of participation by adult learners in making decisions about needs, and is characterised by an experts' judgment approach. This study aims to examine the appropriateness of the Participatory Research approach for educational needs assessment in these farmer programs, and attempts to find a suitable way to implement it. The study found that the whole livestock extension system follows a "top-down" approach, and the existing farmers' educational needs assessment procedure of the Department of Animal Production and Health is not in accordance with adult education principles. Livestock educational programs which are conducted without the contribution of farmers' ideas to educational program planning, do not contribute to improving farmers' income and living standards.

Adult education plays an important role in the development of the labour force of every country and in raising the standard of life by providing adult learners with necessary skills and knowledge. It can be said that the effectiveness of an adult education system depends very much on the quality and quantity of its adult education teachers. To improve the effectiveness of a system, better training programs for adult educators are needed. The adult education system of Vietnam is not truly effective because adult educators are unable to meet the present requirement of administering and managing the adult education system including the teaching-learning process. There are many factors that affect the effectiveness of the adult education system and the lack of a formal training program at university level for adult educators is the most serious. This study examines the training of adult educators in Australia, especially the training program of the University of New England, focusing on the teaching-learning process, as well as the roles and competencies of adult educators, in order to make recommendations for Vietnam. The present situation of the training of adult educators in Vietnam is investigated through literature and the results of field work in Vietnam to arrive at a series of conclusions and recommendations for possible implementation in the near future. An outline for a short training program for adult educators in Vietnam is included as an appendix.

The following dialogue has been woven together after a few months of email exchanges with Margaret Somerville in 2002. This was a curious way to hold a discussion with a writer so interested in questions of embodiment and relationship to place. Without the nuances of faces and bodies to embody and represent writing/thoughts, the potential for missing meanings was heightened somewhat; over email, a 'huh?' could possibly last for days rather than seconds. But the mode of this exchange is significant in also illustrating the role of imagination and play in questions of embodiment and place. Both of these elements feature in Somerville's work Body/Landscape Journals (1999), a ficto-critical text which seeks to investigate what she calls a 'postcolonial practice of writing'; writing which both seeks and questions an embodied settler belonging in a (post)colonised landscape. B/L J follows two previously published collaborative texts, The Sun Dancin' (1994) with Marie Dundas, May Mead, Janet Robinson and Maureen Sulter, and Ingelba and the Five Black Matriarchs (1990) with Patsy Cohen, both collaborations (1) having had profound effects on the ways in which Somerville now chooses to write. In the discussion that follows, Somerville elaborates on her navigation through feminist, postcolonial and poststructuralist connections and disconnections, as well as her strategies for achieving an embodied sense of belonging in the Australian landscape.

This paper traces body lines in feminist poststructural research by identifying the conditions under which research into the lived body can be brought into discursive relation with contemporary theoretical formulations of the body. It begins by identifying the erasure of the corporeal body in the somatophobia of essentialism and the exclusive focus of poststructural research on the constitution of bodies in language. Potential methodologies for researching the lived body are suggested and the problems of phenomenological research identified. The theoretical conditions, methodological gestures, and analytical strategies for researching the body in body/place relations are explored in relation to the author's own work in Body/landscape journals (Somerville, 1999 ) and the work of other Australian researchers. These are brought together in relation to a small sample of the author's current research into safe bodies in the mining industry.

This research explores the implementation of an external quality assurance process with the people of Kulai Aboriginal Preschool. A participatory action research approach was used to examine the process. The impact of this quality assurance process on learning and change in the workplace was the focus of the study. Putting Children First: Quality Improvement and Accreditation System (NCAC 1993) was the initial impetus for organisational change at the preschool, however establishing trust and engaged relationships emerged as critical to meaning making and to changing workplace practices. Metaphors aided communication by bridging cultural boundaries and enacting transformations in thinking. Metaphor and quality assurance were seen as fluid terms, generating energy by moving between possible understandings. Meaning making comes about as a consequence of this movement. Data was collected through participant observations and interviews. This information was recorded using written and visual narrative forms. Maps enabled a macro and micro-analysis of participation in meaning making and organisational change in the context of this Aboriginal early childhood centre. This analysis brought alive the space-in-between, also known as the third space or m-i-n-d field where meaning making was found to occur. Maps enabled the visualisation of meaning making to occur as a consequence of shared action. Analysis of these maps illuminated the complexity of participation in the quality assurance process.

