European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults
The European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults (RELA) is a refereed academic journal creating a forum for the publication of critical research on adult education and learning. It has a particular focus on issues at stake for adult education and learning in Europe, as these emerge in connection with wider international and transnational dynamics and trends. Such a forum is important at a time when local and regional explorations of issues are often difficult to foreground across language barriers.
As RELA is an open access journal, this means that anyone who can access the Internet can freely download and read the journal. There are no commercial interests for Linköping University Electronic Press or the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA) in publishing the journal. There are no charges for publishing authors. The core idea of open access is that copyright remains with the author(s). However, we publish with the agreement of the author that if she or he decides later to publish the article elsewhere, that the publisher will be notified, prior to any acceptance, that the article has already been published by RELA. When publishing with RELA, it is with the agreement of the author that if they make their article available elsewhere on the internet (for example, on their own website or an institutional website), that they will do so by making a link to the article as published in RELA using the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number of the article and acknowledge in the text of the site that the article has been previously published in RELA.
Editorial: Rhythms, spaces, and times of transitional processes in adult education
Copyright (c) 2026 Sabine Schmidt-Lauff, Michel Alhadeff-Jones, Fadia Dakka, Silke Schreiber-Barsch https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2026 Fergal Finnegan, Maja Maksimovic, Diana Holmquist https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Brussels-based organisations doing policy advocacy through EU-funded projects
This paper examines how a Brussels-based NGO, the European Association for the Education of Adults (EAEA), engages in policy advocacy through less conventional and underexplored channels, such as participation in EU-funded projects and the cultivation of transnational networks. Empirical data were collected using network ethnography to map EAEA’s relationships through collaborative projects and to trace its funding sources between 2014 and 2024. Our findings indicate that EAEA has substantially increased its participation in EU-funded projects over the past decade, both as a coordinator and as a partner, often in collaboration with its ordinary and associate members. This shift reflects both a strategic emphasis on project acquisition and an increasing dependence on EU programmes. It further raises questions about autonomy and strategic direction. The study contributes to existing literature by exploring the role of project engagement as a vehicle for collaboration and policy advocacy among Brussels-based NGOs.
Copyright (c) 2026 Marcella Milana, Anthemis Raptopoulou https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Two researchers from the creative arts have come together in a conversational encounter to explore the educational legacy of Ann O’Donnell (1933-2019). O’Donnell was a jewellery designer, maker, entrepreneur and educator working in Leeds, UK during the late 1950s until 1993. During the time of O’Donnell’s employment in an art college, its archivists and librarians did not collect many papers, curricula or resources made by women educators, who often had part-time roles. This resulted in their contributions to the education field remaining invisible. In order to preserve O’Donnell’s legacy, conversations between the two researchers captured the pedagogic knowledge created by her experience and practice in creating a jewellery curriculum with her students. As O’Donnell was working at a significant time for the development of vocational qualifications in the UK (1970s-1990s) the conversation revealed O’Donnell’s pragmatism in interweaving a liberal and vocational education for the benefit of her students.
Copyright (c) 2026 Samantha Jane Broadhead, Frances https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Vocational education and training for adults in UNESCO’s CONFINTEA
How should Continuing Vocational Education and Training (CVET) serve society – as a tool for economic adaptation or as a site of transformative adult learning and democratic participation? This article critically examines CVET discourse across seven UNESCO International Conferences on Adult Education (CONFINTEA) (1949-2022). Based on critical analysis of seventeen key texts and informed by Freirean pedagogy, Lima and Guimarães’ policy framework, and Biesta’s critique of ‘learnification’, three patterns are identified. First, economic priorities consistently overshadow humanistic aims despite periodic rhetorical reaffirmations. Second, the shift from ‘adult education’ to ‘adult learning’ individualises responsibility, transferring costs from states and employers to learners while obscuring structural inequalities. Third, comprehensive policy frameworks coexist with implementation gaps, exposing CONFINTEA’s limited capacity to counter neoliberal restructuring. Governance has shifted from public responsibility (1949-1960) to normalised public-private partnerships (2022). Realising CVET’s transformative potential requires binding mechanisms, political-economic engagement, and democratic mobilisation beyond declaratory commitments.
Copyright (c) 2026 Ozan Koç, Gülden Akin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Dynamics of motivation of older adults in training programmes
While educational programmes for older adults are critical for active ageing, their effectiveness depends on deeply understanding participation drivers beyond simplistic lists of motives. This systematic review synthesises evidence on motivations and barriers, reconceptualising motivation as a dynamic process that evolves from initial impulse to sustained engagement. Following PRISMA guidelines, 31 empirical studies regarding adults aged 50+ were synthesised. A multidimensional framework analysed the temporal evolution and functional axes (instrumental, social, eudaimonic) of motivation. Participation is often initiated by pragmatic instrumental or cognitive goals. However, sustained engagement is driven by social connection and eudaimonic pursuits. Instrumental goals often act as gateways, while barriers encompass multi-layered personal, technological, and structural factors. Motivation is a dynamic journey of pragmatic adaptation and existential expansion. Programmes must challenge ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches, adopting flexible, person-centred ecosystems that attract learners with practical benefits while nurturing the evolving social goals crucial for well-being.
Copyright (c) 2025 Francisco Lucas Chinchilla Hernández, María González Blanco, Nelly Fortes González, Pilar Montañés Muro https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Temporalities and rhythms of identity transitions amongst second-career teachers
This article explores the professional identity transitions of second-career teachers (SCTs) through the temporal and rhythmic dimensions of narratives written during teacher education in French-speaking Switzerland. Based on a qualitative inductive-deductive analysis of eight experience-based narratives selected from a broader corpus, the study examines how SCTs make sense of career change and narratively configure continuity, rupture, overlap and transformation. The findings indicate that identity transitions involve changes in professional activities, skills and representations of self, teaching and learners. They also unfold through heterogeneous rhythms, ranging from gradual reorientations to abrupt turning points associated with personal, occupational or existential disruptions. The article argues that narrative writing constitutes a mediating space in which prior experiences are reinterpreted, legitimised and integrated into emerging teacher identities. It thus contributes to research on professional transitions by foregrounding temporality and rhythm as key analytical dimensions.
Copyright (c) 2026 Marcos Maldonado, Kristine Balslev, Margaux Chehab, Sandrine Cortessis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article argues for the urgent reorientation of Adult Learning and Education (ALE) from its dominant anthropocentric paradigm toward an ecocentric foundation. Adopting a critical and interdisciplinary approach, it engages with UNESCO global reports and prominent scholars from ALE and other fields of knowledge that highlight the need for fundamental shifts in educational paradigms. Drawing on environmental philosophy, decolonial thought, and ecological epistemologies, it interrogates the ontological and epistemological assumptions underpinning contemporary sociocultural and educational frameworks. Central to this discussion is the role of contemplative knowledge as a pathway to overcome disconnection, with attention to its assumptions, pedagogical approaches, and capacity to foster relational, embodied, and ecological awareness. The findings reveal emergent alternatives prioritising epistemic diversity, planetary well-being, and sustainability. By integrating contemplative practices with critical ecocentric perspectives, the article advocates a profound reimagining of ALE – one that transcends human exceptionalism, nurtures interconnectedness, and supports justice-oriented, sustainable, and resilient educational futures.
Copyright (c) 2026 Albertina Oliveira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Transitional and socioecological perspectives in adult education relating to the environment
This article is based on doctoral research conducted in the fields of environmental adult education and environmental geography as part of a participatory approach in the context of a territorial ‘sustainable development’ project. The framework elements of the qualitative case study in question situate the article and its proposed insights in the dialogical dynamics of the environmental way of knowing studied from an institutional discourse analysis perspective. A transcoding of statements occurs, which affects the participatory dynamics and engagement of the inhabitants-actors. The challenge of considering environmental temporalities highlights the formative temporalities relating to the environment and the emergence of an alternative agenda centred on the commons. Suggestions related to environmental adult education are made to establish a reference framework for the environmental transition currently underway.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jerome Lafitte https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Where institutional pathways are unclear, responses to sustainability transitions are largely individualised, marked by subjectivity and complexity, thereby placing the burden of navigating social change on individuals. This article argues that engaging with temporalities – particularly through rhythms and the practice of rhythmanalysis – offers valuable support for making sense of life-course transitions under uncertain and contested social change conditions. Drawing on biographical narratives with adults in professional transition, the paper examines how individuals connect personal life-course transitions to broader sustainability challenges. Using rhythms as a conceptual lens, the analysis and the subsequent discussion explore processes of sense-making, complex thinking, and engagement with wicked temporalities. This approach is advanced as a relevant resource for adult education in the context of rapid socio-ecological change. In doing so, the article contributes to ongoing debates on rethinking learning by expanding how the unfolding of lives can be framed and understood under complex and uncertain conditions.
Copyright (c) 2026 Elisa Thevenot https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Drawing on research into processes of individual emancipation in adult education, we examine how training may support transformative processes by establishing its own spatiotemporal dimension and bring into dialogue how French-speaking authors conceptualise emancipation, particularly within autoformation1. Training can operate as a secured spatiotemporal cocoon, aiding in regaining life control through transformative learning and anthropoformation. The study focusing on adults resuming higher education suggests utilising Galvani’s concept of kaïros2, Pineau's schizo-chrony, and Alhadeff-Jones's rhythmic approaches that emancipation addresses both spatial ('Where is my place?') and temporal ('What is my time?') questions. Within this secured spatiotemporal cocoon, learners reflect on experiences, addressing Mezirow's 'disorienting dilemma' and benefit from the gift of epoché. Engaging with training's rhythmic patterns, they redefine their present, constructing futures. We contend that educators’ role involves supporting transformation and emancipation while creating, maintaining, and defending this spatiotemporal cocoon. How might educators safeguard this transformative space?
Copyright (c) 2026 Magali Balayn Lelong https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
'The people need to be enlightened and taught'
This article explores the social, educational, and participatory practices during the revolutionary period in Portugal (1974-1976), a historical moment marked by a combination of political rupture and grassroots mobilisation. By focusing on four key initiatives – agrarian reform, popular education, the MFA’s Cultural Dynamization and Civic Action Campaign, and the Student Civic Service – this study sheds light on the diversity of popular educational experiences and social transformation movements of the time. It analyses how education and civic engagement were conceived and employed as tools for societal transformation. The results show that, during the revolutionary period, civil society, previously repressed under the dictatorship, played a crucial role in the democratisation of education. They also highlight the significant contribution of the popular classes and of popular education in the broader transformation of Portuguese society.
Copyright (c) 2026 Carla Vilhena, Luís Mota, António Fragoso https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Rhythmanalysis in times of climate catastrophe
This article explores the analytical and pedagogical potential of rhythmanalysis for interpreting contemporary socio-environmental crisis. Drawing primarily on Henri Lefebvre’s conception of rhythmanalysis, the study examines how systemic acceleration, work precarisation, educational disruption, and climate catastrophes can be understood as expressions of broader arrhythmic conditions characteristic of late modernity. Focusing on the Brazilian context, including the long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2024 floods in Rio Grande do Sul, the article highlights temporal asymmetries between rapid destruction and slow processes of reconstruction. By placing rhythmanalysis in dialogue with environmental education and adult education, it argues that education can cultivate critical rhythmic awareness capable of rendering crisis intelligible and fostering more just and sustainable forms of coexistence. Rather than proposing a closed model, the article advances a reflective approximation between these fields.
Copyright (c) 2026 Raizza da Costa Lopes, Samuel Lopes Pinheiro, Carlos Roberto da Silva Machado https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Public open spaces as arenas for learning
The paper examines public open spaces as sites of informal and transformative learning and engages with the frameworks of public pedagogy and the pedagogy of the unknowable. The study aims to understand how learning unfolds through unplanned, relational, affective and non-representational encounters with space, others and the self. Based on a qualitative case study conducted along the Path of Remembrance and Comradeship in Ljubljana (PATH), the paper analyses this urban memorial site as a multi-layered learning environment that evokes historical, symbolic and social dimensions. The findings suggest that such spaces not only harbour social interaction, but also actively shape reflective, critical and emotional learning processes that promote personal change and social awareness. By conceptualising the unknowable as a pedagogical condition, we foreground the unpredictability, openness and ambiguity inherent in learning in public open spaces and offer a conceptual rethinking of pedagogy beyond formal institutions.
Copyright (c) 2026 Meta Furlan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
For over two decades, quality has been a central and widely debated issue in lifelong learning. Drawing on a comparative study grounded in qualitative, reconstructive social research, this article examines organizational problems implementing quality development within adult education organisations. The analysis reveals two core problems: first, the organization’s own infrastructure can become an obstacle; second, quality development itself may generate new difficulties rather than solely resolving existing ones. The article reconstructs how adult education organizations navigate these problems in practice. By highlighting the interplay between quality initiatives and organizational structures, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of the complexities inherent in implementing quality development.
Copyright (c) 2026 Marlena Kilinc https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Experiences of stigma among adult learners in second-chance education
This article examines four life-histories from students who recently completed second-chance education at a Swedish folk high school, having previously left upper secondary school without full qualifications – an experience often associated with academic failure. Through their studies, they have now gained eligibility for further education. Their narratives – shaped by different explanations for their earlier difficulties – are analysed using Erving Goffman’s concept of stigma. The study highlights the varied ways individuals navigate school failure and departure from dominant educational norms. At the same time, their stories reflect pride in having forged alternative paths, particularly through labour market experiences. Using an educational life-history approach, the article explores how participants relate to their past school failure – retrospectively, in the present, and with regard to their futures. Particular attention is paid to how stigma tied to compulsory school failure influence their educational trajectories and how they position themselves as students.
Copyright (c) 2025 Samuel Raoufi-Kvist https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
'All the different routes we walk and the knowledge they can’t take away from us.’
The falsification of the results of the 2020 presidential election in Belarus produced a movement of peaceful civil disobedience and resistance. Civil activism furthered radical change embracing broad democratic participation and created new political subjects. Biographical interviews conducted with Aliaksandra, a young Belarusian adult, look at the learning situation of the individual and open a space in which the search for individual meaning-making in times of biographical transition can be heard. The interviews showcase interactions in time and space between an individual and her wider out-of-frame interactions, and on the effects of social and political conflict and crisis on her biographical narrative. The concept of ‘biographicity’ is employed to describe the dynamics of ongoing biographical learning, and Raymond Williams’ understanding of the processes of social transformation provides the theoretical backdrop of the transformation of lived lives in this paper.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rob Evans https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
‘... we scratch our heads; we look at each other... we come up with a solution and we have no idea who came up with the solution... probably all together...’
This paper investigates aspects of informal and non-formal learning that emerge through adults’ participation in collective actions and social movements. Drawing on qualitative data derived from interviews with members of social collectives in an urban area of Athens (Greece), the study illustrates how these spaces function as dynamic learning environments. Participants develop practical knowledge, social skills, critical awareness, and a deeper understanding of social issues. Moreover, engagement in collective actions also fosters emotional bonds, solidarity, and processes of personal transformation. The findings underline that learning is not confined to formal settings but emerges meaningfully through participation in civic life. The study highlights the pivotal role of collective action in promoting adult learning and self-awareness, contributing to the broader dialogue in the field of adult education by demonstrating how involvement in social groups constitutes a significant site for both individual and collective transformation.
Copyright (c) 2026 Eleni Giannakopoulou https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Empowerment, as a goal of adult education, seeks to support people to critically reflect on structural settings and to take constructive action towards social equality and social change. This article analyses empowerment and adult education from a micro-, meso-, and macro-level perspective. The key assumption is that these levels cannot be considered in isolation. Drawing on Freire (2014) and Sen (1993), the article outlines how empowerment can be fostered through adult education at each level, while also analysing the interdependencies between them. We propose a heuristic model that identifies seven characteristics for assessing the promotion of empowerment through adult education, providing a foundation for empirical research: (1) knowledge and abilities, (2) active agency, (3) cultural realities, (4) pedagogical self-conception, (5) dialogic spaces, (6) representation of interests, and (7) educational mandate.
Copyright (c) 2026 Julia Saam, Regina Egetenmeyer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The disorienting dilemma versus the event
We live in appalling times, in which it is almost impossible to remain hopeful; for radical adult educators, it is difficult to know what we should do in response. In this article, I draw on two theorists for possible inspiration. Jack Mezirow’s perspective transformation theory is one of the most widely used of all adult learning theories, but also continues to be critiqued as a theory of social change. Alain Badiou’s theory of the event has not as yet been considered within adult education. I consider whether and how these might help us think through our role in current times.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anne Harley https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Organising special education support in adult education
In municipal adult education (MAE), adults are offered a second chance to complete secondary or upper secondary studies. This article examines how special educational support was organised within MAE in a Swedish municipality, focusing on students’ needs, the learning environment, and the resources available to teachers. It highlights the diverse needs of adult learners and how the physical learning environment interacts with teachers’ interpretations of those needs. Actor-network theory (ANT) serves as the theoretical framework, with the concept of translation guiding the analysis. Semi-structured group interviews with teachers and special educational needs teachers were conducted repeatedly during the first year of a three-year project on special needs education. The findings identify three translations of support: pedagogic group-oriented collegial learning, special educational individual-oriented support, and health promotion in a student health team. The article discusses dilemmas related to who receives support, who provides it, and where it can occur.
Copyright (c) 2025 Susanne Severinsson, Henrik Lindqvist https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Superdiverse and multilingual, but still languageless
It is widely emphasized that there are existing gaps between parents who understand themselves as residents and parents who are positioned as immigrants or even ‘perpetual foreigners’. This qualitative study illustrates how unconscious and unintended raciolinguistic attitudes position some groups of parents and keep them excluded despite the programmatic idea of school-based parent cafés, legitimized by governmental strategies of better inclusion. The theories of raciolinguicism and monolingual habitus are further explored to understand intertwined mechanisms of creating groups. The analysis was planned and carried out using the Grounded Theory based on interviews. As the main findings, it is argued that German is understood as the language that leaves parents with another first language languageless with no or just limited communication skills. In certain school-related contexts, the monolingual habitus of German can be replaced by another dominant language. The study also showcases the phenomenon of (self)othering that can occur unintendedly in parent cafés.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alexei Medvedev, Anke Grotlüschen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Mini-quiz as a teaching model to support adult learners in their mathematics studies
Teachers from Municipality Adult Education (MAE) have identified a need for hands-on teaching models supporting students in organising their studies, strengthening their self-regulation, and determining whether they are on track with the mathematical content taught. In this action research project, a team of researchers and experienced teachers in MAE explore a teaching model called mini-quiz. The model contains weekly automatically corrected digital multiple-choice quizzes with immediate feedback. Through semi-structured interviews with 30 students, mini-quiz was evaluated by examining students’ views on its use. The analysis, following thematic analysis, identified three main themes: Support for monitoring and evaluation, Support for planning, and Support for responsive teaching. The findings suggest that mini-quizzes increase students’ self-efficacy, help them confirm their understanding and plan their studies. Mini-quizzes also provide teachers with valuable insights to adapt their teaching at individual and group levels early, a factor important in complex educational settings like MAE.
Copyright (c) 2026 Annika Pettersson, Daniel Eliasson, Ibolya Harsanyine, Marina Lindqvist, Emine Miftari, Yvonne Liljekvist https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Swedish adult education policy and the world of work
Public policies in adult education have been shaped by two generations of human capital influence, each reflecting different assumptions about the relationship between education and the economy. While the first generation, emerging in the post-war decades, has received little scholarly critique, the second has faced extensive criticism for its neoliberal orientation. Tracing these lines of thought internationally, we emphasise the need for a broader historical-institutional perspective to understand what was at stake and why the world of work remains a central component of contemporary Adult Learning and Education (ALE) policy. Using historical institutionalism and the concept of pressure points, we analyse Swedish adult education policy from the late 1950s onward. We show how its adult education system, shaped by both economic and social demands, emerged and has remained largely intact despite grand societal changes and political shifts. At the same time, evolving policies have paved the way for private providers within welfare services, hybridising the Swedish welfare-state-model.
