Ed Ellis has kindly allowed us to reproduce a tribute to John which has has published on his substack.
Ed know and worked with John over many years. Ed joined the Northern College in 1980, eventually becoming the Vice Principal. We reproduce his tribute in its entirety below.
Remembering ... John Field
The obituaries and tributes to John Field, who died on 25th March 2024, speak of a dynamic and multi talented man whose life was gloriously lived. And they are right.
In a career devoted to the advancement of Life Long Learning much has been quite correctly written about John’s contribution to research, policy and internationalism.
His commitment to the University sector, his publication record and his participation in the major institutional pillars of the world of Continuing Education have also been suitably and loudly celebrated.
Not so much space has been given to his teaching or to his personal battles as a teacher, or indeed, to his formative experiences during the 1980s at the Northern College of Residential Adult Education. And yet much about John was forged in that extraordinary crucible. At that early stage in his career he lived in Sheffield, but his journey to work in Barnsley took him across a series of cultural, educational and psychosocial borders.
The Northern College during the 1980s was like no other educational establishment in the UK. To enter it as a student or as a teacher (with prior experience of formal education) was to be thrust into an apparently familiar setting, but one in which many of its major features had undergone the consequences of a paradigm shift - a shift that was both inspiring and (for some) extremely threatening. The lazy description of the College as the “Ruskin of the North”, with its unfortunate echoes of hierarchy and an implicit suggestion of the subordinate rank of a “Northern outpost” was both resisted and resented by John and by other staff members. Identity was something to be struggled over - even if it was a struggle between friends. Likewise it should be noted that during the early 80s the Northern College was neither exclusively a further education establishment nor exclusively a centre for higher education. At that time it was important that staff worked in a learning environment that did not recognise the formal and taken for granted distinction between FE and HE. This was of course a reflection of deeply held philosophical conviction and principle that subsequently set out the parameters of battles with the soon to be established Further Education Funding Council.
As a member of the College’s founding staff team, John played a pivotal role in the creation of a teaching and learning environment that was genuinely exceptional- his teaching and his reading lists for example were devised with the College’s collapse of the FE/HE barrier in mind. The staffs’ aim was to focus on the individual learner and not on arbitrary educational hierarchies- in John’s case, as we shall see, a very dangerous strategy. Nevertheless the strategy led to exceptional leaps in learning - leaps that were experienced not only by students but by staff too. Indeed, one of the extraordinary hallmarks of the College was that, particularly for a visitor, it was occasionally difficult to distinguish between staff and students when open discussion was underway. That “confusion” or ambiguity was a feature that John facilitated and enjoyed and moreover was a source of his oft referred to “wry smile”. But his “presence” was so much more than “that smile” - he had an imposing physique, a commanding voice and a booming if somewhat abbreviated laugh. His classes were cauldrons of energetic debate that he moved fast or slow according to the needs of the participants and the circumstances of their learning. He possessed a quick and sometimes cutting wit that was very effectively mobilised in both the classroom and in staff meetings, (the College did not possess a staff room - an artifice that was regarded as an unwarranted means of demarcating status).
His teaching, founded on philosophical conviction was both authoritative and malleable; it encouraged a response from students that celebrated oral and written exploration and experimentation; within the albeit necessary confines/limitations set by the need to declare teaching objectives, he promoted learning that was democratic, inclusive, participatory and exuberant; it was a style that was well suited to the Oxbridge tradition of Lecture/Seminar/Tutorial - a style that the College unashamedly appropriated; in his writing as well as in his comments on student/staff texts he absolutely loathed split infinitives and poor punctuation!
In the popular imagination, and in the local media as well as in professional circles, the College was either hopelessly tainted or alternatively much admired because of its political reputation. It was supported by local and national Trades Unions and owed its existence to support and funding from the South Yorkshire (and other) Labour Local Authorities. There was no doubt that it attracted a great deal of attention because of its support networks and its target student audiences. It was designed to address the needs of working class men and women, the organisations to which they belonged and the communities in which they were embedded. It extended its reach from the classroom into those very active organisations and communities.