This study is an investigation of students' perceptions of their participation within the context of a joint educational development at Coffs Harbour Education Campus, which is a partnership between the North Coast Institute of TAFE, the Department of School Education (Senior College) and Southern Cross University. Joint developments are designed to provide potential benefits for students by sharing of joint facilities and access to a broader range of educational provision. The study shows, through a qualitative approach, how students perceive the Campus, rather than the planning and administration perspective of providers. It explores the major aspects of students' participation, and the framework is underpinned by what students themselves consider to be the significant issues. The aspects that emerge from the study relate to the physical presence of the campus, educational outcomes, social relationships and attitudes toward education. The potential benefits and concerns of students are discussed and whether this unique educational environment meets their needs. General recommendations and further research are suggested to assist planners in future joint development projects.

This article is based on research into the practical problem of masculinity and learning and practising safety in the mining industry. The research began with a post-structural analysis of gendered subjectivity in miners' yarns but argues that a concept of 'culture' is needed to elucidate a middle-level relationship between individual workers and the organisation. Concepts of 'culture', however, are problematic in this context because they have been used uncritically in organisational literature. The author explores the enactment of a concept of 'culture' through an ethnographic study of mine workers. It was found that workplace cultures are characterised by violence and aggression, risk taking, and competitiveness, which impact on learning and practising safety. In emergent understandings of culture in this study the author suggests that 'culture' can be reconceptualised in order to involve workers in their own cultural analysis and to articulate the relationship between the complex, collective, and contested nature of contemporary workplaces and the learning that takes place there. Such a cultural analysis enables the possibility of identifying sites of change and 'culture' as a concept that can be mobilised as a technology for workers to intervene in their own workplace practices.

The title of the conference suggested to me questions of (auto)biography, questions about the power of telling of our lives in relation to our research in adult learning and teaching. In this paper I will reflect on my own stories, and the stories of participants in two research projects, about transformations, to explore how we might re-generate research in adult learning and teaching. I will self consciously adopt a storytelling methodology for writing and presenting this paper as a potential (re)generative strategy. I will begin the paper with some memory work (Haug, 1987; Davies et al, forthcoming) of my own relationship to the field of adult learning and teaching and to the exclusionary practices of the discipline.

This paper arises from a research study that I have recently conducted into workplace learning in aged care workplaces in partnership with an organisation that manages a number of aged care facilities in rural and regional Australia. Twenty aged care workers were interviewed using semi-structured, conversational style interviews about how they learned to do their work. This included trainee entry level care workers who were also researched using discussion/focus groups and conversational interviews about the process of their workplace learning, tracking their learning experiences after one week, three months and eight months of full time work. This paper focuses on the findings from these trainee care workers. The study found that these trainee workers learned in the usual ways that have been documented in the workplace learning literature. The most powerful and resilient learning however, was learning the body, a process which could only occur during the process of doing their work in a community of practice. The paper will explore this body learning, its embedded nature, and how new learning is contested within this community of practice.

This study looks at critical issues connected with low farmer participation in agricultural extension in Sri Lanka. As an experienced agricultural extension worker, the author relies heavily on his personal experience and his colleagues' perceptions to explore the present situation of rural agricultural extension and research processes. The study attempts to generate new extension strategies to increase farmers' active participation in this regard. A review of the literature on participatory research and its applications in developing countries confirms the authors' perceptions. The theme of the study is 'participatory research' approaches to enable local people to share, enhance and analyse their knowledge of life experiences, to plan and to act for their own development. Case studies are used to investigate the applicability of the principles of participatory research to the Sri Lankan situation. The behaviour and attitudes of the agricultural extensionists and the researchers as facilitators, are crucial, in the satisfactory implementation of a participatory research approach. This research study reveals that there should be radical changes in the ways of approaching rural people in the processes of agricultural extension and research. Agricultural extension workers must facilitate humanist programs for rural farmers, involve them in design, delivery and decisions on rural agriculture development programs in Sri Lanka.