Copyright (c) 2025 Erik Nylander, Kjell Rubenson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The role of learning and education in trade union efforts to organise young and precarious workers
Due to increasing precarisation, trade unions face challenges of organising young and precarious workers. Although research informs of innovative union strategies in this regard, there is a gap in understanding the role of learning and education in trade union efforts to organise young and precarious workers. This paper addresses this gap by drawing on industrial relations and adult education scholarship to examine a case study of innovative strategies of the Trade Union Youth Plus (TUYP) that has since 2011 operated in Slovenia. Findings show that dialogical approaches to education played a crucial role in the establishment and development of TUYP and its innovative proactive fieldwork and communication tactics, which increased unions’ dialogical capacity to engage with, organise and unionise young and precarious workers, and ultimately also led to the transfer of knowledge from TUYP to the wider trade union movement. The article shows that dialogical approaches to education are a necessary prerequisite for organising and unionising young and precarious workers and for revitalising trade union organisations.
Copyright (c) 2025 Barbara Samaluk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This study investigates continuing vocational education and training (CVET) in three institutional contexts: Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Drawing on PIAAC Cycle 1’s unique questions and transparency, we analyse institutional regimes and socio-economic gradients in CVET participation. Barriers to and engagement in CVET is embedded in educational, labour market, and welfare state institutions. Results show that Sweden’s universal-collectivist regime fosters the highest participation with minimal disparities, while Germany’s corporatist regime shows lower participation and higher stratification. The UK’s liberal-individualist model exhibits moderate participation but sharp socio-economic inequalities, emphasising financial and employer-related barriers. Resource constraints such as time and money are prominent barriers across institutional contexts. Our exploratory measurement of CVET interest opens pathways for future research that was not thought possible with existing PIAAC data. These findings contribute to long-term institutional analysis and theory, and inform policy interventions to reduce barriers, increase interest, and support disadvantaged groups.
Copyright (c) 2026 Nate Breznau, Dr. Offerhaus https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Empirical research on motivation in adult education and learning
This scoping review maps empirical research on motivation in adult education and learning, analysing 95 studies published between 1971 and 2024. Drawing on data from Web of Science and Scopus databases, it delineates key thematic areas, geographical patterns, and methodological orientations. The findings highlight a marked increase in publications since 2016, with a pronounced focus on specific learner populations – including non-traditional students, low-skilled adults, and second-chance learners in adult basic education. Research activity is heavily concentrated in European and Anglophone contexts, pointing to the need for broader cultural representation. While quantitative methods dominate, many studies employ instruments lacking validation. Notable gaps emerge in the use of mixed-methods and longitudinal designs. Overall, the review calls for more inclusive and methodologically robust inquiry to deepen our understanding of adult learner motivation across diverse educational landscapes.
Copyright (c) 2025 Michaela Bílá, Jan Kalenda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The article examines the concept of competences from a critical perspective. The authors begin with an analysis of the dominant competences discourse, highlighting its limitations in times of polycrises. They propose the concept of wild competences, acquired through collective actions. These competences are both individual and collective in nature. Unlike traditional competences focused on adaptation within neoliberal frameworks, wild competences are subversive, enabling social actors to destabilise hierarchies, challenge the status quo, and initiate transformative actions. The analysis explores three aspects of wild competences: their foundation for reflexive action, their role in the laboratory of emancipation, and their contribution to reconstructing social orders. Wild competences thus provide alternative pathways for societal change and democratic engagement.
Copyright (c) 2025 Przemyslaw Szczygiel, Piotr Kowzan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
‘For all, by all, with all’: Directors and programme planners as co-creators of racism-critical organisational development in adult education
This article analyses how directors and programme planners at the German Volkshochschule (adult education centre) support racism-critical organisational development. The data is interpreted with qualitative content analysis and based on five interviews conducted with directors and program planners within one Volkshochschule. In order to research the potential avenues of support, the article employs a theoretical framework based on racism-critical leadership approaches. The article argues that through an interplay of leadership characteristics and leadership actions two forms of support empirically emerge: (1) an organisational guiding principle of education for all, by all and with all and (2) a community-driven programme planning challenging the programme planning table and making communities to curators of their own learning pathways. The findings indicate the central role of directors and programme planners in racism-critical organisational development processes and underscore the necessity of continuous organisational self-critique to address racism.
Copyright (c) 2025 Jennifer Danquah, Regina Egetenmeyer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Pathways into the profession of older adult educator in the non-formal education sector
This article addresses the underexplored issue of professional trajectories among educators of older adults within Poland’s non-formal education sector. Based on a qualitative analysis of 17 in-depth interviews, three distinct entry models into the profession were identified: adaptive, pragmatic, and mission-driven. The trajectories of the educators proved to be diverse, non-linear, and often shaped by external factors, chance events, or personal experiences, rather than long-term career planning. The study also highlights the absence of formal qualifications, fragmented institutional support, irregular employment conditions, and ambivalences regarding professional identity. It expands the existing knowledge about this group and points to the need for establishing frameworks of support, training systems, and formal recognition of this profession within educational policy, particularly in the context of an aging society.
Copyright (c) 2025 Agnieszka Konieczna https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Quality management in its relation to professionalisation revisited
This paper revisits a theoretical paper on quality published in the adult education journal RELA in 2011. It analyses the relationship between quality management and professionalisation in Germany, drawing on empirical studies conducted after 2011. The diverse and sometimes ambivalent results demonstrate that there is still a conflation of quality management and professionalisation, with the latter occasionally taking a dominant position. Nevertheless, bridges and mutual benefits between both logics are also observed. One significant finding is that the landscape of quality management is not solely determined by external forces such as policies and other professions. The role of trained educators is also crucial and perhaps relatively more important than other professions and disciplines.
Copyright (c) 2025 Bernd Käpplinger https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Turning prisons into a place for learning
This study investigates the organisation of adult education in Swedish prisons and examines how education is integrated into a highly regimented environment. Using documents as empirical data, the study applies template analysis and the theory of practice architecture to explore the conditions shaping education in prison. The findings show that security concerns impede students’ learning opportunities and development of digital literacy. In addition, due to a lack of resources, prisoners’ right to education becomes conditioned, with some individuals excluded from participation. At the same time, efforts are made to turn the prison into an educational space through design choices, employment of non-prison staff, and language use. Furthermore, participation in education has recently been linked to the opportunity for parole. This has the potential to increase participation and completion rates through coercion, thus increasingly embedding education into the system of control and sanctions that is inherent in prisons.
Copyright (c) 2025 Kiki Maleika Qiu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Joke Vandenabeele, Silke Schreiber-Barsch, Fergal Finnegan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The tension between education and emancipation is a recurrent theme in educational philosophy but remains comparatively neglected in critical educational gerontology (CEG). CEG is a philosophical strand in older adult education aiming at the social emancipation of older learners. CEG links radical emancipation to the outcome of raising older learners’ presumed naïve consciousness with the help of an enlightened teacher. In this essay, we argue that the logic of radical social emancipation features theoretical contradictions at its roots, which translate into empirical ambiguities when employed to raise older learners’ consciousness. We address two problems: (1) older learners’ naïve consciousness and (2) its subsequent dependence on teachers’ critical consciousness. To solve these problems, we propose Jacques Rancière’s logic of educational emancipation, focusing on the individual’s capacity to learn by presuming intellectual equality as a pre-condition for learning rather than an outcome as with CEG. By treating this perspective in older adult education, we hope to emancipate CEG itself by refocusing its scope primarily on the educational realm.
Copyright (c) 2025 Hugo-Henrik Hachem, Marvin Formosa, Johannes Westberg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper addresses the processes involved in the Europeanisation of adult education, with a particular focus on the limitations of EU policies aimed at increasing adult participation in education and learning. Mobilising relational, multidimensional Europeanisation perspectives as tools for understanding, the research is methodologically supported by the analysis and discussion of documentary and statistical data. The Portuguese case study illustrates the emergence of dual Europeanisation processes in education through national policy options, trajectories and outcomes. This study offers new insights into the role of national contexts in influencing the evolution of European policies. It elucidates the ways in which EU guidelines are either absorbed or accommodated, as well as instances of transformation, inertia or retrenchment in the pursuit of European targets for adult participation in education across member states. This analysis sheds light on shortcomings of outcomes achieved in about two decades of (rhetorical?) construction of European adult education policy.
Copyright (c) 2025 Fátima Antunes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The self-positioning strategies of adult learners in relation to family narratives
The aim of this study was to identify how young adults position themselves in relation to family stories for better understanding the dynamics of continuity and discontinuity in the process of becoming adults. The qualitative research was conducted in Poland. Author’s family narrative sheet was used for data collection. A total of 54 participants aged 19 to 25 were enrolled. Three types of family narratives were recalled by participants, which correspond to the levels in the ecological systems model by Robyn Fivush and Natalie Merrill. Four strategies of self-positioning towards them were identified: construction, co-construction, negotiation, and rejection. The results could be used to support families in deepening relationships through encouraging storytelling. On the other hand, they could help in avoiding idealization of family storytelling and the recognition of young adults’ freedom to re-position themselves towards family stories, myths and legends in order to build their own ideas, values, identities.
Copyright (c) 2025 Emilia Mazurek https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Promoting learning in the rescue department
The modern digitalised workplace requires continuous learning to maintain the skills and knowledge required for civil protection work. The purpose of this study is to identify the primary factors that enable learning in the rescue department. Data was collected in semi-structured interviews with firefighters and fire officers from a Finnish rescue department. The results of the study show that peer support and learning preference are valued across organisational ranks. Technology has a crucial role as it disrupts workflows and necessitates new work requirements, while serving as a tool in social interactions, learning and knowledge management. The findings contribute to research on workplace learning through the development of communities of practice for civil protection workers, emphasising the need for collaboration and adaptive strategies for learning in the workplace.
Copyright (c) 2025 Filip Sever https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Struggles of highly educated adult immigrants as identity negotiations through Finnish language learning
This article aims to advance a critical understanding of language learning and identity negotiations among adult immigrants. Through Bonny Norton’s (2013) theoretical lens of ‘identity as a site of struggle’, we argue that immigrants often find themselves in contradictory positions assigned through unequal power relations because of their inadequacy in using the local language. Using narrative positioning analysis, we explore the ways in which highly educated adult immigrants in Finland negotiate their identities through Finnish language learning. Our data consists of initial interviews from a longitudinal study with seven adult immigrants who participated in Finnish Integration Training. Our findings show how the acts of identity negotiations referred to three specific types of ‘struggles’: struggle for recognition of competence; resistance against immigrant stereotypes; and the balancing act of parenthood in a multilingual context. These negotiations highlight difficulties and inequalities adult immigrants face, but also their empowerment through language learning.
Copyright (c) 2025 Paulina Beatriz Chavez Rodriguez, Ulpukka Isopahkala-Bouret, Tero Järvinen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Carving space to learn for sustainable futures
This article addresses the pressing need to reimagine education for sustainable futures amidst the socioecological crises of our time. Grounded in the recognition of modernity as profoundly alienating and unsustainable, we argue for an education informed by theory, critical pedagogies and critical sustainability research. Through an example from our own teaching practice, where we focused on pace, place, connections and modes of engagement, we demonstrate how adult educators can draw on theory to deliberately shape teaching. Highlighting the unsustainability of social acceleration, we encourage educators to slow down and carve out a space for profound engagement with sustainability. Drawing on diverse theoretical frameworks, we propose an approach that cultivates a sense of embeddedness in place and connection to oneself, others and the natural world. Finally, we argue that education for sustainable futures necessitates a departure from modernist paradigms, inviting educators to envision transformative pedagogies that foster critical awareness and societal change.
Copyright (c) 2024 Diana Holmqvist, Filippa Millenberg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Predicting drop-out during initial training among volunteer firefighters
This article looks at the drop-out rate among volunteer firefighters during their initial training. It is based on data collected in France. It uses a mixed approach to identify profiles likely to leave their commitment quickly during initial training. Profile data from 330 individuals still in employment and 42 dropouts were used. The results show that women, individuals with prior knowledge of the environment, and city dwellers are more likely to drop out, while individuals from advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds will continue their involvement. Adjustments in communication, environmental management and mission specialisation could help retain volunteers and limit the risk of early drop-out. This study addresses a particularly important issue at a time when the recruitment of volunteer firefighters is posing significant challenges around the world.
Copyright (c) 2025 Pauline Born https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
We have reached the logical end of modernity as it lays waste to the natural world, discards people, and reveals its inherent and thus continual violence. Withdrawing our energy from and breaking down the constellation of modern beliefs, we can repattern ourselves and our communities for a life-giving future. In its structure and content, this article demonstrates a relationality approach to sustainability and climate education that undertakes practices to emplace humans back within the living world. Indigenous philosophies of place as well as posthumanism offer relational notions of time, space, place, and land to consider. Pedagogy-rich, the article provides practices for: restoring the history of modernity as a decolonial counternarrative; composting the most problematic beliefs and practices of modernity; providing tracings of and for possible futures; deriving pedagogical entry points of relevance to learners; and nurturing ways of being that can build a rooted, more life-giving way of being.
Copyright (c) 2024 Elizabeth Lange https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper presents a critical literature review on the systemic interconnections between ageing, learning, and care. Using the lenses of complexity and interdisciplinarity, we analysed a sample of 62 papers published between 2003 and 2022, examining their reference to micro, meso and/or macro levels, theoretical depth, and use of complexity as a sensitizing concept to understand implications for learning and transformation as structural features of an ageing society. Our analysis highlighted the role of different settings of care (formal, informal, and technology-mediated) in shaping, enhancing, or hindering meaning, well-being, and social justice for older learners and their caregivers, and the implications for society at large. Findings suggest a gap in the examined literature regarding the use of complexity theories to highlight self-organisation, interdependence, and co-evolution of individual and systemic learning. A theoretical interdisciplinary framework, we contend, would better mirror the multiple factors and levels entailed in the process of ageing.
Copyright (c) 2024 Laura Formenti, Davide Cino, Francesca Loberto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Barbara Merrill, Andrea Galimberti, António Fragoso https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This study seeks to investigate the potential evolution of education when integrated with place, addressing socio-ecological degeneration. Special attention is given to art education, which not only views places as learning locations but also recognizes the material and relational aspects of a place’s ecology as having epistemic value. The inquiry into art education practices delves beyond art-based methods and draws on the rich tradition of place-based practices. To illustrate the contribution of art education to sustainability, the study examines the collaborative project ‘Full Line, Broken Line: The Future of Liminal Landscapes’ in Serbia, focusing on disrupted landscapes near Belgrade. This insight into how investigation and learning about a locality can elicit memories and interpretations through the lens of absence demonstrates the importance of the interaction of temporal and spatial dimensions when learning about what is lost and the possibility for renewal.
Copyright (c) 2024 Maja Maksimovic https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper analyses adult education for sustainable development policies, examining their dominant discursive orientations – neoliberal, liberal, and critical – across global, EU, and national levels. Focusing on Slovenia and its transnational policy influences in this field, it highlights a prevalent interplay of liberal and neoliberal discursive orientations alongside a comparatively limited presence of critical discourse. At the global level, the United Nations’ influence emphasises liberal discourse aligned with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), while the European Union policies exhibit a predominant neoliberal discourse, further solidified at the national level, particularly in more recent Slovenian policies. A prevalent interplay of neoliberal and liberal discourses characterises Slovenian adult education for sustainable development policies, reflecting the substantial influence of transnational actors.
Copyright (c) 2024 Tadej Košmerl https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper reports on a short course for working class people, in Cape Town, South Africa. It outlines how a ‘gut pedagogy’, that is, a practice of teaching through the body that takes the digestive system as ‘teacher’, is the starting point for ‘reading the world’. The journey of food as life and energy-giving substances from the world, through the body, back into the world, illustrates how systems are entangled with each other. The gut pedagogy is deliberately centred within a part of the body that mediates between inside and outside, yet is rarely spoken about. The practice is rooted firmly within feminist popular education that re-connects what has been separated – body and mind, humans and more-than-humans, the gut and the brain. Feminist practice respects and surfaces different ways of knowing, both rational and gut instinct. The paper shows that we can learn from our bodies, if we listen: about health, about the interconnectedness of all life, about the need to respect life and work together to maintain our planet.
Copyright (c) 2024 Astrid von Kotze https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The climate crisis as an impetus for learning
This contribution examines the kinds of situations in which people begin to learn in the context of the climate crisis. This approach differs from how learning is usually debated in environmental education, which typically focuses on why adults should learn and how this learning can be induced by educational efforts. To understand why and how adults initiate learning, we engage with the debate on concepts of exploring ‘impetuses for learning’ (Lernanlässe), which has been a topic of discussion in the German-speaking context over the past decades. We explore how this concept provides an empirical perspective on the diverse contexts in which adult learning currently occurs and could potentially occur in the future as the climate crisis continues to unfold.
Copyright (c) 2024 Maria Stimm, Jörg Dinkelaker https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article outlines methods of practice-oriented teaching at universities integrating democracy, sustainability, and learning in adult education.. The methods highlight the potential for democratic innovation in local communities in which diverse perspectives come together to address societal challenges. With a focus on sustainability and the connection among place, space, and pedagogy it introduces ‘Voice-Resonance Walks,’ a deliberative method piloted in Stuttgart, Germany, for social work education. It also highlights pilot deliberations at the district (Mini-Studentlab Deliberative Walks) and cityscape (Public Transport Walks) levels in Hamburg, Germany, involving interdisciplinary student groups in lifelong learning. These examples illustrate how higher education institutions are engaging with the public sphere, with a particular focus on vulnerable groups of citizens and on fostering civic learning. They aim to equip students with the knowledge and skills to become future experts, decision-makers, and active citizens, capable of understanding the challenges facing both their local neighborhoods and diverse urban spaces.
Copyright (c) 2024 Rolf Ahlrichs, Peter Ehrstöm https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Discourses on quality in Swedish adult education
Swedish municipal adult education has many providers. The overall responsibility for this service still lies with the municipalities, entailing the enactment of national policy with respect to providers. This study puts focus on the discursive enactment of policy concerning quality in adult education. Five discourses on quality are identified through interviews with school leaders, teachers, and students, namely that quality is about formal demands and processes, that it is a matter of student focus, that it is about teachers’ competence and working conditions, that it is about teaching, and that quality depends on the student group. School leaders focus on formal and organisational aspects of quality, while teachers and students focus on actual processes in the classroom, connecting to their own work and lives. Compared to national policy, the local discourses are limited mainly to studying, teaching, organisation, and short-term outcomes, while long-term aims in national policy are less prominent.
Copyright (c) 2024 Per Andersson, Karolina Muhrman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Studying the legacy of second-chance adult education in Flanders
Every year, third-year bachelor students participating in a course on adult education at the University of Leuven (Belgium) conduct an interview with adult educators working within a particular setting of adult education, such as civic integration courses, detention education, etc. In this article, we elaborate on one particular case, viz., adult educators working in second-chance education for adults who still want to obtain their secondary diploma. We show how their profession as an adult educator can become a common concern for both third bachelor students of educational sciences and for adult educators in second-chance adult education celebrating in 2021 their 40 years of existence in Flanders. This means that our analysis in this article will also show how a university can become a place where their daily professional practice as adult educators, viz., their ambitions and doubts, ambiguities and contradictions, can fully materialize as collective study material.