In the context of the febrile politics of the 1980s the College was arguably an easy target for those who felt threatened by such activity. And so, when Her Majesty’s Inspectors descended on the College there was an expectation that it would be sorely tested. And so it was.
The HMI report on The Northern College was profoundly damaging, a tirade against the College’s mission, and most importantly, an extraordinarily shoddy and careless document. It took the College well over a decade to counter its accusations and to establish a nuanced and more accurate assessment of its work.
Among the many shortcomings of the Report was a paragraph that identified John’s teaching. His class was seen as flawed because it was tied to only one text, and moreover it was tied to a text that was academically inappropriate (HE) and ideologically biased (towards the left). The text in question was a standard text in HE and one regularly referenced in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. It was regarded as inappropriate because of the background of the College’s working class student constituency and because it had been selected, it was claimed, to advance ideological objectives. In fact it had been chosen by John to challenge his students and as such it was acknowledged as a remarkable “ask” for those adults who had left school at the earliest possible opportunity. The students relished the challenge and particularly relished John’s method of teaching it.
John’s teaching focussed on the learner’s stage of development and was always directed by the need to encourage critical thinking; his view was that all ideas must be subject to direct and relentlessly critical challenge. The text then was important but only as a vehicle that provided access, via critical scrutiny to “better” interpretation and understanding. In any event John’s teaching was always informed by reference to a wide range of texts and by multiple and diverse sources of information. Be that as it may, HMI chose to focus on the text and not on the pedagogy and in doing so they found a convenient way to wound both the tutor and his institution. It provided an illegitimate and shameful stick to beat the College and endorse a prejudicial view of its work. It is interesting to note that while the academic staff were incensed by the Report’s references to John’s work, John himself was sanguine. He had a remarkable ability to rise above conflict and I have no doubt that he saw HMI as a compromised profession despite its advocacy of its own independence and freedom from political interference. Of course Educational practices are always anchored in subterranean political currents and judgements, and assessments by HMI (and everyone else) are influenced by such currents and compromises. However as C. Wright Mills so perceptively observed, the question to ask of compromise is: compromise in whose favour?
The events described here are testament to John’s commitment to rigorous pedagogy; to his conscientious engagement with the political realities of education in the moment of its practice; to his determination to make progress with his own struggles, irrespective of their cost to reputation or career; to the significance for him of teaching in an organisation that pursued knowledge, understanding and social justice through the critical scrutiny of ideas; to the need to confront the challenges of teaching and learning even when those in positions of control and influence are unsympathetic; to the importance John attached to the development of mechanisms for the improvement of teaching in the face of the views of appointed critics whose judgements are arguably based on astonishingly unexamined prejudices.
John Field was an exemplary educator and a magnificent colleague. I have so many fond memories of him and will miss him enormously.
Leicester Vaughan College is very saddened to hear of the loss of John Field. John was a leading figure in the world of adult learning and of educational opportunity for all. He stood with us in the campaign against the closure of Leicester University's adult education provision, and supported the new Leicester Vaughan College from the start, including contributing to our Research Forum. We will remember him with admiration and affection as a champion of adult learning.
With Tom Schuller's approval and that of the editor of Convergence, Professor Peter Mayo, we reproduce here Tom's memories of John.
IN MEMORIAM
John Field (1949-2024)
The ‘Learning Professor’
Tom Schuller
John Field and I met as founding members of Warwick University’s Department of Continuing Education, in autumn 1985. John had both
substantial personal experience of adult education, as a mature student himselfand then with a 7-year spell as lecturer in economic and social history at Northern College, and a PhD in the subject which he had completed several years before. I had neither the personal experience nor the doctorate, but John never made any attempt to assert his better qualifications. He was to me, as to everyone else who worked with him, a rigorous but wholly sympathetic colleague.
