Name Michael Newman | ||
Michael Newman (born 1939) is an Australian adult educator and author.
His most recent book is Teaching Defiance: Stories and Strategies for Activist Educators, published in 2006 by Jossey Bass, San Francisco. The by-line of the book reads “a book written in wartime”. Newman explains in a preamble that he started writing the book when the US, the UK and Australia were planning to invade Iraq, and that he finished it while foreign forces were still engaged in occupation and combat there.
Newman has written six books, and all in one way or another have examined teaching and learning in contexts of community, social and political action. Information about all his books can be found on his website. Three can be downloaded free of charge. Two of Newman's books have won the Cyril Houle Award for Outstanding Literature in Adult Education, awarded by the American Association of Adult and Continuing Education.
Newman started his working life as a journalist in Sydney. In the early 1960s he left for the UK where he tried his hand at acting, writing and film-making but found himself teaching adult education classes to stay alive, then setting adult education classes up, and then working for seven years as a community education worker in inner London. Towards the end of the 1970s he was appointed Warden of the Working Men’s College, an elderly (in adult education terms) institution set up in 1854 to provide a liberal education for working people. In 1982 Mike was invited back to Australia to head up the Sydney Workers’ Educational Association. He left the WEA to work for four years as a trainer with the Australian Trade Union Training Authority, and in 1989 took up a post as Senior Lecturer in Adult Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Technology, Sydney. He retired from UTS in 2001.