Copyright (c) 2024 Joke Vandenabeele https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Editorial: Inclusion, adult education and social justice
Copyright (c) 2023 Danny Wildemeersch, Paula Guimarães, Andreas Fejes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Post-critical perspectives in Social Movement Learning
The objective of this paper is to highlight the potential contributions of the post-critical perspective to social movement learning (SML). To achieve this aim, the study employs a thematic analysis of findings derived from a systematic literature review on deconsumption (an umbrella term understood as rejection of consumerism together with materialistic values prevalent in the Western consumer societies, encompassing movements such as voluntary simplicity, freeganism etc.). Identified themes are presented within the framework of post-critical pedagogy and analysed through its lens. This approach allows the researcher to demonstrate the implications and insights of the post-critical perspective in SML and adult education. This article argues that integrating the post-critical perspective into SML can yield a novel understanding of pertinent issues within this subfield. Such an application not only broadens the scope of adult education but also expands post-critical pedagogy itself.
Copyright (c) 2024 Kamila Szyszka https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Member education in three Finnish parliamentary parties
This study investigates the purposes and corresponding preconditions of member education practices in three Finnish political parties using the theory of practice architectures. To accomplish this, it examines the educational endeavours of three Finnish parliamentary parties—namely, the Centre Party of Finland (Suomen Keskusta), the National Coalition Party (Kansallinen Kokoomus) and the Social Democratic Party of Finland (Suomen sosiaalidemokraattinen puolue). The study draws on the theory of practice architectures, which provides a framework for examining the arrangements comprising the preconditions underlying practices—that is, purposeful endeavours based on established human courses of action. The research questions addressed in this study are as follows. What are the main purposes of education within the studied political parties? What preconditions enable or constrain the educational practices related to those purposes? The findings reveal that the Centre Party of Finland aims to foster expertise among its entire membership in a consistent and impactful manner, emphasising educational planning and supporting political ambition. Moreover, the National Coalition Party’s political education aims to foster members’ expertise and success, as supported by individualisation, while the Social Democratic Party of Finland’s party-political education focuses on engaging members and renewing the party, which are pursued through offering open educational opportunities and considering both local preconditions and historical knowledge. In conclusion, the identified purposes seek a balance between ensuring equality and supporting hierarchy among the party membership, while the identified preconditions indicate understandings of the political party as either a collective actor or an arena in which individual political actors operate.
Copyright (c) 2024 Annika Pastuhov https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Adult education, democracy, and totalitarianism
This article explores the role of adult education in supporting democracy through an examination of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) (1949-1990). This case study presents the institutional landscape, political regulations, and key trends of adult education in the GDR, complemented by insights from educators who worked within the field during the 1970s through 1990s. Two key categories emerge from the findings: (1) ‘Learning society’: Opportunities, access, and control of learning; and (2) Coexistence of conformity and resistance. Interviews highlight the diverse aspects of adult education in the GDR. While some programmes facilitated access to education, culture, and certain professions that would have otherwise been unattainable, the indoctrinative, centralised, and state-controlled education system promoted a predefined societal model and sought to mould a specific personality type, aligning with the vision of a totalitarian learning society, which clashes with the fundamental values of adult education and creates a contradictory situation for adult educators.
Copyright (c) 2024 Tetyana Hoggan-Kloubert, Chad Hoggan, Nicole Luthardt https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The representation of mature students in governing bodies of a Portuguese university
With this text, we try to understand if – and if so, how – mature students are represented by and in the governing bodies of higher education institutions. With a theoretical framework that values above all the institutional dimension, we carried out thirteen semi-structured interviews with students and faculty members who are part of the various governing bodies with student representation of a Portuguese higher education institution. The data show that (i) the functioning of these bodies tends to be known only by the students who participate in them, (ii) the bodies usually react to, rather than prevent, the problems that arise, (iii) mature students are perceived as a source of ‘difficulties’ and ‘needs’, and (iv) student representation in governing bodies does not seem to fairly and equitably represent all students, and some specificities of mature students (among other underrepresented groups) seem to be made invisible.
Copyright (c) 2024 José Pedro Amorim, Felismina Viterbo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Two research projects undertaken ten years ago explored the experiences of mature students’ access, progression and drop-out in higher education, relying on Habermas and Honneth for sensitizing concepts. This paper explores the implications of undertaking this research today adopting a different set of sensitizing concepts and in the process transforming the identity of the researcher. To this end, this paper moves beyond Habermas and Honneth to the critical theory of Negt and Kluge as a source of new sensitizing concepts informing a reimagined researcher and research project. Their work on experience, its dialectic nature, imploitation, obstinacy – as an alternative to resilience – and a sociological imagination are explored in order to identify possible new sensitizing concepts for researching adults returning to higher education. Implications for transformative adult education will be identified.
Copyright (c) 2024 Ted Fleming https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Perspectives, aspirations and perceived support students with low economic and cultural capital in the university in Spain and Dominican Republic
This paper investigates the characteristics and both material and emotional costs of upward social mobility through university education in Spain and the Dominican Republic. A comparative qualitative study has been carried out, based on biographical-narrative interviews, with a sample of 6 Dominican students and 9 Spanish students coming from an economically disadvantaged background. The results show the social mobility experiences and expectations of the participants and their families, with different nuances in the two contexts. The need to combine study with work is one of the main costs of university. The primary coping strategy in both countries is material and symbolic family support, but additional coping mechanisms to persist in studies are also evident. The conclusions highlight both the perspectives developed by the participants and the critical role of structural dimensions (social background, national context, recent history, economy, social values, culture, religious beliefs) in understanding their experiences in the university context.
Copyright (c) 2024 José González-Monteagudo, Teresa Padilla-Carmona, María A. Tenorio-Rodríguez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A European study investigating adult numeracy education
Numeracy is a critical competency needed by adults to navigate their way through tasks in their personal and professional lives. Hence, it is critical that efforts are made to identify and address challenges that prevent adults from developing the numeracy skills needed to engage in society. In this research we identify the challenges facing adult numeracy eduction across Europe. A survey, which sought to investigate the main challenges faced by adult educators and policy-makers when delivering numeracy programmes, was distributed to leading figures in adult numeracy education in EU states. Twelve countries responded and challenges identified related to the lack of a standardised definition of numeracy, the lack of a standardised framework to support adult numeracy education and the need for professional development for adult numeracy tutors. In this paper we look at how these challenges manifest themselves in different jurisdictions and offer suggestions for overcoming these challenges in future.
Copyright (c) 2024 Dr Niamh O'Meara, Dr Kathy O'Sullivan, Prof Kees Hoogland, Prof Javier Diez-Palomer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Directive adult education by political actors
This paper presents for discussion two empirically grounded theses. First, political actors educate adults, and second, in doing so, they use directive forms of education; that is, they expect adult members of society to adopt certain orientations. Following a theoretical discussion on the directive education concept and its relevance to public pedagogy, the methodology (discourse analysis and documentary method) is explained. Then, three approaches to directive adult education demonstrated by political actors are empirically analysed: (1) directive political education is employed by political party leaders when, in the face of a potential U-turn of their party, they try to change the core political convictions of party supporters; (2) newcomers to society are directively educated to adopt democratic role orientations; and (3) in social fields in which practices are standardised by laws but cannot sufficiently be controlled, directive education for the common good can be observed. These types of directive education used by political actors are discussed vis-à-vis the concepts of paternalism and pedagogization.
Copyright (c) 2025 Arnd-Michael Nohl https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Although life course transitions are not a new topic – see for instance van Gennep’s (1909/2019) work on rites of passage or various studies on changes in the life course, their social conditions, and societal consequences – educational research has explored the topic of transitions in a rather segmented fashion. Transitions have been investigated according to age (e.g., youth transitioning to adulthood), according to pedagogical institutions (e.g., from family to day care), and pertaining to education subdisciplines (transitions in adult education). As a result, it is easy to lose sight of the connections between life course transitions and profound questions of education and learning. With the aim of further developing the educational learning discourse, this conceptual paper discusses life course transitions as an impetus and framework for learning and transformation processes.
Copyright (c) 2024 Christiane Hof, Michael Bernhard https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Accessing higher education is a biographical learning experience for all students, which can promote transformations in individuals’ identities. This article aims to investigate the implications of biographical learning experiences on the students’ identities. We will explore African students’ biographical learning experiences in Portuguese higher education and how they shaped their identities. Biographical learning and identity theoretical perspectives were adopted. This is a qualitative study that used biographical interviews with 22 African students enrolling at Portuguese higher education. The content analysis carried out has been organized into 2 themes: biographical learning experiences and identity transformations. The results of the study show that African students gained new knowledge and skills and became more independent and autonomous. They develop their self-confidence and open-mindedness through a new way of seeing the world. Thus, African students’ experiences in higher education contributed to the formation and transformation of their identity.
Copyright (c) 2024 Catarina Doutor, Natália Alves https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
How can arts-based methods support narrative inquiry into adult learning in the arts?
This article considers an arts-based project, Learning Returns (2023), that seeks to capture the experiences of adults who have returned to arts study after some time away from formal education. The aims of the project are twofold: firstly, to evaluate the combination of narrative inquiry and digital film-making hosted on YouTube as a method of investigating adult learning and secondly, through an analysis of the Learning Returns content, to discover what themes the participants considered important to communicate to an imagined, virtual audience. The findings suggested that the aesthetics of the videos/films interconnect with the lived experiences of the participants. The participants were able to give an account of their experiences spontaneously, and at the same time communicate messages of hope to prospective adult returners. It was also discovered that the editing process offers a means of analysing the content of the films that is analogous to the approaches associated with qualitative research.
Copyright (c) 2024 Samantha Jane Broadhead, Ms Sharon Hooper https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Social exclusion in public policies and the micropolitics of an association founded by migrants
The theme of social exclusion has gained visibility in recent years through political discourse. This paper problematises the issue of social exclusion by analysing the hegemonic discourse in public policies and the alternative discourse grounded on the policies of an association, a civil society organization, facilitated by migrants and their descendants. The analysis is the result of a participatory research study based on the collection of documentation and semi-structured interviews. The hegemonic discourse on social exclusion was analysed through empirical data from the perspective of those who inhabit and/or intervene in a neighbourhood that is the object of public policies targeting the so-called 'excluded'. Several paradoxes were identified between the social exclusion discourses conveyed in public policies and in the micropolitics of this association. The discourse, goals and working methods that characterise the micropolitics of the association contribute to the emergence of new forms of singularisation, through adult education initiatives.
Copyright (c) 2023 Cármen Cavaco, Catarina Paulos, Rita Domingos , Emília Alves https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article presents ecological thinking of the Finnish educational philosopher, Urpo Harva (1910–1994). Harva's theories of adult education are strongly linked to the theory of self-cultivation developed in Finnish educational theory particularly in the early 20th century, according to which adults need to develop themselves as moral agents in their relations with others and the ecological environment to reach mature adulthood. In addition to his work as a professor, Harva was an active social debater, writing a significant number of columns and essays for Finnish magazines. The present article uses abductive content analysis on 31 of these columns and essays written between 1971 and 1994 to uncover the basics of Harva’s environmental adult education theory. The analysis showed that readers are encouraged to adopt a “biophilic” or nurturing attitude towards nature, as this will provide the necessary skills for ensuring a more sustainable future.
Copyright (c) 2023 Johanna Kallio https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Editorial: Radical popular education today
Copyright (c) 2023 Fergal Finnegan , António Fragoso , Barbara Merrill https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Critical social theory, inclusion, and a pedagogy of hope
In recent years, issues of inclusion within the field of adult education have garnered increasing attention and have expanded to consider various equity and social justice concerns. Frequently, however, these concerns are considered in a piecemeal fashion, either with a narrower focus on a particular equity issue, or as a simplified add-on to wider debates about educational design, delivery modes, or policy structures. To deepen the discussion around inclusion in lifelong learning, it is important to draw upon critical social theory to explore not only particular circumstances and challenges faced by different groups seeking equity and inclusion, but also to consider the broader frameworks in which adult teaching and learning happens. Despite challenges such as neoliberalism, adult educators need to retain Freire’s belief in the possibilities offered by a pedagogy of hope and the belief that humans have the capacity to make positive changes.
Copyright (c) 2023 Patricia Gouthro, Susan Holloway https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Towards a post-humanist design for educational inclusion
In this contribution to the special issue on adult education, inclusion and justice we discuss how an inclusive pedagogy can foster a more just way of inhabiting litter polluted living environments, in which the interests of both human and non-human dwellers are taken into consideration. More precisely, we theorize how arts can function as study material and enable a collective sensitivity for the ways in which (non-)human entities (e.g., fishermen, seals, birds, litter pickers, tourists, plastic producers) constitute a ‘sick’ habitat. Based upon our theory-driven participatory action research with adult inhabitants of the litter polluted Belgian coast, we conclude that a study pedagogy has the power to constitute collective events of emancipation in which inhabitants of damaged living environments can start to inhabit these places, i.e., they become (more) attentive to the reciprocal relationships with other human and non-human entities and respond accordingly with care towards these entanglements.
Copyright (c) 2023 Viktor Swillens, Mathias Decuypere, Joke Vandenabeele, Joris Vlieghe https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Teachers’ approaches to social inclusion in second language teaching for adult migrants
Adult education has been used as a means to enhance citizens' opportunities to participate and be included in society, but adult education may also construe students as excluded. This study focuses on how teachers in second language education for migrants conceptualise and enact teaching for social inclusion. It draws on Fraser's concept of social justice and Biesta’s aims of sound education. The article is based on observations and interviews with teachers. The findings highlight that the teaching is enacted to develop the students’ language skills for formal qualification and everyday life as well as their knowledge of Civics and norms in Swedish society. Thus, conceptualising the students as emerging participants, lacking skills and knowledge as language users and citizens. This teaching enactment reflects qualification and socialisation as central aims of education, but less of subjectification processes. Consequently, social inclusion is conceptualised as migrants adjusting to society in predefined ways.
Copyright (c) 2023 Helena Colliander, Sofia Nordmark https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Access to education is a matter of individual and communal justice and development. However, simple access to education, and simple inclusion as often noted in DEI, fail to capture the structures of power and inequality that limit the potential of education. It is not enough to be in education, we must aim for an education adult students can belong to. This requires that we re-conceptualize belonging as complex, non-binary, and multifaceted, acknowledging the struggles of our adult students to participate in education. For this re-conceptualization, we call upon theories of liminal belonging, in particular Anzaldúa's idea of mestiza consciousness. We use adult education students in Ecuador as a case study to reflect on the gender and identity struggles to belong and conclude with some recommendations of how pedagogy and institutions can be adapted to foster belonging for adult learners.
Copyright (c) 2023 Alexis Oviedo, Karem Roitman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
‘Special offers for target groups that otherwise would not have been reached’
Using the perspective of neo-institutionalism and institutional logics, this article examines regional networks in the field of literacy and basic education. The goal of the analysis is to identify different forms of community-logics within two actor constellations. For this purpose, two regions are focused within a multiple-case study design. The empirical approach is based on interviews with experts from the field of literacy and basic education. The Interviews are evaluated qualitatively. The interview material will be used to identify different logics of communities in the regions and to examine the contexts in which actors orient themselves to the different logics. It becomes clear that communities in adult basic education are constituted on the basis of both geographical and content related aspects. By becoming a member of the communities, the actors benefit from various advantages. This collaboration ultimately enables the social participation and inclusion of the low-literate in the regions.
Copyright (c) 2023 Jakob Bickeböller https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Setting the new European agenda for adult learning 2021-2030
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, international organisations and governments have issued mitigation policies, and (re)oriented broader policy strategies to respond to new problematisations about the future. In this context, the education ministers of the European Union (EU) adopted a Council Resolution on a new European agenda for adult learning 2021-2030. Drawing on the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), this paper examines the political mobilisation and agenda setting behind this Resolution through network ethnography and the analysis of belief systems. The findings point at an increased social dialogue, favoured by an ‘uncommon’ way – as by our informants – through which the Slovenian Ministry of Education pursued the agreed priority at EU level, while holding the rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU. While visibility of adult learning rose under COVID-19, advocacy coalitions formed at national (Slovenian) and European level facilitated stronger alignment in agenda setting among different actors towards a holistic approach that calls for inter-sectorial and multi-stakeholder collaboration.
Copyright (c) 2023 Marcella Milana, Borut Mikulec https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The paradox of exclusion through inclusion
In our contribution we investigate firstly the general discussion on inclusion in education that had its origins in educational reform movements and in special needs education policies and practices. In line with this, we describe the growing interest in international organizations, resulting into varied attempts on national and local levels to create equal opportunities for all, with particular attention for students with special needs. We furthermore analyse how these concrete policies and practices of inclusive education often coalesced with deficit approaches, resulting into the above-mentioned paradox of exclusion through inclusion. In a next step, we explore how and why inclusive practices keep on reinforcing existing dependencies and possible ways out of the dilemma. In a final section we analyse how in adult education research literature, this paradox of exclusion through inclusion is dealt with and what answers are developed in this particular field of research.
Copyright (c) 2023 Danny Wildemeersch, George A. Koulaouzides https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Otherness is one issue that comes up when discussing migration, and when it comes to asylum seeking in Europe, the topic of discrimination is a pivotal one also due to the rise of nationalistic political parties in the last few years. This paper therefore uses narrative interviews and Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition to explore the experiences of two asylum seekers with discrimination in Italy, and how they were responding to these experiences. The aim of the paper is to highlight how discrimination impacted differently on the participants’ construction of self-identity and their different strategies when it comes to becoming part of the host society.
Copyright (c) 2023 Darasimi Oshodi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Bounded advantages of higher education regarding young adults’ participation in nonformal education
The article uses insights from the capability approach as a theoretical framework. It investigates the potential of higher education to provide fertile advantages regarding young adults’ participation in nonformal education and whether this potential is bounded by people’s individual characteristics and the wider social context in which they live. Applying descriptive statistics and multilevel modelling, we conducted a secondary data analysis of the Adult Education Survey for 29 European countries. The findings go beyond previous research by clearly demonstrating that the fertile advantages of higher education regarding participation in adult nonformal education are not absolute and straightforward. They are bounded not only by certain important individual characteristics (such as individuals’ social background and household income) but are also context-dependent. More concretely, they differ among countries and depend on various country-level factors, such as level of innovation and economic growth.
Copyright (c) 2024 Petya Ilieva-Trichkova, Pepka Boyadjieva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Encountering works by Nyerere and Freire
This conceptual paper presents an encounter of a work regarding education on self-reliance by Tanzanian educator Julius K. Nyerere (1922–1999) with a work by Brazilian educator Paolo Freire (1921–1997) on education for liberation to explore their relevance for contemporary radical popular education. To this end, the study aligns with the methodological approaches used in qualitative comparative education research. Entering into a comparative dialogue between both contributions contextualises the respective features of each contribution and allows a systematic dialogue between commonalities and differences and for conclusions to be drawn regarding radical popular education. Solidarity and sustainability serve as guiding categories in this endeavour. They point conclusively to the benefits of further theoretical encounters (with, for example, the philosophy of ubuntu), to the risks of neoliberal reinterpretations and, against this background, to the quest for nurturing contemporary approaches in radical popular education in adult education academia, research and practice under the auspices of social change and transformation.