John was a historian by training and by inclination. The training is clear: a degree in history from Portsmouth, then the PhD at Warwick combined with a professional job teaching history to adults. The doctorate was on training and unemployment in the first part of the 20th century (published as Learning through Labour: training, unemployment and the state, 1890-1939, Leeds University 1992), and this period continued to engage his attention: thirty years after the PhD he published a book on the same historical period, this time on work camps (Working Men’s Bodies: work camps in Britain, 1880-1939, Manchester University Press, 2013). Although for the bulk of his career his professional home was in the education of adults, he maintained a disciplinary historian’s eye.
His career took him to different parts of the United Kingdom. I’d guess there aren’t many academics who have worked in three of the four nations: after Warwick, John went to Bradford in the North of England, then across the sea to the University Ulster and eventually, after another spell at Warwick - this time as professor of lifelong learning – up to Scotland to the University of Stirling, where as well as holding a chair in lifelong learning he was the Deputy Principal for Research and Knowledge Transfer. I’m not sure what Wales did to miss out on his talents. In each case he was sensitive to the national or regional preoccupations. One thing common to all these locations is that they gave easy access to hills, or at least countryside, as John was a keen walker.
But his reach extended well beyond the UK. Indeed, possibly John’s single most outstanding characteristic was his pervasive internationalism. This was not the weary much-travelled cosmopolitan variety, but a genuine belief that we should understand other cultures and traditions. He was unusually (for an Englishman) proficient in German and French, and spent some time actually teaching in Cologne. He would constantly remind us, personally or at professional meetings, of these different perspectives, intellectual and political.There will be colleagues and friends in many different countries who are mourning his loss.
The list of John’s mainstream academic duties and positions is impressive. Positions on editorial boards, on advisory panels and on research assessment. reviews are too numerous to mention. I would just highlight John’s 5-year stint as a Governor of Newbattle Abbey in Scotland and his membership ofForesight groups in the UK and the EU. He acted as PhD examiner in some 30 universities – a remarkable tally; the news of his death brought immediate tributes from some of those whose theses he had examined, as a rigorous but entirely sympathetic scholar. He engaged extensively in policy forums and committees without ever losing his academic identity.
Work on social capital was one of the major themes of John’s writing. I enjoyed working with him and Stephen Baron as co-editors on an early book on the topic, published in 2001. John went on himself to write a very successful book on social capital, published in 2003 and translated into Italian and Turkish (and maybe other languages). It’s a sign of its success, and of its quality, that it was republished five years later in a fully revised edition. Many would regard it, in educational circles, as the standard work on the topic.
I was personally delighted to have John as member of the Inquiry into the Future of Lifelong Learning, sponsored by NIACE in 2008-10. John was always a perceptive and constructive member of the Inquiry, often contributing to the discussion with a slightly quizzical air but always with something that would give energy to the discussion. Similarly we worked together on the third UNESCO Global Review of Lifelong Education around 2015, where John’s international range of experience combined with his research expertise made him a very valuable participant.
John carried on his reading and writing up to his untimely death. He blog posted as The Learning Professor, a nice reaffirmation that each individual carries on learning, or should do so, whatever their status. Lately his communications were more often to do with rugby matches, on which he would offer commentary as rigorous and objective as his adult education scholarship. A generous, vigorous man who exemplified the value of lifelong learning.
As colleagues have said John was a leading figure in the world of adult learning. He was always a stimulating and supportive member of the Universities Association for Lifelong Learning (UALL) and his publications were widely and warmly cited by our members and conference speakers. We remember his multi-talented character and wide sphere of knowledge, and of course his indefatigable good humour.
I first met John Field when he was at Northern College and I was at the nearby Sheffield City Polytechnic, and we were working together to explore how we could better support adult learning. He was a regular visitor to my house in the early days of the miners strike where we had regular meetings to review and reflect on what was happening in our communities.
I kept in touch with him as he filled several roles; indeed I was one tor his successors at the University of Bradford. He was always active in adult learning forums both domestically and internationally, but more importantly he was a really supportive colleague who would question, critique and help, always with a wonderful cheeky grin. He was a colossus in our field of study and a person you always wanted around you and the shaper of many an academic career.
This is a really sad loss and we will all miss him
Geoff Layer, Formerly Vice Chancellor at the University of Wolverhampton
Ed Ellis has kindly allowed us to reproduce a tribute to John which has has published on his substack.
