ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is not the academy itself, but its porous edges and individuals’ understandings of their own educational strategies relative to those boundaries. Unlike other chapters in this volume, my research examines cultural values for post-secondary education within a community context rather than a specifi c institutional setting. The purpose of this study was to identify the ways in which local knowledge systems in a Nova Scotian working-class community have been used to negotiate educational credentials, expertise, and empowerment vis à vis post-secondary education. I ask: In what ways did residents of a coal-mining community perched on the headlands of Cape Breton Island make sense of their cooperative traditions of labor and learning in the face of an individualized, post-industrial knowledge economy?