Copyright (c) 2023 Silke Schreiber-Barsch, Joseph Badokufa Bulugu, Lukas Eble https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Civic Learning through active citizenship in diverse societies
In response to the growing heterogenous populations in urban areas, and the important role of civic engagement and active citizenship for the promotion of democratic processes, this paper discusses the active participation of resident foreign citizens and/or persons with a history of migration, in urban areas. The theoretical connections between active citizenship, lived citizenship and civic learning are outlined and then linked with the results of an applied research project focused on various aspects of gender. In conclusion, active – lived – citizenship, in particular ‘performative’ acts of citizenship, generate civic learning as subjectification. Public spaces as learning opportunities for active engagement should take into account aspects of diversity as well as inequalities in a diverse society in order to promote inclusion and democracy for as many residents as possible regardless of their citizenship status.
Copyright (c) 2024 Ms. Kukovetz , Ms. Sprung, Ms. Wlasak https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Editorial: 30 years of research on adult education, 30 years of ESREA
Copyright (c) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Deriving a theory of learning from social movement practices
The field of Adult Education is rich with general theories of learning but limited in terms of theories that inform social movement learning (SML). Today, there are several conceptualizations of SML, but little learning theory development based directly on empirical studies of SML. This article aims to present findings from a systematic literature review of empirical studies on social movement learning (SML). We collected and identified 69 empirical studies focusing on adult learning and education within social movements for this literature review. We purposely focused on empirical research studies and did not include works that conceptualise or theorise social movement learning outside of actual empirical studies of SML. From our review of empirical studies, we have identified five elements we believe could serve as the foundation of a theory of learning and education in social movements.
Copyright (c) 2023 Mai Atta, John Holst https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Citizenship, learning and social inclusion
The aim of this article is to gain knowledge about how people engaged in EU-funded social initiatives targeting poor EU migrants in Sweden reason about the meaning, hardships, and possibilities they ascribe to the concept of social inclusion. The empirical material consists of a key policy and interviews with staff involved in these social initiatives. The analytical approach is constructionist, inspired by Foucault, focusing on how target groups are constructed, problematised and governed as learners not yet socially included in society or the labour market. In the concluding discussion, the results are discussed in relation to Levitas’ thoughts on social inclusion. Key results indicate that discourses on the national and EU level can both facilitate and hinder learning and social inclusion for vulnerable citizens. The article concludes that free mobility within the EU makes belonging and responsibility a complex issue for those engaged in learning for social inclusion.
Copyright (c) 2023 Viktor Vesterberg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Dialogic popular education in Spain and its impact on society, educational and social theory, and European research
Dialogic popular education developed by La Verneda-Sant Martí School for Adults in Spain, influenced by the work of Paulo Freire, has had a range of significant social and educational impacts. Starting with an emancipatory approach to eradicate oppression, this dialogic popular education resisted and has transformed aspects of the Spanish educational sphere despite ongoing hindrances and difficulties. This article presents a path of events, a history of interventions and findings from research on how dialogic popular education has affected and changed educational practices as well as how research is approached elsewhere in Europe. In addition, it presents ways in which a radical commitment to social change can be combined with scientific standards in the pursuit of achieving a better society for all.
Copyright (c) 2023 Laura Ruiz-Eugenio, Itxaso Tellado, Rosa Valls-Carol, Regina Gairal-Casadó https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The climate catastrophe is a clarion call to humanity to change how we live. How do radical popular educators respond to this call? We ‘join the dots’ using climate justice, ecofeminism and our own insights from our engaged activist scholarship as theoretical positions to explore this question. Dominant Western worldviews which separate humans from other life forms contribute to ecological degradation. For climate justice, this hard-wired worldview needs to be disrupted. Drawing on multiple examples from Africa, we conclude that ways to do this require the foregrounding of cognitive justice which includes recognising the validity of multiple knowledges, learning from others and supporting communities’ in their struggles for reparation, reclamation and conservation of their land. These actions can be amplified in engagements which disrupt the unsustainable behaviour and policies of the wealthy. We argue that radical popular education in these times is climate just and ecofeminist.
Copyright (c) 2023 Astrid von Kotze, Shirley Walters https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article explores on the formative influence of adult popular education in the evolution and continued ethos of adult literacy education in the Republic of Ireland. Freire’s work has been influential within Irish adult education and community development, informed by Freirean practices of learner-centredness, experiential learning and group learning. This stands in contrast to Further Education and Training system in which the adult literacy services are based, which has become increasingly professionalised in recent years, susceptible to the ideological values and practices of performativity. The article analyses the findings of research reports on adult literacy which used a mixed methods approach. They reveal how the adult literacy sector holds important spaces for educators to counteract systemic pressures of performativity as they work with learners and their communities through the ethos and pedagogies of adult education, but this is constrained in its radical transformative possibilities.
Copyright (c) 2023 Bernie Grummell https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The article analyses learning related to experiencing violence in social actions and social movements. Activists may experience physical abuse from individuals and from organised entities such as the police, both accidentally and as a form of intentional repression. Applying the social movement learning approach to the analysis of individual experience, collective responses to violence, and preparations for the eventuality of its occurrence allowed us to identify the functionalities of protest culture towards de-escalation of violence. The article offers a review of literature as well as an analysis of empirical data from our previous research projects. The result of the analysis is a model of social movements learning about violence, linking individual suffering with the potential of social change.
Copyright (c) 2022 Piotr Kowzan, Przemyslaw Szczygiel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Acting against health inequalities through popular education
This article investigates if health inequalities can be reduced using popular education (PE) methods. It argues that, although ill health may be experienced as a private trouble, it is embedded in broader social and political processes and should be seen as a public issue. It illuminates this concept of health by using student writings from the Health Issues in the Community (HIIC) project. These writings illustrate the impact of unemployment, lack of facilities, food poverty etc. on people’s physical and mental health and the action they have taken to challenge and reduce these inequalities. It is argued that PE contributes to human flourishing, but the educator must resist the power they have to steer students in particular directions. It concludes that whilst PE cannot abolish health inequalities, HIIC participants have taken small steps to change existing realities and so have challenged oppressive social relations.
Copyright (c) 2022 Lyn Tett https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Popular education is more needed than ever. The Covid 19 pandemic has been highlighting the challenges of widening inequalities, increasing exploitation and oppression, along with persistent xenophobia and violence against women and minority communities. Yet popular education faces threats of its own, and resources have been on the decline, precisely when they have become so urgently required in the contemporary context. Whilst acknowledging these threats, the article goes on to focus on some of the ways in which popular education initiatives have continued to be promoted despite these wider challenges. ‘The World Transformed’ (TWT) has provided evidence of just such initiatives in Britain.The conclusions of TWT’s research resonate with Paulo Freire’s own reflections in the final section of ‘The Pedagogy of Hope’. Despite the challenges he continued to look forward to the future with hope.
Copyright (c) 2023 Marjorie Mayo, Fiona Randford https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This article covers the places that came to constitute the pivotal points of reference in the narration of the life of Z., a female migrant from Albania to Greece. It attempts to highlight the function of such places as cognitive and reconstructive frames that signify the life, memories and biographical plans of the narrator, the shaping but also the reception of a personal and social identity by herself as also by others. It attempts to point to the meaning of such places not only in the sense of the scenography (setting) of a life and its narration, but also as the defining elements in the trajectory and self-knowledge of an immigrant.
Copyright (c) 2023 Alexandra Mitsiali https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Popular education in an association – expert by experience and work in tandem
The aim of this paper is to analyse the dynamics of popular education in the Associação Cultural Moinho da Juventude focusing on the expert by experience and the work in tandem. The expert by experience is someone who has personal life experience of poverty and social exclusion and who has also undergone specific training in these areas. The work in tandem is a work methodology involving two individuals and grounded on the complementarity of knowledge. The empirical data was collected using participatory action research. In conceptual terms, the paper is framed by critical theory and popular education.. The research findings point to diversified and continuing popular education dynamics in the initiatives of this association, managed by residents in several interdependent areas (social, cultural, urbanistic, educational, etc) across a long time period. Its practices are geared towards emancipation and the construction of a more just world, with less inequality. Popular education has contributed both to the qualification and the promotion of the power to act of the experts by experience who take action in the neighbourhood, in tandem, in various areas of intervention.
Copyright (c) 2023 Carmen Cavaco, Catarina Paulos, Rita Domingos , Emília Alves https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In this article, the protest songs of teachers on strike were analysed as a traditional pedagogical tool of popular education, social movements, and trade unions. An important context for this was the commodification of the entertainment market, expectations towards the teaching profession, and the state of musical competencies in the population. By identifying what the essence of teaching in the teachers' protest songs was, recommendations for making these activities more educational and politically more effective have been presented. The songs might have played a role in the demise of the strike, in the specific political context, described in the paper. Using the comparisons of teachers to animals by the teachers themselves was a common, but risky tactic.
Copyright (c) 2023 Piotr Kowzan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Is There a Place for Popular Adult Education in the Managerial University?
This article studies the possibilities of reclaiming and revitalising popular adult education in Finland’s neoliberally driven managerial university and addresses the place for popular adult education in it. In Finland, popular adult education has been taught at a university level since the 1920s. Currently, it has a marginal position in academia. This descriptive case study ponders the role of teaching popular adult education in Finnish universities and describes the pilot program on popular adult education organised at Tampere University in 2020. The study suggests that popular adult education, even in managerial universities, can provide students and practitioners with meaningful knowledge and the means to build global humanity and a sustainable future. In conclusion, the article discusses the future of popular adult education and its role in the university.
Copyright (c) 2023 Juha Suoranta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The transformative dance of the crisis to resignify social educational work: auto-ethnographical reflections on a cooperative enquiry in Northern Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic
This contribution proposes an autoethnographic reflection on a cooperative enquiry involving social workers, volunteers and family members of people with intellectual disabilities in Northern Italy. The author, a social worker and doctoral student, recognises the complexity of her own positioning and reflects on the educational work that takes place in the social sphere, on the risks connected to a technocratic logic and on critical, and transformative possibilities offered by the crisis. The author proposes a systemic reflexivity that challenges the dominant discourses, connects the micro, meso and macro levels and promotes different ways of knowing. The dynamism of the body, linked to the author's experience in the field of contemporary dance, becomes a symbolic way to decolonise the posture of social workers and open it up to the transformative potential of a sensitive, conscious and incorporated social educational work.
Copyright (c) 2022 Antonella Cuppari https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The following essay touches on a highly interesting problem for politically sensitive adult education: What are the ‘costs’ of educational advancement? The answer is sought in biographies of three prominent examples: Pierre Bourdieu, Annie Ernaux and Didier Eribon. The data is based on autobiographically oriented reflections of the protagonists – symptomatically not ‘classic’ autobiographies. The concentration on France has to do with the fact that in the French cultural tradition this level of reflection – not least through the works of the selected authors – has gained a particular meaning. The selection itself relates to astonishing differences in the influences of historical times and the relevance of cohort experiences. The result of the analysis is undoubtedly an ‘essayistic dramatisation’, not a hasty generalisation, but it could stimulate scientific discussion and systematic empirical research.
Copyright (c) 2022 Peter Alheit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Participation of older people in learning studies
The participation and meaningful engagement of older people are strongly supported because of their individual and communal benefits. Currently there is a lack of general understanding of how older people participate in research activities. The purpose of this review was to examine the ways older people participate in learning studies. A search of abstracts of empirical studies published in English was conducted in three databases between 2015 and 2019 using scoping review methodology. The results showed that most often older people did participate as study subjects in clinical studies. Other participant roles included informants, partners, and multiple roles. The review addressed a paucity in qualitative and participatory roles in older people’s learning studies. All participant roles are still needed to provide various standpoints for learning studies. Further studies are suggested to provide various meaningful and participatory ways for older people to get involved in research activities.
Copyright (c) 2022 Jenni Koski, Kaisa Pihlainen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The paper explores the importance of social movements as reinventors of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy and promoters of a radical popular education. It particularly focuses on the Movimento de Mulheres Camponesas (MMC) (Peasant Women’s Movement), which was founded in 2004 and is currently organised in eighteen Brazilian States. My reflections arise from a collaborative and multi-sited ethnography conducted with the Movement in the State of Santa Catarina, in the South of Brazil, between 2011 and 2015. In the light of this research, I will argue that the Freirean inspiration represents a path and a challenge for the MMC and is evident in its genealogy, struggles for education, political-educational methodologies and in the process of forming of militant subjectivities. On the other hand, I will argue that the Movement contributes to expanding Freire’s proposal to new themes, such as: feminist struggles and the environmental question.
Copyright (c) 2023 Mariateresa Muraca https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Beginning with Boeren’s (2018) or Rubenson and Elfert’s (2019) claims of under-recognition of quantitative methodology in adult education, authors use the ecological niche from biology as a metaphorical and heuristic model in order to consider the mechanisms determining the viability of research methodologies in education for adults. The authors discuss ecosystem factors affecting research methodologies and consider the situations of Germany and Canada to illustrate application of the niche metaphor. The conclusion stresses the complementary relevance and integrative value of different forms of research. Addressing diverse questions requires diverse methodologies and a rich ecosystem of resources and research capabilities.
Copyright (c) 2023 Bernd Käpplinger, Ralf St. Clair https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Copyright (c) 2021 Silke Schreiber-Barsch, Danny Wildemeersch, Henning Salling Olesen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Categories of distinction in programme planning
The paper provides an analysis of the categories of distinction seized by programme planners in adult and continuing education and the underlying reasoning arguments to reasoning them. The analysis of 14 interviews shows that in their target group orientation, programme planners make use of the categories gender, migration experience, age, educational needs and dis/ability. The categories of distinction are based on their attribution as individual characteristics, as characteristics for grouping individuals, as characteristics of shared expectations and as occupation- and employment-related characteristics. The findings point to a need for encouraging awareness and critical reflection about categories of distinction.
Copyright (c) 2022 Clara Kuhlen, Regina Egetenmeyer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Paraplegic women’s emancipation along their vocational pathways: the potential contributions of Freirean, structural and post-structural feminist pedagogies
We have recently completed doctoral research on the reconstruction of paraplegic men’s and women’s vocational trajectories in French-speaking Switzerland. Based on three female informants’ life narratives, we analyse issues of gendered vocational guidance, pathways and identities in paraplegic people’s life courses. We shape some emancipating experience models and discourses about action, which empower the female informants on their vocational pathways. Our objective is here to point to the potential support that an emancipatory, feminist pedagogical approach could offer paraplegic women in the further development of personal models, and discourses of self in the conduct of their educational and vocational life.
Copyright (c) 2022 Elena Pont, Isabelle Collet https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Learning from the whirlpools of existence
The aim of this paper is to problematize and enrich the use of the concept of crisis in adult education to theorize further its contribution to the study of transformative processes. This paper discusses first the implications inherent in the adoption of event-based and processual approaches to crises. It seeks then to nuance and problematize the ways in which the relationships between crisis, learning and (trans)formative processes are conceived in adult education, especially through transformative learning theory and biographical approaches. The reflection highlights the difficulty of capturing the fluidity of learning and (trans)formative dynamics. Inspired by Edgar Morin’s paradigm of complexity and illustrated by examples taken from the COVID-19 pandemic, three principles are defined to help conceiving what structures, regulates and reorganizes such dynamics. The contribution concludes by emphasizing the importance of developing a critical awareness of the rhythms that shape educational processes.
Copyright (c) 2021 Michel Alhadeff-Jones https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Creating connections for expansive learning in crisis-laden times of long-term unemployment
This paper deals with the crises of long-term unemployment using subject theory, biographical research and critical theory as the framework. Based on narrative-biographical interviews with long-term unemployed people, I identify the factors and conditions that turn long-term unemployment into a crisis, arguing that expansive learning processes and the competence of utopian thinking are essential for creating visions of one’s occupational future as well as (social) utopias, thus, being a way out of these crises. The findings of the data show that subjective crises in times of prolonged unemployment are not always caused by unemployment itself and that existing visions of the occupational future cannot always be pursued
Copyright (c) 2021 Franziska Bonna https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The continuing education sector explicitly regards itself as serving the goals of lifelong learning. In fact, however, it is oriented towards the market and measures its success according to the sales of its products. The article analyses this market orientation from the perspectives of educational sociology and discourse theory and illustrates its consequences using examples from the Swiss continuing education market. The author develops an alternative approach whereby continuing education is measured according to the value it creates for individuals and society. Here, a connection is made with economic value creation theory, enhanced by sociological dimensions of the recognition and valorisation of education. This enhanced value creation concept shows how continuing education generates values, where these values are recognised, in what contexts they are valorised and what players and discourses are involved. The author also outlines a procedure for value creation analysis and, using two continuing education programmes as examples, illustrates the findings that value creation analysis can generate. On this basis, the author calls for a reorientation of continuing education that transcends the limitations of market logic.
Copyright (c) 2022 Walter Schöni https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Editorial Citizenship and the crisis of democracy
Copyright (c) 2018 Danny Wildemeersch, Andreas Fejes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Gender sensitive research in adult education: Looking back and looking forward to explore what is and what is missing in the research agenda
Despite legislation, policies and practice, and while some progress has been made in many countries, there are still no countries who have achieved a hundred per cent gender equality (Gender Equality Index, EIGE, 2019). Over the years this has included several supranational agreements and mandatory regulations signed by countries such as the Convention of the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW, 1979), the Platform of Beijing (1995), the Istanbul Convention (2011), and more recently the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2015), among others. The failure of these initiatives indicate that gender inequality, discrimination and prejudice suffered by women are embedded in structural unequal power relations. The ultimate goal of the ‘gender mainstreaming principle’ is the integration of a gender perspective into the preparation, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation policies, regulatory measures and spending programmes (including research ones), with a view to promoting gender equality between women and men, and combating discrimination.
Copyright (c) 2021 Joanna Ostrouch-Kami?ska , Cristina C. Vieira , Barbara Merrill https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Metaphors we learn by: practitioners’ conceptions of the meaning of nonformal learning in Estonian context
Non-formal education is the central standpoint and practice of lifelong learning. The aim of the article is to demonstrate the possibilities of construing the meaning of non-formal education through practitioners’ conceptions in Estonia. At the same time, we show how non-formal education practice can enrich other types of education and how these principles may be more widely applied in formal education as well. The current research based on metaphor analysis draws on the materials collected in focus group interviews with practitioners (n=17). Analysis revealed that practitioners describe non-formal education as a cooperational journey of discovery which requires effort, concentrates on development and is related to emotions, play and creativity. At the same time, non-formal education is defined through metaphors of cultural symbols and open space. The diverse opportunities of non-formal education create the basis for choices and tolerance to differences, whereas the emergence of border area metaphors confirms the deep rooted idea that non-formal education’s place lies in between different types of education.
Copyright (c) 2021 Halliki Põlda, Katrin Karu, Riina Reinsalu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The first issue of RELA was published in 2010, so with this issue we enter the 10-year anniversary. In this editorial, we will firstly elaborate on what we as editors find that RELA has accomplished. Secondly, we introduce changes that are taking place while entering 2019, and lastly, we introduce the papers which are included in this issue.
Copyright (c) 2019 Andreas Fejes, António Fragoso, Wolfgang Jütte, Ewa Kurantowicz, Barbara Merrill, Henning Salling Olesen, Danny Wildemeersch https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Mapping our way out? Critical reflections on historical research and the Faure report
Contributions to the literature have postulated an historical shift in policy narratives from the Faure report’s formulation of “lifelong education” for UNESCO in 1972 to a focus on “lifelong learning” since the mid-1990s. It has also been argued that the policy narrative articulated by de-schoolers in the early 1970s was incorporated in the Faure report. This paper critically examines the empirical foundations for such arguments and is based on a re-reading of the policy repertoire articulated by Faure’s report together with an analysis of the de-schoolers’ reception of the report in the early 1970s. Based upon a re-reading of primary texts and secondary sources from the 1970s, the analysis demonstrates that these widely accepted arguments constitute a problematic interpretation of the historical relationships between the key policy narratives in the 1970s. The conclusions identify a number of significant areas for further empirical research regarding the historical relationships between first generation policy narratives.