Ed know and worked with John over many years. Ed joined the Northern College in 1980, eventually becoming the Vice Principal. We reproduce his tribute in its entirety below.
Remembering ... John Field
The obituaries and tributes to John Field, who died on 25th March 2024, speak of a dynamic and multi talented man whose life was gloriously lived. And they are right.
In a career devoted to the advancement of Life Long Learning much has been quite correctly written about John’s contribution to research, policy and internationalism.
His commitment to the University sector, his publication record and his participation in the major institutional pillars of the world of Continuing Education have also been suitably and loudly celebrated.
Not so much space has been given to his teaching or to his personal battles as a teacher, or indeed, to his formative experiences during the 1980s at the Northern College of Residential Adult Education. And yet much about John was forged in that extraordinary crucible. At that early stage in his career he lived in Sheffield, but his journey to work in Barnsley took him across a series of cultural, educational and psychosocial borders.
The Northern College during the 1980s was like no other educational establishment in the UK. To enter it as a student or as a teacher (with prior experience of formal education) was to be thrust into an apparently familiar setting, but one in which many of its major features had undergone the consequences of a paradigm shift - a shift that was both inspiring and (for some) extremely threatening. The lazy description of the College as the “Ruskin of the North”, with its unfortunate echoes of hierarchy and an implicit suggestion of the subordinate rank of a “Northern outpost” was both resisted and resented by John and by other staff members. Identity was something to be struggled over - even if it was a struggle between friends. Likewise it should be noted that during the early 80s the Northern College was neither exclusively a further education establishment nor exclusively a centre for higher education. At that time it was important that staff worked in a learning environment that did not recognise the formal and taken for granted distinction between FE and HE. This was of course a reflection of deeply held philosophical conviction and principle that subsequently set out the parameters of battles with the soon to be established Further Education Funding Council.
As a member of the College’s founding staff team, John played a pivotal role in the creation of a teaching and learning environment that was genuinely exceptional- his teaching and his reading lists for example were devised with the College’s collapse of the FE/HE barrier in mind. The staffs’ aim was to focus on the individual learner and not on arbitrary educational hierarchies- in John’s case, as we shall see, a very dangerous strategy. Nevertheless the strategy led to exceptional leaps in learning - leaps that were experienced not only by students but by staff too. Indeed, one of the extraordinary hallmarks of the College was that, particularly for a visitor, it was occasionally difficult to distinguish between staff and students when open discussion was underway. That “confusion” or ambiguity was a feature that John facilitated and enjoyed and moreover was a source of his oft referred to “wry smile”. But his “presence” was so much more than “that smile” - he had an imposing physique, a commanding voice and a booming if somewhat abbreviated laugh. His classes were cauldrons of energetic debate that he moved fast or slow according to the needs of the participants and the circumstances of their learning. He possessed a quick and sometimes cutting wit that was very effectively mobilised in both the classroom and in staff meetings, (the College did not possess a staff room - an artifice that was regarded as an unwarranted means of demarcating status).
His teaching, founded on philosophical conviction was both authoritative and malleable; it encouraged a response from students that celebrated oral and written exploration and experimentation; within the albeit necessary confines/limitations set by the need to declare teaching objectives, he promoted learning that was democratic, inclusive, participatory and exuberant; it was a style that was well suited to the Oxbridge tradition of Lecture/Seminar/Tutorial - a style that the College unashamedly appropriated; in his writing as well as in his comments on student/staff texts he absolutely loathed split infinitives and poor punctuation!
In the popular imagination, and in the local media as well as in professional circles, the College was either hopelessly tainted or alternatively much admired because of its political reputation. It was supported by local and national Trades Unions and owed its existence to support and funding from the South Yorkshire (and other) Labour Local Authorities. There was no doubt that it attracted a great deal of attention because of its support networks and its target student audiences. It was designed to address the needs of working class men and women, the organisations to which they belonged and the communities in which they were embedded. It extended its reach from the classroom into those very active organisations and communities.
