Talmadge C. Guy
Over the course of his forty-year career, Talmadge C. Guy pioneered adult education scholarship and practice in multiculturalism. His 1999 book, Providing Culturally Relevant Adult Education: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century, was a catalyst for raising awareness of multiculturalism’s absence from adult education and for advancing changes in practice as a result. Using contemporary conceptual frameworks in the 1990s, Guy launched culturally relevant teaching and learning practice when little research was available to assist adult educators working in diverse educational and learning environments.
Before his landmark book, Guy was already an influential adult education practitioner and leader. He served as deputy director of the Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC) in Gary, Indiana, in the 1970s, and in the 1980s as associate vice chancellor of adult and continuing education at the City Colleges of Chicago. During his tenure there, he created equitable opportunities in adult literacy and basic education for marginalized communities. Guy spent the last twenty-three years of his career on the faculty at the University of Georgia, where he redefined courses on the history and philosophy of adult education and multicultural issues in the field, critical media literacy and critical race theory in adult education.
Throughout his career, Guy’s work on multiculturalism has been his greatest contribution to the field of adult education. He exposed the field’s historical amnesia regarding the significant contributions of African Americans through research on Alain Locke, the American Association for Adult Education’s Bronze Booklets, and W.E.B. Dubois, and experiments with African American adult education. His research highlighted adult education’s complicity in sustaining a racist caste system in the United States. Collectively, his scholarship—which includes more than fifteen articles, three books, eleven book chapters, and seventy-five conference presentations—promoted the practice of multicultural adult education as an effective pedagogy for working in linguistic, ethnic, and racially diverse instructional environments. The impact of his book Providing Culturally Relevant Adult Education is evident in its being cited more than 1,500 times. It resonates still with adult educators and learners today.
As a practitioner, Guy led a curriculum innovation for adult literacy in Chicago and brought about city-wide change in adult basic education and literacy pedagogy. As an educator, at the university level in Georgia, his classes encouraged students to think critically. Using culturally relevant mentoring practices, he advised graduate students, who went on to become influential leaders in adult education. Many of his students were African Americans, resulting in diversification of the professoriate.
Through numerous leadership positions, including those with the University of Georgia’s College of Education Multicultural Council and the Athens-Clarke County School District Multicultural Initiative, Guy also influenced policies. His work directly impacted marginalized groups on campus and in the community, sparking institutional shifts evidenced by the creation of a graduate certificate in multicultural education. Through UNESCO-affiliated organizations and conferences, he also helped shape policy on an international scale.