Copyright (c) 2021 Barry Hake https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Political Posters, the Soviet Enlightenment and the Construction of a Learning Society, 1917-1928
This paper explores the construction of a Soviet learning society represented in Soviet political posters during the first decade after the 1917 Socialist Revolution. The theoretical framework is based on studies of learning societies, lifelong education and learning, Soviet education, and the theory of multiple modernities. We employed a post-structuralist discourse analysis that allowed us to explore verbal and non-verbal poster elements to identify key domains in the construction of the Soviet learning society. Our study identified six main discursive visual and textual messages in political posters as educational devices in the development of the Socialist learning state. Findings show that learning was embedded in broader social, political, economic and cultural practices and took multiple forms. Political posters served multiple functions: they were motivators for learning, learning devices, means to communicate the Soviet party-state agenda, and part of the social-political and cultural curriculum of the learning society to come.
Copyright (c) 2021 Elena Ignatovich, Pierre Walter https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
“Why don’t they participate?” Reasons for nonparticipation in adult learning and education from the viewpoint of self-determination theory
The study deals with the perceived reasons for nonparticipation in adult learning and education (ALE), drawing on existing research concerning the motivation for lifelong learning, adult attitudes towards education, and the study of dispositional barriers. The aim of the study is to determine the subjective reasons/motivation of adults not to participate in ALE and what factors influence their nonparticipation. For this purpose, we drew on self-determination theory (SDT). Based on that we have created the research tool “Motivation to Nonparticipation Scale” (MNP-S), which measures three factors: extrinsic motivation, intrinsic motivation, and amotivation. The empirical research was conducted with a representative sample of adults (N = 943, age: 19 to 81 years) who had not participated in ALE. Contrary to theoretical assumptions of SDT, amotivated adults do not predominate among nonparticipants, with the main subjective reasons for nonparticipation based on intrinsic or extrinsic motivations.
Copyright (c) 2022 jan Kalenda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
PIAAC and the South – Is Southering the new Othering? Global Expansion of dominant Discourses on Adult Literacy
Large-scale studies such as Programme for the international assessment of adult competencies (PIAAC) are currently the most influential variant of literacy research. PIAAC is undergoing a process of regional expansion towards countries located in the geographical south. Based on the finding that large-scale studies can create stereotypes about social groups, this contribution examines the extent to which this danger also exists with regard to countries and regions. For doing so we suggest the term southering. Southering brings together the discourses about the South with the concept of othering, introduced by Said (1978). The presentation of the results as tables and world maps can result in exposing countries of the South to a pronounced deficit perspective. The contribution does not pursue the goal of questioning the legitimacy of international studies. Rather, we would like to point out the necessity of exercising due care in the interpretation of corresponding study results.
Copyright (c) 2020 Grotlüschen and Buddeberg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Experiences of intrinsic values in education for older adults: insights from a Swedish senior university
This study aims to acquire more knowledge about the meaning of intrinsic values in or­ganised post-work non-formal educational activities for older adults. Observations and focus group interviews were conducted at a senior university in Sweden. John Dewey’s concept of experi­ence and theory of value are used to facilitate a deeper under­standing of the in­trinsic values that were identified. The results of the study demonstrate what intrinsic values in education for older adults can be, as well as how they are experienced. Several intrinsic values were identified: (i) new insights and widened perspectives, (ii) the reflective process, (iii) enrichment, (iv) meaningfulness, (v) enjoyment, (vi) peacefulness, (vii) existential awareness, (viii) relational support and (ix) sense of community. The results further reveal how the values of education are experienced in the interactions and relations between older individuals and the social environment in the ongoing education and that the activities themselves are valued by the participants.
Copyright (c) 2022 Magnus Schoultz, Johan Öhman, Mikael Quennerstedt https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Work pedagogy as an alternative path to adult life
In recent years, much attention has been paid to how young people in the ‘not in education, employment or training’ group can get education or work, not only to ensure welfare and social mobility but also because education constitutes an important bridge between childhood and adult life. This article discusses the usefulness of work pedagogy for young people in this transition Theoretically, the article draws on a socialization theory concept of life history and a critical theory concept of work. Methodologically, it is based on a narrative autobiographical interview with a young girl in a Danish ‘production school’. This enables a critical analysis of how young people's educational participation is closely linked to life history experiences and transitions from childhood to adult life. These experiences form the basis for the young people’s subsequent participation in various forms of (compensatory) adult education.
Copyright (c) 2022 Lene Larsen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Editorial: Capitalism(s) and the future of adult education policy
Copyright (c) 2021 Marcella Milana, Martin Kopecký, Fergal Finnegan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Leading Intergenerational Learning in Organizations: An Example from Turkey
Within the fact that there are members of different generations in organizations nowadays, intergenerational learning in organizations has become more and more important. Some managers are observed to confuse about how to lead intergenerational learning environments in their organizations which makes important to conduct a research on this problem. Thus, this study was conducted and it aimed to understand the intergenerational learning process and how to lead it in a production facility in Turkey. The study group includes 61 people who are employees, team leaders, department directors, field directors and instructors. The study was carried out in the phenomenological research design. The data were gathered through interviews and analysed with content analysis. The results brought out six main themes, which are which are creating zone, acting according to generational differences, increasing motivation, supporting personal development, recording and managing “know-how”, and creating intergenerational respect and understanding.
Copyright (c) 2021 Soner Polöat, Gizem Günçavd?, Y?lmazer Y?lmaz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Editorial: Adult education and migration
Copyright (c) 2020 Andreas Fejes, Silke Schreiber-Barsch and Danny Wildemeersch https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
This paper identifies some of the key characteristics of the marketisation of adult learning and education (ALE) and analyses the effects in the contexts of Germany (focusing on Bavaria) and Slovenia. ALE policies and institutional practices are analysed through the method of document analysis and interviews. Policy models of ALE proposed by Lima and Guimarães—the democratic–emancipatory model, the modernisation and state control model, and the human resources management model—are used as an analytical framework. Our findings indicate that the latter model prevails in the analysed policies, while the market forces are introduced on the organisational level of ALE from ‘below’ through the increased influence of the market demand coming from the learners/customers, and from ‘above’ through calls for tenders that shape the ‘quasi-market’ in which the ALE organisations compete for funding. However, signs of resistance to the marketisation of ALE practices are also identified.
Copyright (c) 2021 Tadej Košmerl, Borut Mikulec https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Public Reason, Adult Education and Social Imagination
Communities of publics where citizens together develop informed opinion as basis for political decisions is crucial to democracy; and adult education can contribute vitally to such communities. This was argued by two critical social scientists, Charles Wright Mills and Oskar Negt. Researching and writing in different situations and drawing on different traditions, they voiced many of the same concerns about the inequalities and contradictions of modern capitalist societies. Mills and Negt argued that citizens and publics need to grasp the interrelations between society at large and individual lives and troubles. It is also necessary to transgress the immediate reality and its options, to imagine how societies and lives could take different turns, both in negative and positive directions. This article makes a case that imaginative fiction literature can help critical social science and adult education in promoting such social imagination.
Copyright (c) 2021 Palle Rasmussen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Capitalism, migration, and adult education
Migration has become both a consequence of and support structure for global racialised capitalism. A presumed source of support for the people who migrate is adult education, especially the second language learning class. However, as a state organized institution, the policies and practices that govern second-language courses serve to inculcate the ideologies and values that support a racialised capitalist system. We draw on two case examples – the U.S. and Germany – to demonstrate these entanglements. We engage Freire’s critical pedagogy wherein learning contexts encourage students to question the realities of their lives, and Foucault’s ideas regarding heterotopian places where the hegemonic norm is suspended and different approaches of pedagogical work can be implemented. We conclude with the suggestion of different pedagogical paths – a ‘pedagogy of dreaming’ and a ‘pedagogy of courage.’
Copyright (c) 2021 Alisha M.B. Heinemann, Lilia Monzó https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Critiques of capitalism have constituted the backbone of political economies addressing living, working, and learning conditions in a variety of forms of capitalism. This paper explores different approaches to representations of the future of (adult) education in capitalist Europe. It examines the 1960s and 1970s as a period when rapid technological change was addressed in studies of the future in Europe by proponents of post-industrial society, New Left public intellectuals, professional futurologists, and critics of late capitalism, envisaged quite different futures for both society and organised adult learning. Attention is subsequently focused on the pan-European project Educating Man for the 21st Century during the early 1970s which envisaged the future as ‘neo-industrial/neo-capitalist society’ in the year 2000. In conclusion, the paper offers a critical account of early encounters with neoliberal politics during the 1970s and early 1980s, particularly the cultural materialist work of Raymond Williams.
Copyright (c) 2021 Barry J Hake https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Gender and Polish family discourse in adult education:
The main aim of the paper is to reconstruct the family discourse in adult education in Poland in the context of the gender research perspective present in this discourse. The narrative starts from an analysis of the family as a place of informal learning and the family research in adult education, as well as family learning/informal learning of adults in a family, to come to an analysis of the gender approach in adult education and gendered learning of adults, as well as researching gender in the Polish family discourse present in adult education. In reference to the latest literature and analyses of different contexts of family research in adult education, both international and Polish, at the end the author presents a small part of the findings from the biographical research it was conducted on a dual-career family and the process of constructing gender equality in marriage as an example of gendered family discourse in adult education.
Copyright (c) 2021 Joanna Ostrouch-Kami?ska https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
What can we learn from COVID-19 as a form of public pedagogy?
This paper aims to investigate the corona-crisis as a large-scale, unplanned and unintended global experiment of ‘public pedagogy’. An investigation is focused on touching upon emergent questions such as: What does our experience of the crisis brought about by the emergence of this specific virus tell us about our assumptions of learning and of public engagement with an issue as a form of public pedagogy? We bring into play transactional theory of teaching and learning, as well as Jan Masschelein’s notion of pedagogical milieu of study and Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobject to conceptualize what we can learn from COVID-19 in terms of teaching and learning.
Copyright (c) 2021 Stefan Bengtsson, Katrien Van Poeck https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Migrants’ self-perception of technical skills and occupational realities: A case of Zimbabwean School- Leaver Migrants in Botswana
The level of technical skills affects the integration of migrants into the host country’s labour market. This study investigated the relationship between Zimbabwean school-leaver migrants’ self-perception of technical skills and occupational realities. A mixed-method research design was used in this study and systematic sampling was used to select respondents for the study. Questionnaires were administered on 60 respondents to collect quantitative data whilst 19 respondents provided qualitative data using semi-structured interviews. Findings suggested that most low-skilled migrants from Zimbabwe faced several challenges including failure to secure formal employment, obtain work and residence permits because of their low-level technical skills and qualifications. This challenge further affects migrants’ social integration and economic status in the host country. Findings also revealed that there are no strategies to provide skills to migrant labour to assist them to join the mainstream labour market and reduce their life challenges in Botswana.
Copyright (c) 2022 Jerald Hondonga https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Beyond the Trinity of Gender, Race and Class
Research exploring the gendered dimensions of adult learning has blossomed in the past two decades. Despite this trend, intersectional approaches in adult learning, research, and teaching remain limited primarily to the three categories of gender, race, and class. Intersectionality theory is more diverse than this and includes discussions of social structures, geographies, and histories that serve to build richer, more nuanced descriptions of how privilege and oppression are experienced. Because the purpose of intersectionality is to understand how social identities are constructed and to challenge the structures of power that oppress particular social groups, this approach is important for feminist and social justice educators. The Canadian authors of this manuscript posit that adult learning should move beyond intersectionality that focuses only on the trinity of gender + race + class in order to consider the nuances of inequality and the true complexities of representation and collective identities. By exploring literature in feminism, adult education, and intersectionality, they illustrate a gap at the core of adult education for social justice. Finally, they use two examples to illustrate how intersectionality works in practice.
Copyright (c) 2021 Cindy Hanson, Amber Fletcher https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The new feminist frontier on community-based learning
Feminist activism has always promoted informal learning opportunities for men and women. Internet, along with ICTs have expanded these opportunities by affording large-scale feminist mobilising and connection. Yet the digital environment is not only enhancing feminist campaigning but also facilitating the contexts to abusive behaviours flourish. Departing from the concept of social movement learning, in this article, we examine the significance to adult education of the large-scale reinvigoration of feminist activism in tandem with the surge of anti-feminist and misogynist ideas in the digital environment. We argue that just as online social media brought unprecedented opportunities to provide social movement learning, it offered the same tools to misogynists groups, mostly led by a toxic understanding of masculinity. By co-opting the same online opportunities, the feminist movement enjoys, individualised and collective toxic masculinity agency is a potential foe to match, reinventing the same struggle, demanding an ongoing battle towards deconstructing patriarchy.
Copyright (c) 2021 Rita Basílio Simões, Inês Amaral, Sofia José Santos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Dropout in adult education as a phenomenon of fit
In adult training practice, dropout marks the transition from participation to non-participation. There are only a few theoretical models, especially from the second half of the 20th century, that address this phenomenon. With special consideration to the congruence model of Boshier (1973) and the integration model of Tinto (1975, 1993) the study focuses first on the theoretical discussion of empirically grounded models for the explanation of dropout in the field of adult education. Against the background of analyses of 40 problem-centered interviews with dropouts from adult education, the two models are examined as to their explanatory contributions. Based on these empirical and theoretical explorations, a newly developed typology of as well as a model for dropout are proposed which topicalize dropout in adult education as a phenomenon of fit.
Copyright (c) 2022 Veronika Thalhammer, Stefanie Hoffmann, Aiga von Hippel, Bernhard Schmidt-Hertha https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Age images and learning in late life. Coping with crisis experiences as a potential in long-life societies
This paper discusses the potential that coping with ageing experiences in later life might have for dealing with the current Covid-19-pandemic. The paper is based on the results of a qualitative study on subjective ageing experiences and the respective coping strategies of older people. The study is based on subject-obnderlying social structures. (e.g. BMBF, 2010). A qualitative research design was developed using the method of group discussions. The data gathered in these discussions were evaluated based on the approach of grounded theory. The results of this study are discussed regarding the ways in which the coping strategies of the participants revealed the specific abilities of older people to manage crisis experiences. The findings offer new perspectives on improving current images of ageing.
Copyright (c) 2021 Claudia Kulmus https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Crises in our society – climate, covid-19 and mass migration – seem to define not only the experience of learning but also the experience of living and even surviving that in turn have implications for adult learning. We explore the concept of experience and examine whether it plays a role in addressing the need for transformative learning. Our allies in this task are Oskar Negt from the Frankfurt School tradition, L. A. Paul from a philosophical tradition and René Arcilla. Negt is useful for rethinking the role of experience in pedagogy. Paul helps identify the not-knowing aspect of our current experience and our inability to imagine how decisions translate into one’s way of living and being in the world. Arcilla emphasises the importance of keeping conversations going. Jack Mezirow’s transformation theory (relying on Habermas) informs the understanding of adult learning and how we can transform our way of being and living while facing experiences of crises and disorientation.
Copyright (c) 2021 Saskia Eschenbacher, Ted Fleming https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In contrast to qualitative and theoretical approaches, the mainstream of quantitative research often still finds it difficult to incorporate modern concepts of diversity and intersectionality into its work. This article aims to highlight various aspects in which large studies and their evaluations marginalise or ignore certain parts of the population. In surveying data, large-scale surveys like the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) often not only operate on a binary gender concept but also do not differentiate between a person gender identity and their social gender. In addition, commonly used methods keep unequal distributions invisible. Non-binary people are virtually invisible, unequal benefits for women remain hidden and the intersectional diversity inside the broad gender categories poses challenges to the mainstream of quantitative research in adult education. Therefore, there is a need for a feminist approach to statistics and quantitative research.
Copyright (c) 2021 Lisanne Heilmann https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
LGBTI Sexualities and intersectional research
We examine testimonies pertaining to the integration of a gender perspective beyond the dichotomy man-woman into practices of affective-sexual adult learning and education (ALE). We are interested in inclusive practices able to expand voices from specific vulnerable groups against discriminations and multiple oppressions among the aged when belonging to LGBTI Communities. The framework is based on post-feminist contributions, to allow for a democratic understanding of gender equality as well as to integrate population sectors suffering from different types of gender-based violence, such as non-heterosexual, trans and intersex people. The narrative literature review method was chosen, and international scientific search engines and databases were consulted to find literature in Portuguese, Spanish and English. A total of 25 educational interventions were selected for analysis. To discuss the data, we resorted to Barragán’s (1996) theoretical models. The results show a small number of internationally documented experiences on affective-sexual education with the elderly and adults
Copyright (c) 2021 Rosanna Barros, Agustín Romero López, Alejandro Granero Andújar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Rebellion as a learning experience in the light of narrations of adults participating in protests. Selected issues
The aim of this article is to show the learning potential of participation in protests in the narratives of several adults. Participation in rebellions is seen as a specific learning experience here. What is the relationship between experience and learning on the example of participation in rebellions? The author analyses this relationship, inter alia, on the example of critical practices described by Usher. This article is a part of a broader research project on learning mechanisms of adults participating in various forms of rebellion. The study is concerned with answering the questions: what and how do protesters learn? what are the social and cultural mechanisms of their learning? In this research project a biographical perspective was used. Within it, the biography is understood in a processual way. The biographical method focuses on the subjective level of experience in the socio-cultural and institutional context. The empirical material was analysed by searching for similarities and differences in rebels’ narratives. The results of the study are above all the identification of learning outcomes and identity-building processes.
Copyright (c) 2021 Przemyslaw Szczygiel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Contemporary dance as being and becoming in the age of aging
This article takes experiences from a contemporary multi-artistic dance project as a starting-point. The aim is to describe and explore how such a project can offer possibilities for being and becoming among elderly amateur dancers, based on a phenomenological way of thinking. The phenomenon of the investigation is self-conceptualization. The multi-artistic process and context is defined as an adult educational situation. To come close to the lived experiences of the dancers, the rehearsals as well as the performance were observed, and documented. Six of the participants were also interviewed. The material was analyzed in a hermeneutical phenomenological manner, and de Beauvoir’s thinking regarding aging, was used as a theoretical lens. The results show how the self-images of the participants change throughout the project. The dance activities seem to give the elderly possibilities to remain themselves, even if they become different. They learn to know themselves, each other and the world.
Copyright (c) 2021 Cecilia Ferm Almqvist https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Biographicity as ‘mental grammar’ of postmodern life
‘Biographicity’ is a concept that has been discussed in international adult education for more than 30 years. It has stimulated research concepts and has become a metaphor for the resilience potential of biographical learning processes in modernised modern societies. A basic theoretical foundation has so far been lacking. This article attempts to provide such a foundation. The stimulating influence of modern neurobiology will be discussed in the first section (1). Afterwards, innovations and restrictions of a systemtheoretically reformulated biography theory will be the issue (2). Its self-referentiality blockades can be illustrated clearly by the problem of the social construction of ‘gender’, in which we also reach the limits of the interactionist concept of construction (3). This theoretical discourse creates a concept of its own: the idea of a ‘biographical habitus’ as the ‘mental grammar’ of life in postmodern societies (4).
Copyright (c) 2020 Peter Alheit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Adult education and its teachers have an important role when it comes to providing knowledge that prepares asylum seekers for a potential life in a new country of residence. In this article we focus on the study circles organised by study associations and analyse the way study circle leaders (SCLs) mobilise their experience of migration in their work with asylum seekers. The article is based on interviews with SCLs and managers, who have been SCLs themselves, and by drawing on a social psychological approach, we analyse SCLs’ relational work with the participants. The analysis shows that SCLs’ migrant background is mobilised as a pedagogical resource and has a prominent influence on the relationship with the participants. However, the relationship is a balancing act, since there is a risk that the asymmetrical pedagogical relationship becomes more symmetrical and thus turns into friendship, guardianship and/or social work.