In the context of the febrile politics of the 1980s the College was arguably an easy target for those who felt threatened by such activity. And so, when Her Majesty’s Inspectors descended on the College there was an expectation that it would be sorely tested. And so it was.
The HMI report on The Northern College was profoundly damaging, a tirade against the College’s mission, and most importantly, an extraordinarily shoddy and careless document. It took the College well over a decade to counter its accusations and to establish a nuanced and more accurate assessment of its work.
Among the many shortcomings of the Report was a paragraph that identified John’s teaching. His class was seen as flawed because it was tied to only one text, and moreover it was tied to a text that was academically inappropriate (HE) and ideologically biased (towards the left). The text in question was a standard text in HE and one regularly referenced in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. It was regarded as inappropriate because of the background of the College’s working class student constituency and because it had been selected, it was claimed, to advance ideological objectives. In fact it had been chosen by John to challenge his students and as such it was acknowledged as a remarkable “ask” for those adults who had left school at the earliest possible opportunity. The students relished the challenge and particularly relished John’s method of teaching it.
John’s teaching focussed on the learner’s stage of development and was always directed by the need to encourage critical thinking; his view was that all ideas must be subject to direct and relentlessly critical challenge. The text then was important but only as a vehicle that provided access, via critical scrutiny to “better” interpretation and understanding. In any event John’s teaching was always informed by reference to a wide range of texts and by multiple and diverse sources of information. Be that as it may, HMI chose to focus on the text and not on the pedagogy and in doing so they found a convenient way to wound both the tutor and his institution. It provided an illegitimate and shameful stick to beat the College and endorse a prejudicial view of its work. It is interesting to note that while the academic staff were incensed by the Report’s references to John’s work, John himself was sanguine. He had a remarkable ability to rise above conflict and I have no doubt that he saw HMI as a compromised profession despite its advocacy of its own independence and freedom from political interference. Of course Educational practices are always anchored in subterranean political currents and judgements, and assessments by HMI (and everyone else) are influenced by such currents and compromises. However as C. Wright Mills so perceptively observed, the question to ask of compromise is: compromise in whose favour?
The events described here are testament to John’s commitment to rigorous pedagogy; to his conscientious engagement with the political realities of education in the moment of its practice; to his determination to make progress with his own struggles, irrespective of their cost to reputation or career; to the significance for him of teaching in an organisation that pursued knowledge, understanding and social justice through the critical scrutiny of ideas; to the need to confront the challenges of teaching and learning even when those in positions of control and influence are unsympathetic; to the importance John attached to the development of mechanisms for the improvement of teaching in the face of the views of appointed critics whose judgements are arguably based on astonishingly unexamined prejudices.
John Field was an exemplary educator and a magnificent colleague. I have so many fond memories of him and will miss him enormously.
Ed Ellis
Leicester Vaughan College is very saddened to hear of the loss of John Field. John was a leading figure in the world of adult learning and of educational opportunity for all. He stood with us in the campaign against the closure of Leicester University's adult education provision, and supported the new Leicester Vaughan College from the start, including contributing to our Research Forum. We will remember him with admiration and affection as a champion of adult learning.
With Tom Schuller's approval and that of the editor of Convergence, Professor Peter Mayo, we reproduce here Tom's memories of John.
IN MEMORIAM
John Field (1949-2024)
The ‘Learning Professor’
Tom Schuller
John Field and I met as founding members of Warwick University’s Department of Continuing Education, in autumn 1985. John had both
substantial personal experience of adult education, as a mature student himselfand then with a 7-year spell as lecturer in economic and social history at Northern College, and a PhD in the subject which he had completed several years before. I had neither the personal experience nor the doctorate, but John never made any attempt to assert his better qualifications. He was to me, as to everyone else who worked with him, a rigorous but wholly sympathetic colleague.