Copyright (c) 2020 Sofia Nyström, Magnus Dahlstedt, Andreas Fejes, Nedžad Meši? https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Boosting adults scientific literacy with experiential learning practices
Working as an interdisciplinary team, from the departments of Education and Biology we organized a short experiential learning seminar followed by a hands-on workshop for the promotion of citizen scientific literacy. Participants were adult lifelong learners enrolled in University programs, and others were adults interested in scientific activities without a motivation towards continuous learning. Through a teaching dynamic based on learning science by doing science, they could make close contact with the research procedures in scientific laboratories and learn about the use of DNA to identify unknown fish species. The data collected about their learning gains in this science literacy experience showed that elder lifelong learners found the basic scientific concepts more difficult to understand than the non-lifelong learners, but were more motivated to engage in science education activities than the latter, which makes them a very interesting potential group to recruit for citizen science initiatives.
Copyright (c) 2021 Eduardo Dopico, Alba Ardura, Yaisel J. Borrell, Laura Miralles, Eva García-Vázquez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Paternalistic benevolence – Enabling violence
The transnational empirical project zooms in on ‘German language classrooms’ and the teachers’ task of dealing with the double bind between ‘the need to teach the German language for the empowerment of the learners’ on the one hand and the consequent ‘reproduction of the hegemonic norm of a monolingual society’ on the other. The teachers in the focus of the project work for institutes of adult education with learners who are migrants and refugees living in Germany or Austria. The results show how teachers frame their work through two central positions. The first can be framed as ‘paternalistic benevolence’and the second as ‘enabling violence’. The latter corresponds to a critical stance reflecting on the harm done in learning spaces while still being inevitable in nation states that construct themselves as monolingual unities. Pedagogical professionals looking for a responsible path that reduces the violence done to a minimum will discover interesting reflections on the possibilities of how to find an always uncertain and contradictory place in the interstices.
Copyright (c) 2020 Alisha M.B. Heinemann, Saman A. Sarabi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Migration, culture contact and the complexity of coexistence
This paper covers a part of a larger qualitative and participatory study on the integration of asylum seekers and refugees hosted in the Province of Lecco, Northern Italy. Their embodied experience as newcomers and the daily relationships with space, with others, and with the public discourse is the main focus of the paper. The notion of coexistence, its struggles, constraints and possibilities, is addressed following Bateson’s work on culture contact and a systemic theoretical framework. The discourse of integration is deconstructed and challenged, re-imagining the outcome of culture contact as the unpredictable effect of complex, relational, and entangled processes of interaction. Newcomers’ movements in the physical and symbolic space are studied with aesthetic and generative methods, inspired by the spatial and sensory turns in social sciences. The methodology is multiple and layered: interviews, focus groups, narrative aesthetic workshops and sensobiographic walks are used to chronicle and interpret narratives of coexistence, at a micro, meso, and macro level.
Copyright (c) 2020 Laura Formenti, Silvia Luraschi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Modernisation of organisations due to migration?
The following paper discusses as a research question the effects of increased migration by refugees and asylum-seekers on German adult education centres (Volkshochschule - VHS). Other studies have focused on the effects of co-called integration courses on learners, their trajectories, or general societal effects, such as inclusion in the labour market. In these studies, adult education was perceived as a means of how to deal with migration and integration, and the research was less focused on how migration and integration affects adult education centres. Based on modernity theories, this study used quantitative analysis in order to determine if the approximately 900 German adult education centres have changed in the last two decades due to increased migration and different legal frameworks. Program analysis were used in previous studies, while here the provider statistics were used for a longitudinal data analysis. This analysis focused on the following three factors: professional staff, the fields/subjects of provision, and financial sources.
Copyright (c) 2020 Bernd Käpplinger https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Potential of Peer Guidance to Empower Migrants for Employment
Peerness is a common approach to learning, especially in Nordic adult education, but is increasingly adopted by European Union (EU)-funded projects that aim to improve migrants’ employability. This article discusses action research that evaluated an ESF-funded project, run by a Finnish popular adult education association in collaboration with vocational adult education institutes, NGOs, and a trade union. The project trained migrants to become peer group guides and empower migrant-background participants for employment. The training prepared guides to become experiential experts, but increased the distance between the participants and themselves. The guidance could even strengthen the otherness of participants when the peerness was based solely on sharing a migrant background. Voluntary peer guidance may reinforce this separation, but dependence on ESF funding also shapes mainstream adult education; therefore, the empowerment of migrants should build on collaboration between experiential experts and guidance professionals as part of the regular adult education system.
Copyright (c) 2020 Satu Heimo, Katriina Tapanila, Anna Ojapelto, Anja Heikkinen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This article aims to explore continuity and change in adult migrants’ experiences of Swedish for immigrants (SFI), a state-subsidised language programme for basic Swedish. The study has a longitudinal and comparative design, drawing on discourse analysis of qualitative interviews conducted with language learners in 2001/2002 and 2015/2016. This period was characterized by important societal shifts, defined by increased migration, growing tension between discourses on rights and obligations of adult migrants living in Sweden, and an intensified marketisation of the Swedish education system derived from neoliberal principles. The study describes how these changes affected SFI as well as the conceivable impact that restructuring the language programme had on the learners. Ultimately, the study highlights tensions between various state initiatives that impacted the language programme and the SFI participants’ experiences of being adult language learners.
Copyright (c) 2020 Katrin Ahlgren, Maria Rydell https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Transformative learning theory and migration
This paper introduces the concept of transformative conversation inspired by Arcillas concept of edifying conversation, as an extension of TL theorys notion of discourse, in the context of adult education and migration. By contrasting the idea of exchanging arguments with opening space for conversation and ones private quest for meaning and self-understanding, I introduce the idea of becoming a fellow transformative conversationalist as an appropriate attitude for promoting TL. I will (1) differentiate between an instrumental and a transformative notion of learning in the context of migration; (2) engage Rorty in a conversation with TL theory; (3) introduce Arcillas concept of edifying conversation to join and broaden the ongoing conversation and develop the concept of transformative conversation.
Copyright (c) 2020 Saskia Eschenbacher https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Migrants, coming to Germany, must attend integration courses in order to obtain a residence permit. These courses are comprised of a language section as well as an orientation section. The latter’s purpose is, according to the German Federal Agency for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), the transmission of knowledge of the German legal system, culture, and history and especially of democratic values of the German political system (BAMF, 2017, p. 6). This article examines the challenges that instructors and participants of those courses face when it comes to the teaching and learning of democratic values, based on a qualitative research conducted in 2018. As the theoretical lens, this article incorporates the concept of dialogue by Martin Buber.
Copyright (c) 2020 Tetyana Kloubert, Inga Dickerhoff https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Research over the last few decades has supported the contention that ‘there are different literacy practices in different domains of social life ….[and] these change over time’_x000D_ (Hamilton, Tett, & Crowther, 2012, p.3). In this article, we use ‘political literacy’, as conceived by Paulo Freire, as a theoretical lens through which to consider non-formal education in the changing context of South Africa. After considering the influence of Freire’s thinking in the black consciousness (BC) movement in South Africa during the 1970s, we consider a current BC-aligned non-formal education intervention in Freedom Park, a township outside Johannesburg, drawing on research conducted in 2018. This used snowball sampling and qualitative data collection methods, including observation of a ‘political class’ currently run in the community. We found that, in contrast to ways in which Freire was used in the BC movement in the anti-Apartheid struggle, the ‘political class’ leaned towards what Freire termed the authoritarian left.
Copyright (c) 2020 The author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Adult literacies from the perspective of practitioners and their learners: a case study from the north of England
This article is based on qualitative research with adult literacy practitioners and learners in the north of England. I draw on interview and focus group data to identify their perspectives on adult literacies and compare these with the understandings of literacy on which current policy-making for adult literacy in England is based. The research revealed a wide range of ways in which literacy is understood in practice, compared with a much narrower conceptualisation in current policy. The article concludes that teachers’ and learners’ perspectives on adult literacies reinforce the notion that literacy is not a fixed concept, but that its meanings and uses vary according to time and context. It argues, however, that a policy environment based on an understanding of literacy which emphasizes employability and economic outcomes creates challenges for teachers and_x000D_ learners to maintain their own perspectives in relation to what literacy constitutes and what is important in adult literacy education.
Relationship with Literacy: a longitudinal perspective on the literacy practices and learning of young people without a diploma
This article explores the temporal dimension of the ‘rapport à l’écrit’ (relationship with literacy) in the lives of two young people-Anaïs (aged 19) and Zachary (aged 22)-without a secondary school diploma. The article draws on data taken from a mixedmethods longitudinal study looking at young people’s transitions in Québec (Canada). Process Analysis is used as an analytical framework. The results suggest that young people without a secondary school diploma do not necessarily have a difficult or negative relationship with literacy. By focusing on the relationship with literacy and its evolution over time, it is possible to put emphasis on young people’ positive investment in a number of literacy practices and not be limited to school practices alone. Our findings confirm the relevance of exploring the temporal dimension of the relationship with literacy for policy makers, researchers, and educators.
Editorial: The changing landscapes of literacy and adult education
Critical information literacy: Adult learning and community perspectives
This article considers the evolution of information literacy as a distinct area of inquiry and instruction in libraries. The influence of critical and feminist pedagogies is paramount for the development of critical approaches to understanding an information landscape that is highly politicized. The definition and practice of information literacy will be described, followed by an exploration of critical approaches that help interrogate how information access and control affect these literacy goals and people’s democratic right to information. Information literacy that is grounded in social justice goals can be strengthened through the collaboration of librarians with other adult educators, community development practitioners, social service providers and activists.
Low literacy in Germany: Results from the second German literacy survey
When Germany performed the first national assessment on reading and writing skills among adults in 2010 (LEO), it was late compared to other European countries such as_x000D_ England or France. Now the results of the second round of that survey reveal a higher average literacy level in Germany compared to the preceding survey. In this paper, we briefly discuss the state of literacy research in large-scale surveys and offer some critical viewpoints. Next, we present the results of the two LEO surveys from 2010 and 2018. Besides providing information about the composition of the low-literate adult population in Germany (aged 18–64 years), we selected results that might help to critically revise current stereotypes about adults who have difficulties reading and writing.
The Rise and Fall of Adult Literacy: Policy Lessons from Canada
There was a period of time, from the late 1980s until the early/mid-2000s, when interest in adult literacy in Canada was strong among the public, in the media, and with policymakers, and a policy window opened for the mainstreaming of literacy. Against this background, it is surprising that the Canadian literacy infrastructure was subsequently_x000D_ largely dismantled. Drawing on theories of policy formation, and recent and previous research, including interviews with key stakeholders, we argue that mainstreaming literacy has failed and explore the reasons for this failure. The paper is structured in three sections. First, we report on the construction of an adult literacy infrastructure in Canada over two phases: i) the period from the 1970s up until the launch of the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) in 1994; ii) the story of IALS and changes occurring up until around 2005. Second, we examine the reasons for the failure of the mainstreaming of literacy in Canada. We conclude with further reflections on the present situation in which adult literacy has been largely reduced to employability skills which are under-supported.
Interconnected literacy practices: exploring classroom work with literature in adult second language education
Previously, there has been little research conducted on how teachers and adult second language learners negotiate the challenge of reading authentic novels in the target language. This qualitative classroom study explores literacy practices in adult intermediate second language instruction, involving two teachers and their diverse student groups over four weeks of work with literature. The material has been generated during weekly book discussions, through observations, voice recordings and the collection of texts and other teaching materials. The result shows a strong orientation towards meaning-making, which was scaffolded by the teachers directing attention to language, style and narrative structure. Thus, different kinds of literacy practices were interconnected. Although practices of critical text analysis were not prioritised by the participant teachers, it is shown how the students used their diverse experiences and knowledge to read both ‘with’ and ‘against’ the grain of the text. Implications for teaching and steering documents are discussed.
Signposts of change in the landscape of adult basic education in Austria: a telling case
Drawing on a strongly grassroots and expertise-supported development in the field of adult basic education in Austria, this paper traces the current shift to politically motivated_x000D_ interventions. The article is based on a methodologically triangulated case study based on interviews (part 1), review of theory (part 2), and document analysis (part 3). It unveils_x000D_ a unique spirit of empowerment and emancipation in Austrian adult basic education. This spirit currently seems to be at risk. The authors identified five signposts of a changing_x000D_ landscape showing a strong tendency towards impact orientation in terms of employability and upskilling: (1) Standardisation and one of its unintended consequences (2) Technocracy over expertise (3) Narrowing the curriculum (4) Teaching supersedes facilitating (5) Research and development – disliked. In order to preserve the tradition within the framework of adult basic education, the authors emphasise the importance of raising informed and critical voices.
The paradox of utilitarian recognition of prior learning
In this article, we examine the vertical influence of the European Union (EU) policy on recognition of prior learning (RPL) in one Southern European country (Portugal) and in a Central European one (Slovenia). We stress the influence of the EU policy on adult education (AE) policies and the development of RPL granting professional qualification. Although not widely acknowledged in adult education theoretical discussions, we use the RPL models introduced by Judy Harris to debate the main aims of core official RPL national policy documents from 2000 to 2018 using documentary analysis. Comparative analysis of the two countries is made, and similarities and differences between the RPL provisions are debated. Our findings indicate the relevance of the utilitarian approach to RPL within national policies. Furthermore, these findings allow us to question why employers give little attention to adult learners’ qualification acquired through RPL.
Copyright (c) 2020 Paula Guimarães, Borut Mikulec https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Knowledge ‘transfer’ as sociocultural and sociomaterial practice
Research on migration and knowledge transfer predominantly focuses on expatriate and return migrants, who are acclaimed for transferring knowledge from the west to the rest of the world. Not only does the literature reinforce the west as the epistemic centre, but it conjures a realist image of knowledge as an objective thing. To interrupt these images, this paper examines the knowledge transfer experiences of 22 immigrant engineers in Canada. Theoretically, it posits knowledge transfer as an effect of immigrants’ enrolment in sociocultural and sociomaterial practices within professions. Empirically, it pinpoints three ways in which immigrants help expand engineering practices, i.e., assembling knowledge, mobilizing the capacity of learning to learn, and negotiating being and becoming. The process of transfer, as accounted by research respondents, is enabled through access to epistemic and boundary objects, reception of peer professionals, and the rise of (niche) needs. The paper draws on a narrative case study.
Copyright (c) 2020 Hongxia Shan http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Editorial: Active ageing, social inclusion and wellbeing: Benefits of learning in later life
Copyright (c) 2019 The author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Inclusion in education later in life: Why older adults engage in education activities
The connection between education and wellbeing is presented as a general argument for the participation of older adults in education, but is this reason why older adults themselves choose to engage in education activities? This paper combines the results from two previous empirical studies and addresses how older adults account for their participation in education activities. The first empirical data set comprises a survey completed by 232 Swedish pensioners. The second empirical data set comprises stories by 53 Swedish pensioners about their participation at Senior University. The same dominant arguments for their participation in education emerged in both studies; namely (i) staying active and (ii) socialising. However, this observation can be understood in terms of motives and benefits, something which indicates a possible fusion of extrinsic- and intrinsic motivation. A closer reading of the narratives reveals that many participants enrolled in Senior University because other family members, friends, and former work-colleagues had enrolled. This suggests that what on the surface may appear as an individual’s choice could, in fact, be explained by social factors.
The role of empowerment and agency in the lives of older men living alone
Longevity and changes in family status are leading to a growing number of men living alone in later life. They are often considered an at risk group in terms of deprivation, suicide and mental health problems, a perspective that has informed community services. This paper reports on a study that set out to get a better understanding of this historically new group, particularly in light of significant structural and cultural changes to later life and ageing. The study used interviews with stakeholders and biographical interviews with older men living alone in Frankfurt/Main, a city with a particularly high rate of men over 65 in single occupancy households. The analysis suggests that service providers were interested in encouraging men to recognise and act on their needs, an approach informed by empowerment as well as active ageing strategies. The analysis from the biographical data shows that living alone was a learning process and involved the ability for men to care for themselves as well as others. Learning to live alone enabled them to maintain an identity as an independent individual.
Focussing on tutoring skills instead of learners’ disadvantages in teenaged tutors’ training for intergenerational learning programmes
In the twenty-first century non-professional tutors, including teenagers, have an important role to play in the development of contemporary skills among the older population. Scholars in the field of older-age learning share a common belief that age-specific knowledge should be introduced and implemented when instructing older people. At the same time, psychologists warn that only perceived similarities between members of an in-group and out-group can reduce the age stereotypes they may hold. Therefore, focusing on age-specific knowledge in preparing teenaged tutors for instructing older individuals in the acquisition of e-skills would not support age-stereotype dilution in intergenerational programmes. An alternative idea is introduced by analysing the connections between geragogical principles and the nature of scaffolding assistance. It is proposed to focus on tutors’ scaffolding skills instead of older learners’ peculiarities when preparing teenaged tutors. The theoretically grounded idea will need to be validated by future empirical studies.
Education and socialisation in later life: The case of a University of Third Age in Portugal
In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in studying various dimensions of ageing and learning based on various disciplinary approaches. Nevertheless, insufficient research attention has been paid to education and learning among older adults (over 65 years old). Similarly, researchers have placed insufficient focus on the impacts of older adults’ learning and the benefits to their wellbeing. In this paper, we will present the results of a case study on a University of Third Age (U3A) in Portugal. We adopted an exploratory position, and our approach included documentary analysis, naturalistic observation, and semi-structured interviews. Our case study results revealed that this U3A is a non-formal learning space in which older adults are able to engage in different activities that stem from educative practices and socialisation between adults. In some cases, the U3A represents an opportunity to participate in an activity that individuals were unable to do earlier in their lives. However, without a space in which to socialise, such as a bar, it seems not difficult for new social networks to be generated and maintained. Such networks help to counteract older adults’ isolation and loneliness. This fact gives us some important clues concerning the relationships between individuals’ education, socialisation (social relations), and wellbeing.
Education matters: cumulative advantages and disadvantages amongst Portuguese older men
Our paper sought to analyse the influence of the educational background over various dimensions of the lives of Portuguese older men (age 60+) across the life course. Drawing on the theory of cumulative advantages and disadvantages we used biographical research, namely narrative interviews with men from different educational background: men with a very low educational background and men with a medium/high educational background. Our results show the influence of educational background in the life course, and how it can contribute to accumulation of advantages/disadvantages that explain their biographies and the very different situations in which they live today.
The potential of statistical matching for the analysis of wider benefits of learning in later life
It is challenging to investigate wider benefits of adult learning, especially in later life, due to limited data on educational activities and non-monetary returns in large, longitudinal surveys. Statistical matching provides an approach to exploit the potential of existing data by combining data sources with complementary features based on shared information. The paper describes the matching of two data sources (German Ageing Survey and Study of Educational Attainment and Interests of Older People) in order to examine the effects of educational participation on well-being in later life. We emphasize the matching procedure and how to identify the best-matched dataset. Based on matched data, effects of educational activities on life satisfaction are examined in later life. The discussion focuses on future demands on data and methods for investigating wider benefits of adult learning in quantitative research.
In this paper I illustrate how auto/biography, drawing on feminist research methodology, enabled me to chronicle and theorise the lived experience of class relations in the academy. I explain how auto-diegetic auto/biographical doctoral research has provided me with ‘both a mode of representation and a mode of reasoning’ (Richardson, 1997, p. 28) which was therapeutic, reflexive, as well as agentic to help me understand the sense of displacement in the academy and how I used my doctorate to redress that.
Copyright (c) 2020 Paula Stone https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The role of informal learning in adults’ literacy proficiency
This study used the PIAAC dataset to compare the effects of informal literacy learning on adults’ literacy proficiency to those of formal and non-formal learning. The study participants were Nordic adults aged 35–65 years. The statistical method was regression analysis. The results indicate that informal literacy learning had the most significant effect on Nordic adults’ literacy proficiency. Non-formal adult education had a clearly smaller effect, and formal adult education seemed to have a negative effect when background factors were controlled for. Informal learning, particularly reading outside work, had a significant effect independent of adults’ backgrounds, indicating that it offers also less-educated and unemployed adults the opportunity to develop literacy proficiency.
Copyright (c) 2021 Sari Sulkunen, Kari Nissinen, Antero Malin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Struggling with the reccuring reduction of being to knowing: placing thin hope in aesthetic interventions
This article explores how aesthetic gestures, experiences, interventions might help us make visible certain problematic, enduring, and historically contingent aspects of the troubling ways of being in which we, modern/Cartesian subjects exist in the world. The article does not seek to ultimately suggest some pedagogical strategies or approaches that will help us deconstruct/dismantle these problematic aspects. Instead, it proposes that the common way in which we imagine solutions to our problems, is the very way, through which these problems are being created in the first place. The text pays particular attention to two problematic constitutive characteristics of the modern/Cartesian subject. First is the reductivist insistence on having our being reduced to knowing (Andreotti, 2016) that results in having our relationship to the world mediated (exclusively) through knowledge. Second is our insistence on being able to see/sense/experience ourselves only as separate, presumably autonomous, individuals that ultimately ends up producing us as such..
Relational aesthetics: A duoethnographic research on feminism
This paper offers a frame to reflect on the role of aesthetics in the development of a critical pedagogy for social justice in adult education. Arts-based research and practice have the power to illuminate the participants’ views, ideas, and feelings, as well as the systems of values that are embedded in their contexts. Critical thinking and awareness are the result of relational and political processes, triggered by experience and going beyond subjectivity. The authors aim at defining a pedagogical practical theory that celebrates complexity, opens possibilities, develops the new, and triggers deliberate action, rather than fostering specific behaviours or learning. The paper itself is a piece of that pedagogy, developed through a cooperative method of writing-as-inquiry (duoethnography), here triggered by a photographic exhibition and resulting in the dialogic exploration of feminism in the authors’ lives. In this example, it is shown how individual voices can be juxtaposed to develop an open, transforming theory of feminism, identity, and education.
Editorial: Adult Education and the Aesthetic Experience
Varieties of agencies during working life changes
The aim of this study is to shed light on the varieties of workers´ agencies in working life change situations, which is an under-researched topic in the literature of workplace learning and in working life studies. The research questions are what kinds of agencies there are to be found when workers encounter changes and how the different kinds of agencies are connected together. The understanding of agency is grounded on the subject-centered socio-cultural approach, whereas the methodological approach is based on applying life-course perspective on research material consisting of 48 working life narratives written by Finnish adults. The narratives are analyzed by abductive content analysis. The results reveal the dynamical and periodical processes between the different kinds of agencies during one´s working life narrative. The different forms of agency overlap and rotate. Suffering can be seen as a dynamic concept mediating transformative agencies, small agency and resistance.
Copyright (c) 2020 Anu Järvensivu http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The process of transformation: Kegan’s view through the lens of a film by Wenders
The aim of this paper is the exploration of Kegan’s constructive-developmental theory through the analysis of the behavior of an agent within Wenders’s film Alice in the Cities, which is used as a case study. In the first part, we will approach Kegan’s ideas regarding the evolution of human beings’ consciousness as they move through five progressively more complex orders of consciousness. We will also approach the connections of Kegan’s perspective to Mezirow’s Transformation Theory. Then, we will draw insights from the film in order to expand the exploration of some crucial issues of Kegan’s theory, such as: How is a person’s consciousness developed? Are there signs, when a person is situated in a certain order of consciousness, that he/she has the potential to move toward a next one? Which might be the adult educator’s role in assisting the learners’ evolutionary process? Finally, in the last section, some limitations of Kegan’s perspective will be critically discussed.
Debt, Learning and Migration in the Time of Crisis
This paper discusses the issue of learning in adulthood by those who were indebted during the financial crisis of 2008-2009. The field research was conducted in Iceland, where interviews with indebted Icelanders and migrants were conducted, along with a broader ethnographic study. The result of the study is a model of learning based on Peter Jarvis model, but adjusted when it comes to the context of social crisis and the possibility of migration.
Copyright (c) 2020 Piotr Kowzan https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Making beauty necessary and necessity beautiful
The article shows how unemployed working-class women in South Africa, through collective aesthetic experiences, achieved a sense of catharsis that strengthened the resolve to work towards creating alternatives. The text is based on a series of popular education workshops that were recorded in sound and images, and interviews with individual emerging artists. It draws on theory developed in practice by workers in the nineteen-eighties when they asserted their dignity and humanity as creative subjects and demonstrates how the women, some twenty-five years later, articulate a similar defiance. The article suggests that certain preconditions must be met before the process of conscientisation through creative work can achieve its objective of preparing participants for action: repoliticise art and education by building radically horizontal relationships; create a playful third space for experimentation and generating knowledge, and encourage improvisations that allow contradictions to emerge and be examined critically.
This article reports on part of a project that introduced philosophy programmes to a number of Scottish prisons. It centres on the deployment within these prisons of McCall’s(1991) Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CoPI). It provides a rationale for, and analyses the participation structure, of CoPI, setting out how its communicative constraints and demands provided prisoners with novel means of reasoning and engaging in dialogue with others and with oneself. In interviews conducted with a sample of participants, they described how the critical listening to, and reasoning with, each other in CoPI tutorials had allowed them to develop greater self-awareness and a more reflexive understanding of their own thinking and actions. Findings are framed within sociocultural theorising on literacies, learning and identity. Drawing on Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner & Cain (1998) account of identity and agency, we show how CoPI afforded participants a new positionality and discursive practices.
Copyright (c) 2020 Mary Bovill, Charles Anderson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Agency, identity and learning at turning points in women’s lives
This paper discusses the ways in which women aged 50, in two different cultural contexts (United Kingdom and Italy) narrate and portray turning points in their life course. Particular emphasis is put on the relationships between identity, learning and agency that emerge through work, family and life experiences. The reference paradigm is adopted from Narrative Learning Theory and the approach is qualitative and comparative in analysing the participant’s voice. For the UK sample, the data sources are 16 semi-structured interviews, including drawings representing the life course, selected from the study deposited in the UK Archives Data under the “Social Participation and Identity” project; for the Italian sample, the data sources are 28 semistructured interviews and drawings, based on the same selected items of the UK interviews and provided by women living in the North-East of Italy. This study will show how women’s representations of their life course and of turning points in their lives reveal different propensities to reflect on and learn from their own lives. The comparative perspective highlights, through two-level analysis (micro and macro) and by contrasting cultural, relational and social contexts, variations in ways these women are enabled or restricted in moving their lives forward. The research also contributes to methodological insight into the use of drawings in elucidating life course narratives.
Copyright (c) 2019 Chiara Biasin, Karen Evans https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Feminist Museum Hack as an aesthetic practice of possibility
This article outlines the central components, foundations and key activities of the Feminist Museum Hack, an investigative, pedagogical, analytical and interventionist tool we have designed to explore patriarchal assumptions behind the language, images and stragecrafting (positioning, lighting) of museums and art galleries. We also share findings from a study of student and community participants who employed the Hack in a museum in Canada and an art gallery in England. While differences existed due to institutional genres, findings showed participants’ ability to see and to reimagine absences, objectification, fragmentation, and double-standards and apply these to the world beyond the institution’s walls. As a form of pedagogy of possibility, the Hack encourages critique, just ire and the imagination. As it hones visual literacy skills it emboldens participants to challenge the authority of the museum narratives and to engage in creative practices of agency and activism.
Copyright (c) 2019 Darlene Clover, Sarah Williamson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Just facilitating access or dealing with diversity? Non-traditional students’ demands at a Spanish university
More and more the university institutions welcome a heterogeneous student population. In this article we analyse the main characteristics and needs of the so-called Non- Traditional Students in order to contribute to the development of more equitable conditions and improve their participation and holistic development. To this end, a qualitative study has been carried out at a Spanish university, which explored the experience of a diverse group of this type of student body. The results pointed out to a high level of motivation, determination and greater effort on the part of the group, in comparison with their mates. However, the traditional pedagogy was not suited to their characteristics and created difficulties for them. Few teachers were truly flexible with these students, since an egalitarian (rather than equitable) conception of pedagogical action prevailed. Among other things, we conclude by claiming a comprehensive and personalised education, adapted to their needs.
Copyright (c) 2019 Maria Teresa Padilla-Carmona, Inmaculada Martínez-García, David Herrera-Pastor https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This article examines the working of complex intergovernmental policies that have brought about new opportunities and structures in European adult education since the 2008 global financial crisis. Drawing on political sociology, it restricts attention on the Renewed European Agenda for Adult Learning (2011), to examine its historical development, and how it bundles together various governance mechanisms, policy instruments, and social actors to govern the adult education policy domain through policy coordination. This points at regulatory politics as a distinctive quality of European governance in adult education. Then, through Social Network Analysis, it explores in depth one of its policy instrument (i.e., coordinated working groups/networks) and the form of network governance it creates. This analysis pinpoints at the comparative advantage of some organizations (i.e., the ministries of Latvia, Finland and Belgium), which partake in this form of network governance. This produces unpredictable contingency in EU policy coordination.
Copyright (c) 2019 Marcella Milana, Luigi Tronca, Gosia Klatt https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Ethical codes in adult education as subjects of comparative analysis
In the process of professionalisation of adult educators, a significant role is played by qualification, educational and evaluation standards. However, they do not often deal with ethical questions which can arise from their relationship with participants of the educational process, from their membership in professional associations or from the relationship with an educational institution. This gap is filled by ethical codes, which are not legal standards but they are adult educators’ voluntary obligations. The importance of codes was a reason for the comparison of 26 ethical codes aiming to find their common features and non-standard regulations, to point out the prevailing structures and contents and disciplinary measures when the code is violated. The contribution of this study is to enrich the andragogical theory with a deeper understanding of the purpose of ethical codes, their structural elements and content. From the point of view of education policy, an analysis of codes can work as a specific monitoring of the market of educational services. It can serve for designing certification courses of adult educators as well as subjects in graduate studies in andragogy. The limitation of this study lies in the fact that the selection of codes was limited to codes written in four languages; however, one of them was English, which is a world language. As for the territorial scope, codes cover North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
Copyright (c) 2019 Josef Malach https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Measurement of media pedagogical competences of adult educators
Media pedagogical competence is critical for the modern-day adult educator. In the process of adult learning, both the use of digital media in the classroom and the transfer of knowledge in dealing with media are the basis for social participation and individual development that must be provided by teachers. However, at present little or no research has been conducted that assess media pedagogical competence of adult educators. Moreover, an instrument to measure media pedagogical competence was lacking. In order to redress these concerns, in the present paper an instrument for objectively measuring media pedagogical competence is designed and piloted with adult educators (n=622). The study provides the first results concerning objective measurement of adult educator media pedagogical competence.
Copyright (c) 2019 Matthias Rohs, Karin Julia Rott, Ricarda Bolten, Bernhard Schmidt-Hertha https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Change orientated learning and the Greek disability movement - a mutually beneficial encounter between knowledge and action
This paper is a qualitative survey based on the exploration of disabled peoples’ existing experience of participating in non-formal forms of education, which take place in the context of the Greek disability movement. Its aim is to record the way in which this kind of education can be a catalyst in the empowerment of disabled people. Data was obtained through semi-structured interviews held with both learners with disabilities and educators and from direct observation of the educational process. The main findings of this study explore the ways in which educators can contribute to the empowerment of disabled people. It is found that the empowerment of learners cannot simply be regarded as an aspect of education but rather as an integral part embedded in the content, in the educational methods and in the role of the educator. Finally, the paper highlights the necessity for disability organisations to cooperate with the fields of disability studies and adult education, in order for them to jointly conceive and try out new more transformative pedagogical methods.
Copyright (c) 2018 The author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Marginalised voices in the inclusive recruitment discourse: a dilemma of inclusion/exclusion in the (Swedish) police
Recruitment for diversity is part of a range of proactive strategies for overcoming occupational stereotyping in a number of professions, as well as addressing a history of discrimination against women and minority groups. One such campaign launched by the Swedish police involves ‘inclusive recruitment’. By analysing the discourse of inclusive recruitment and its subject positions in police student talk, this article shows how borders between people who are assigned different social categories are constructed, challenged and reinforced. Positive intentions in agendas towards diversity are problematised when minorities are ascribed as admitted on quotation, which places them in a ubordinate and ‘risky position’ within an occupation and on less legitimate premises. A dilemma emerges between a call to represent minority groups and the risk of categorising them as ‘others’. In particular, voices of resistance from ethnic minority police women show how practices of exclusion could jeopardise efforts to achieve inclusion.
Editorial: Intersectionality and adult education
Developing inclusive later life learning environments: insights from intersectional analysis of ageing and lesbian, gay, transgendered and bisexual identities
To date there has been minimal empirical inquiry on what may constitute inclusive learning environments for older (50+ years) lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) adults. This paper draws upon a recent life-histories study with older LGBT adults in Scotland to consider how such environments can be developed. To do so, intersectional analysis is applied to interrogate how participants’ lived realities and sense of self are enabled and constrained by the interactions between their diverse ageing, LGBT and other identities in the particular contexts of later life, post work. The paper argues that by adopting this approach to intersectional analysis, critical educational gerontology (CEG) is equipped to more effectively realise inclusive, meaningful and potentially empowering learning environments for older LGBT adults. These will be more attuned to their later life realities, enabling them to reflect on the changing significance of being LGBT as they age, while allowing potential for personal growth and renewed sense of self.
Gender consciousness through applied theatre
This paper describes an experience of the use of applied theatre for the promotion of gender equality. The fact that women continue to face multiple forms of discrimination as human beings, citizens and professionals justified the search of alternative training models. The Empowerment Labs focused on the amplification of power, freedom and action of two groups of women: university students and unemployed women. The core of the approach followed was guided by a fundamental question: ‘can theatre raise consciousness and empowerment in the context of gender equality?’ The results obtained through different internal assessment tools provide evidence of change in what feminist awareness and personal empowerment are concerned. We present and discuss the process and results of this experience including the advantages and limitations of applied theatre in certain types of outcomes.
Copyright (c) 2018 Catarina Sales Oliveira, Prof., Alcides A. Monteiro, Prof., Sílvia Pinto Ferreira, Dr. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The paper analyses learning from the perspective of migration. It is based on a qualitative study of Polish first-generation migrants in Iceland. The theoretical framework adopted is translocal learning and learning from places – which joins the perspective of social learning with learning from the environment. The empirical material was used to construct eight categories showing translocal learning outcomes: practical skills, communicative competences, analytic competence, assimilation of values, selfconfidence, independence, living with uncertainty and mobility skills. The findings show that translocal learning has a critical potential of challenging the dominant ideology. Some of the learning outcomes help migrants in further migration Finally, I suggest a new concept for future research – translocal pedagogy.
Copyright (c) 2019 Malgorzata Karolina Zieli?ska https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Intersectionality in Finnish adult education research: insights from the journal Aikuiskasvatus 2010–2016
The article studies intersectionality in Finnish research on adult education. Specifically, we investigate the kinds of discussions on differences and their relations that are going on in such research. To this end we seek to identify intersectional approaches in the articles published in the journal Aikuiskasvatus between 2010 and 2016, a period marked by an increase in multiculturalism and social division as well as in gendered and sexual diversity in Finnish society. We understand intersectional differences as performative processes, not stable essences. Our study indicates that only few articles analysed intersectional differences explicitly. Implicitly recognised differences were mostly seen as givens. Categories such as ethnicity and race were found to be lacking in the data, but age, gender, social class, education, occupation and learning difficulties were discussed.
Copyright (c) 2017 The author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Propaganda as a (new) challenge of civic education
This paper argues that propaganda poses a (new) challenge to civic education. It examines the tension between education and propaganda in relation to civic education for adults considering (1) civic education as protection against propaganda attempts and (2) propaganda as a possible element of civic education. This paper explores didactical approaches and core principles of civic education that strive to both resist and deal with propaganda. The core proposal of the paper is to root civic education in the tradition of the German concepts of Bildung and Mündigkeit in order to contrast civic education with propaganda or manipulation.
Copyright (c) 2018 Tetyana Kloubert https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
An institutional ethnography of a feminist organization: a study of community education in Ireland
A small Irish independent women’s community education organisation, founded to provide personal development and community education programmes for women who cannot pay for them, has experienced the struggles of surviving in a patriarchal state that no longer supports women’s community building but which funds individual capacity building for ‘labour market activation’ purposes. The organisation consists of three staff funded to work on a part-time basis, facilitators who work on an ad-hoc basis to meet the needs of groups of participants, the women who participate in different groups in the organisation, the staff of a crèche, and voluntary members. The purpose of the research is to support the need for the organisation to reconceptualise the meaning of the work of the organisation using institutional ethnography methodology to question the extent to which the work can been seen as political and feminist, and adhering to its original ideals. The research consisted of four weeks of fieldwork in the organisation with the participants, followed by a focus group of staff and facilitators reflecting on features that participants valued: making new connections, groupwork, the physical environment, the challenge and support, and the pace of the work. The provision of a space and culture that transgresses the norms of dominant cultural understandings of being a working-class woman is now understood to be the radical outcome, with the original expectation of the possibility of empowering participants to become feminist activists receding but remaining an ideal.
The social economy as produced space: the ‘here and now’ of education in constructing alternatives
This article approaches adult learning within the social economy through a critical and spatial lens. First, I approach the critical pedagogy of Freire, outlining the dialectical relationship between subjectivity and objectivity enacted in the development of critical consciousness. Carrying this dialogical argumentative forward, I go on to show how the critical geography of Lefebvre ‘unpacks’ this dialectic onto space and place, grounding pedagogical apprehension in a critical geography which is more directly set up to confront and engage with capitalism as a spatial force. Drawing from some of the social enterprise literature, I then utilise Lefebvre’s ‘spatial triad’ to demonstrate how the perceived, conceived and lived facets of space can shed light on integrative areas of adult learning that together constitute a platform for a potential ‘trial by space’ for alternatives.
Learning to live and work together in an ecovillage community of practice
Ecovillages are citizen-organised residential communities that strive for a more sustainable way of life based on a culture of cooperation and sharing, as deemed necessary to support a shift to a post carbon world (Dawson, 2006; Lockyer & Veteto, 2013; Korten, 2006). While much can potentially be learned from the study of these experimental sustainable communities, perhaps their greatest contribution is to help us understand how to transition from individualism and competition in order to live ‘smaller, slower and closer (Litfin, 2014)’. Drawing on a social theory of practice (Wenger, 1998) and concept of communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998), this paper considers how one ecovillage is learning the social competencies necessary to live and work well "in community", and in doing so, it coconstructs and sustains a cooperative culture.