John was a historian by training and by inclination. The training is clear: a degree in history from Portsmouth, then the PhD at Warwick combined with a professional job teaching history to adults. The doctorate was on training and unemployment in the first part of the 20th century (published as Learning through Labour: training, unemployment and the state, 1890-1939, Leeds University 1992), and this period continued to engage his attention: thirty years after the PhD he published a book on the same historical period, this time on work camps (Working Men’s Bodies: work camps in Britain, 1880-1939, Manchester University Press, 2013). Although for the bulk of his career his professional home was in the education of adults, he maintained a disciplinary historian’s eye.
His career took him to different parts of the United Kingdom. I’d guess there aren’t many academics who have worked in three of the four nations: after Warwick, John went to Bradford in the North of England, then across the sea to the University Ulster and eventually, after another spell at Warwick - this time as professor of lifelong learning – up to Scotland to the University of Stirling, where as well as holding a chair in lifelong learning he was the Deputy Principal for Research and Knowledge Transfer. I’m not sure what Wales did to miss out on his talents. In each case he was sensitive to the national or regional preoccupations. One thing common to all these locations is that they gave easy access to hills, or at least countryside, as John was a keen walker.
But his reach extended well beyond the UK. Indeed, possibly John’s single most outstanding characteristic was his pervasive internationalism. This was not the weary much-travelled cosmopolitan variety, but a genuine belief that we should understand other cultures and traditions. He was unusually (for an Englishman) proficient in German and French, and spent some time actually teaching in Cologne. He would constantly remind us, personally or at professional meetings, of these different perspectives, intellectual and political.There will be colleagues and friends in many different countries who are mourning his loss.
The list of John’s mainstream academic duties and positions is impressive. Positions on editorial boards, on advisory panels and on research assessment. reviews are too numerous to mention. I would just highlight John’s 5-year stint as a Governor of Newbattle Abbey in Scotland and his membership ofForesight groups in the UK and the EU. He acted as PhD examiner in some 30 universities – a remarkable tally; the news of his death brought immediate tributes from some of those whose theses he had examined, as a rigorous but entirely sympathetic scholar. He engaged extensively in policy forums and committees without ever losing his academic identity.
Work on social capital was one of the major themes of John’s writing. I enjoyed working with him and Stephen Baron as co-editors on an early book on the topic, published in 2001. John went on himself to write a very successful book on social capital, published in 2003 and translated into Italian and Turkish (and maybe other languages). It’s a sign of its success, and of its quality, that it was republished five years later in a fully revised edition. Many would regard it, in educational circles, as the standard work on the topic.
I was personally delighted to have John as member of the Inquiry into the Future of Lifelong Learning, sponsored by NIACE in 2008-10. John was always a perceptive and constructive member of the Inquiry, often contributing to the discussion with a slightly quizzical air but always with something that would give energy to the discussion. Similarly we worked together on the third UNESCO Global Review of Lifelong Education around 2015, where John’s international range of experience combined with his research expertise made him a very valuable participant.
John carried on his reading and writing up to his untimely death. He blog posted as The Learning Professor, a nice reaffirmation that each individual carries on learning, or should do so, whatever their status. Lately his communications were more often to do with rugby matches, on which he would offer commentary as rigorous and objective as his adult education scholarship. A generous, vigorous man who exemplified the value of lifelong learning.
As colleagues have said John was a leading figure in the world of adult learning. He was always a stimulating and supportive member of the Universities Association for Lifelong Learning (UALL) and his publications were widely and warmly cited by our members and conference speakers. We remember his multi-talented character and wide sphere of knowledge, and of course his indefatigable good humour.
I first met John Field when he was at Northern College and I was at the nearby Sheffield City Polytechnic, and we were working together to explore how we could better support adult learning. He was a regular visitor to my house in the early days of the miners strike where we had regular meetings to review and reflect on what was happening in our communities.
I kept in touch with him as he filled several roles; indeed I was one tor his successors at the University of Bradford. He was always active in adult learning forums both domestically and internationally, but more importantly he was a really supportive colleague who would question, critique and help, always with a wonderful cheeky grin. He was a colossus in our field of study and a person you always wanted around you and the shaper of many an academic career.
This is a really sad loss and we will all miss him
Geoff Layer, Formerly Vice Chancellor at the University of Wolverhampton