Editorial: social economy and learning for a political economy of solidarity
Who counts? Disruptions to adult education’s idyll and its topography of lifelong learning
The question: ‘who counts?’ is raised in this paper at modern democratic society’s fabric, and, more specifically, at the arena of adult education and its counting procedure regarding its clientele, bringing the issue of dis/ability to the fore. For, thus, interlinking citizenship, adult education, and dis/ability, the paper explores the work on disagreement and dissensus by the French political philosopher Jacques Rancière as a theoretical framework. References to qualitative empirical research, elaborating on citoyen sanspapiers (= people without legal papers) in France and on planning and managing activities towards inclusive learning settings by adult education practitioners in Germany, serve to illuminate the theoretical underpinnings’ strengths and limitations. It shall lead not only to a fruitful encounter between interdisciplinary theoretical approaches, but also to push the claim that deliberation and civic learning ultimately depends on expressing voice and being listened to, not least by adult education academia, profession and practitioners.
Copyright (c) 2018 Silke Schreiber-Barsch https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Addressing refugees and non-refugees in adult education programs
The paper analyses mainly non-vocational courses offered by a sample of 47 out of the approximately 900 public adult education centres (Volkshochschule - VHS) in Germany. The focus is on courses, events or other learning forms dealing with refugees in Germany from 1947 to 2015. Refugees can be taught in all-refugee or in mixed-groups, but it can also mean that flight and refuge is an educational issue for non-refugees. The method of program analysis is used. The results demonstrate changes over time. German adult education centres have partly turned into language schools for refugees and migrants. Civic or liberal education courses have lost importance. Refugees and migrants are addressed more than in the past when mainly non-refugees were informed about the reasons why people become refugees. Finally, ideas for courses are put forward. They are related to past practices and other studies.
Copyright (c) 2018 Bernd Käpplinger https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
In this article we examine and contrast how the work of commissions and task forces, assembled to negotiate consensus on important policy issues, contributed to reforms affecting adult education in Italy and Denmark over the period 2000-2016. First, we conceptualise the work of commissions and task forces as a key, yet underexplored, element in national policy reforms, then outline the methodology employed. Following is our comparative analysis. Our discussion highlights that commissions and task forces have been an important element in both countries, and at least three dimensions help explain their country-specific functions: 1) the type of the national political system; 2) its ideological strength over time; and, 3) the nature of its relation to the European Union (EU). We suggest that these dimensions should be adequately considered in further studies.
Copyright (c) 2018 Marcella Milana, Palle Rasmussen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Community learning and learning-by-struggling in solidarity economics
The article covers the concept of solidarity economics developed by autogenous revolutionary struggles – potentias – in the Global South from the 1950s onwards. Theoretical placement and contextualisation of solidarity economics is critically discussed in the second section, followed by methodological and theoretical work on the concept in the third section. Findings and observations from field research in India and Venezuela conducted by the author in 2007 and 2008 are presented in the fourth section, where solidarity economics is seen as an epistemic community with the new language of struggle and also as an attempt at other epistemologies. Perspectives for mutual, participatory, and community learning from the aspect of ‘learning-bystruggling’ and the educational platform embedded in assemblies, encounters, and different forms of group discussion and decision-making processes are considered in the fourth and fifth sections, together with the idea of the authentic re-creation of community.
Learning alterity in the social economy: the case of the Local Organic Food Co-ops Network in Ontario, Canada
While the origins of the social economy date long before the period of industrialization or the modern state (Shragge & Fontan, 2000), it is growing in importance as we find ourselves in ‘the cancer stage of capitalism’ (McMurtry, 2013). Facing issues such as exponentially growing inequality, the demise of rural communities, an exploding obesity epidemic and jobless recoveries from repeated financial crises, more and more people are turning to the social economy for solutions to their problems (see McMurtry 2010; Mook et al. 2010). This paper reports on a pilot study that focused on the Local Organic Food Co-ops Network, created by people who oppose the industrial food system and want to specialize in local, organic food. Adopting a political-economy lens to understand this opposition through the words of participants, the study employed semi-structured interviews to explore the learning dimensions of this social economy organization. The study found that respondents participated in social learning and learned alterity in the social economy. The paper concludes that social economy organizations need to prioritize social over economic values, and the potential for change associated with social learning is key to making this choice.
An analysis of educational programmes for adults accompanying museum exhibitions: the typology of portals
This paper discusses the many educational programmes offered to adults in parallel with museum exhibitions. These were systematically examined using programme analysis, a research method developed in adult education research in Germany, with the goal of determining and differentiating between learning/participation pathways to cultural education—the so-called portals to arts education. An analytical approach to cultural adult education developed in 2005 was used for the first time to identify these various portals in museum offerings. This approach defines portals as specific pathways to arts education. The process described in this paper resulted in a refined and relatively stable set of categories that differentiates between educational programmes accompanying museum exhibits; it also resulted in a better understanding of the range of cultural education offerings for adults in Germany today. Within this framework, the method of programme analysis, research results, limitations, implications, and possible implementation are discussed.
Copyright (c) 2018 Inga Specht, Franziska Stodolka https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The case discusses the ongoing debate in the Greater Lisbon Area concerning the recognition of settlements that have been established during the previous decades by immigrants, mainly from former Portuguese colonies, in Lisbon and its surroundings. The case of Cova da Moura, one of these illegal settlements has a central place in the article. In that neighbourhood, a participatory experiment was put up, aimed at rearranging an open space for common use by the inhabitants. The result of the initiative was not as positive as expected. In this paper, the question whether the experiment was a failure or not, takes a central place. While looking for an answer, different theories are used as lenses for interpretation: the ‘right to the city’ discourse, the understanding of dissent and the framing of policy initiatives as learning processes.
Copyright (c) 2018 Danny Wildemeersch, Joana Pestana Lages https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Reading literacy and metacognition in a Spanish Adult Education centre
In recent years, Spain’s adult population has been characterised by high unemployment rates, particularly among peopled aged over 18 who do not have the Compulsory Secondary Education certificate. Their training in key competences, such as reading comprehension, would provide them with fundamental learning, empowerment, and better employment opportunities. This empirical study examines the relationship between the use of metacognitive skills while reading and improved reading comprehension – previously shown in other studies – evaluating both constructs and attempting to establish whether there is a relationship between them in a sample of 143 adult secondary education students. Research outcomes in reading competence were lower than expected, with significant differences between stages and average use of metacognitive strategies, influenced by gender and age. A significant, linear, and low to moderate degree relationship was found between two of the metacognitive strategies evaluated and so a predictive model was constructed in which age, level, and use of strategies for problemsolving and reading-support are predictive variables explaining 23.4% of the variance in reading skills. We also suggest some changes regarding teacher practice, prioritising active and self-regulating reading.
Copyright (c) 2019 Lourdes Jiménez-Taracido, Daniela Baridón Chauvie https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Teenaged Internet tutors’ level of interactivity - by sharing tacit and explicit knowledge with older learners
Younger people, i.e. teenagers without any pedagogical training and work experience play an important role in teaching computer skills to older adults. The present study is based on 14 cases in which a teenager teaches an older adult to use a computer on a topic of the latter’s own choice. Both interactive as well as non-interactive techniques used by the teenagers will be analysed, as well as their dependence on the whether the tutor is a user of the chosen website, whether he/she has made preparations for the tutoring session, and the combination of these two attributes. As a result, we saw that any kind of previous experience the tutor had with the content taught (as an everyday user or by independent exploration prior to the tutoring session) decreased interactivity of tutoring process. At the same time, the risk of over-demonstration emerged in such cases. For further research, some hypotheses to test the idea of a reciprocal learning model in which an older learner would be a resource person for the young tutor on interactive tutoring techniques are proposed.
Copyright (c) 2018 Tiina Tambaum, Peeter Normak https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Women do not engage in feminist activism with an educational objective. However, activism has a transformatory effect on the participants, through forms of informal learning that are mainly recognized by the concerned in retrospect. Our research tries to identify which elements of the activist process have the highest informal learning potential in terms of empowerment. We analyse and compare the learning effect of activism in two feminist movements—« La Barbe » and FEMEN—based on the transformative learning concept. «La Barbe» is a French network of women seeking to denounce male domination in official institutions, private and public decision making bodies or important public events (conferences, etc.) concerning the political, financial and other “high level” spheres. FEMEN is a radical feminist protest group founded in Ukraine in 2008, now based in Paris. The organization is highly mediatised for organizing controversial topless protests against sex tourism, religious institutions, sexism, homophobia and other social, national and international topics. This research analyses the informal learning effect of these forms of activism, according to the activists’ own perception, taking into account the ways in which the networks, the public appearances and their preparatory processes are organised.
Copyright (c) 2018 Elisabeth Hofmann https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Adult higher education in a portuguese prison
Over the years, the European Union has strengthened measures that address the need to find answers to the challenges posed by the information society, which in turn underscores the importance of a focus on innovation of adult education, especially for those in conditions of social exclusion. The aim of this paper is to analyse the reality of Higher Education in Distance Learning and e-Learning in a prison context. The results from interviews, interpreted in a context of a non-positivist paradigm, show that students are rather motivated because they foresee a more attractive future if they have an academic diploma. Despite this, however, their expectations are not very high, because they acknowledge that their rehabilitation will be difficult due to the stigma of being an ex-prisoner. The results show, also, that the education process has many weaknesses and limitations mostly due to the lack of facilities, educational and technological resources, and support from teachers.
Editorial: digital the new normal - multiple challenges for the education and learning of adults
Participatory perspectives for the low skilled and the low educated: how can media literacy influence the social and economic participation of the low skilled and the low educated?
We assume that social media use contributes to employability and sociality and media literacy complements a basic set of skills. Especially the low skilled and low educated lack media literacy, which contributes to their precarious situation and increases a participation gap. A database search for peer reviewed articles covering effective elements of media literacy did not return any useful results. The retrieved literature was scarce and media literacy concepts were inconclusive, conflated or ambivalent. We then broadened our scope, using a snow ball technique and Harzing’s Publish and Perish for control purposes. This approach lead to literature indicating that self-presentation and self-profiling are important literacy practices, involving knowledge and skills related to participation in social and economic contexts and understanding of the relations between sociality, employability and networks. Media literacy is best approached as hands-on, situated and experiential, taught in a democratic and critical fashion and related to the attitudes and perspective of the low educated and the low skilled. There is however no clear answer what the complementary role of informal learning is and how literacy related skills and knowledge demanded for lifelong learning may change during the life course. It is also important that policies focussing on inclusion and participation broaden their perspective beyond individualistic notions and , consider the influence of structuralizing mechanisms that create inequality and extend their explanations beyond those framed by economic theories, models and categories.
Popular education and the digital citizen: a genealogical analysis
This paper historicises and problematises the concept of the digital citizen and how it is constructed in Sweden today. Specifically, it examines the role of popular education in such an entanglement. It makes use of a genealogical analysis to produce a critical ‘history of the present’ by mapping out the debates and controversies around the emergence of the digital citizen in the 1970s and 1980s, and following to its manifestations in contemporary debates. This article argues that free and voluntary adult education (popular education) is and has been fundamental in efforts to construe the digital citizen. A central argument of the paper is that popular education aiming for digital inclusion is not a 21st century phenomenon; it actually commenced in the 1970s. However, this digitisation of citizens has also changed focus dramatically since the 1970s. During the 1970s, computers and computerisation were described as disconcerting, and as requiring popular education in order to counter the risk of the technology “running wild”. In current discourses, digitalisation is constructed in a nonideological and post-political way. These post-political tendencies of today can be referred to as a post-digital present where computers have become so ordinary, domesticized and ubiquitous in everyday life that they are thereby also beyond criticism.
The ‘digital curious’: first steps towards a new typology for mapping adults’ relationships with others when using ICT
The study described in this article used grounded theory methodology to investigate adults’ accounts of their relationships with others when using information and communication technologies (ICT). Ten women and ten men were interviewed. All were Italians born between 1952-1961. It was found that the participants shared a common eagerness to learn and use ICT, which led us to coin the term ‘digital curious’. They recognised the growing importance of using ICT and realised that they were competent enough to support others in ICT learning or use. Their awareness of their competence and role was linked to their approach to interactions with older and younger people, not all of them easy. The study findings illustrate how the participants’ relationships with older and younger people when using ICT are seen as relevant and offer meaningful experiences. The theoretical and practical implications of the results are also discussed.
Examining social inclusion and social capital among adult learners in blended and online learning environments
New learning spaces and learning formats affected the learning and education of adults. In this respect, digitalisation is believed to reduce social exclusion. Moreover, adult education, social inclusion and social capital are positively related among adults. Therefore, this questionnaire study examines how adults who are engaged in online and blended learning perceived change in social inclusion and social capital. We conceptualised social inclusion as social participation and social connectedness, and social capital as bonding and bridging ties. In the case of blended adult learners, our results show positive perceptions of social inclusion and social capital. Those perceptions are less positive among the online adult learners. In both cases, non-natives experience a higher increase in social inclusion and social capital than natives. Hence, online and blended learning holds advantages for adults particularly non-natives: it enhances social inclusion and social capital.
The educational potential of social economy projects in the Himalayas: the case of Avani
In this article we analyze the social economy projects of Avani – a Community Based Organization based in Himalayas and reflect on their potential for enabling a critical pedagogy of place. We use the concept of tactics in a spatial and educational sense to explore Avani’s projects as an intervention within the dominant place logic of capitalism that opens market opportunities and enables new experiences of living and being for hill communities. We argue that these experiences are educational since they invoke, what we want to call, the possibility to verify one’s equality and one’s ability to do something. Our study is based on an ethnographic case approach and combines literature review, staff interviews and documents of Avani along with sensitizing concepts to guide our analysis.
Migrants’ competence recognition systems
An adequate incorporation of migrants in the labour market, able to fully unleash their potential, is a major challenge for EU development. In this direction, the recognition of migrants skills, knowledge and competence acquired in formal and non/informal contexts represents a crucial issue. Based on a comparative research work conducted at European level, this paper highlights the ambivalence of competence recognition systems which, whilst representing potential means of social inclusion, in certain condition risk becoming invisible instruments of discrimination. Moreover it provides some recommendations for improving the substantial universalism of EU competence recognition systems and their impact on migrants integration.
Copyright (c) 2017 Rosangela Lodigiani, Annavittoria Sarli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Citizenship as individual responsibility through personal investment
The aim of this article is to shed light on how the democratic ideal of institutionalised Nordic popular education is realised through an ethnographic field study in an English as a foreign language study circle. The study focuses on how participants express their citizenship when taking part in the study circle. Citizenship is viewed as a dynamic concept comprising the aspects of ‘being’ and ‘acting’ and constructed in and through social interaction. The study circle is arranged as a classroom practice: The study circle leader organises the activities, while the participants engage in exercises and attempt to learn correct usage. Through their participation, the participants take individual responsibility for what they see as their lack of sufficient knowledge of English. The participants describe their participation as a personal and voluntary investment in themselves. In light of the study, the individual stance is discussed as limiting possibilities for responsibility and thus expressions of citizenship.
Copyright (c) 2017 Annika Pastuhov, Fredrik Rusk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Public pedagogies of arts-based environmental learning and education for adults
This paper examines how current theorizing on public pedagogy can be used to understand scholarship on creative, arts-based pedagogies in informal environmental education for adults. In particular, the study applies Biestas (2012, 2014) typology of public pedagogies to three bodies of literature: arts-based adult learning and education in the environmental movement, eco-art, and Tactical Urbanism, respectively. Each of these is about public art, displayed or performed in public spaces, and connected to environmental learning and education. The scholarship reviewed came mostly from Canada and Australia. In the public, democratic spaces of these countries, we found that arts in the environmental movement and eco-art could be characterized by Biestas pedagogy of the public, and partially by a pedagogy in the interest of publicness. The performance of Tactical Urbanism corresponded most closely to pedagogy in the interest of publicness. The paper concludes with a discussion of directions for further theorizing and research on public pedagogy and arts-based environmental learning and education for adults.
Copyright (c) 2017 Pierre Walter, Allison Earl https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The narrative of ‘equality of chances’ as an approach to interpreting PIAAC results on perceived political efficacy, social trust and volunteering and the quest for political literacy
The article focuses on the theoretically and empirically addressed question of whether workforce literacy strategies in research and policies may tend to exclude relevant fields of literacy, which have emancipatory chances for participants, but which regularly fail to include low qualified or literate adults (Hufer, 2013), namely the area of basic civic education or political literacy. First, a theoretical discussion makes use of recent publications. The relevance of basic civic education will be discussed using contemporary theories, which point at a crisis of democracy and explain this by the spread of income and capital (Piketty, 2014) and its legitimation (Rosanvallon, 2013). Further detail is provided by using Rosanvallons criticism of the term ‘equality of chances’. The everyday unfairness, covered by the narrative of equal chances, leads to peoples’ disengagement from reciprocal relations and disintegration of solidarity within a society. This theoretical approach will then be supplemented by empirical data. The empirical research question is: Do adults with low literacy skills agree less often on feelings of political efficacy and social trust than adults with high literacy skills? Do they engage less often in volunteering than adults with high literacy skills? This is based the PIAAC 2012 dataset which relates literacy on the one hand with variables of political efficacy, social trust and volunteering on the other hand. Results will be compared with volunteer and youth surveys. Furthermore, the connection of a “Nouvelle Droite” (contemporary right-wing populism) and peoples’ low feelings of political efficacy will be reflected in order to refute the stereotype that marginalized groups automatically become voters of right-wing populists.
Copyright (c) 2017 Anke Grotlüschen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Editorial: marketization and commodification of adult education
Copyright (c) 2016 The author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Marketising Slovene adult education policies and practices using mechanisms of the Europeanisation of education
This article addresses the issue of marketisation in the field of adult education by reflecting on the Europeanisation of education currently taking place through the _x000D_ establishment of European adult education policies. The article argues that Europeanisation fosters marketisation of adult education and commodifies valuable knowledge and desirable forms of neoliberal subjectivity. An analysis of Slovene adult education policies from 2004-2015 reveals how a European economised vocabulary is being implemented in Slovene adult education policies and practices. The main argument of this article is that these practices are shaped through financial mechanisms that marketise the adult education field. This results in new relationships between governing bodies within the field, the unstable and decreasing role of public adult education institutions and the prevailing role of private providers of adult education, who offer training programmes to meet labour market needs.
Regulatory governance of ‘training markets’, ‘market failure’, and ‘quasi’ markets: historical dimensions of the post-initial training market in The Netherlands
This article examines regulatory governance of the post-initial training market in The Netherlands. From an historical perspective on policy formation processes, it examines market formation in terms of social, economic, and cultural factors in the development of provision and demand for post-initial training; the roles of stakeholders in the longterm construction of regulatory governance of the market; regulation of and public providers; policy responses to market failure; and tripartite division of responsibilities between the state, social partners, commercial and publicly-funded providers. Historical description and analysis examine policy narratives of key stakeholders with reference to: a) influence of societal stakeholders on regulatory decision-making; b) state regulation of the post-initial training market; c) public intervention regulating the market to prevent market failure; d) market deregulation, competition, employability and individual responsibility; and, e) regulatory governance to prevent ‘allocative failure’ by the market in non-delivery of post-initial training to specific target groups, particularly the low-qualified. Dominant policy narratives have resulted in limited state regulation of the supply-side, a tripartite system of regulatory governance by the state, social partners and commercial providers as regulatory actors. Current policy discourses address interventions on the demand-side to redistribute structures of opportunity throughout the life courses of individuals. Further empirical research from a comparative historical perspective is required to deepen contemporary understandings of regulatory governance of markets and the commodification of adult learning in knowledge societies and information economies.
When theories become practice - a metaphorical analysis of adult-education school-leaders’ talk
Marketization has changed the education system. If we say that education is a market, this transforms the understanding of education and influences how people act. In this paper, adult-education school-leaders’ talk is analysed and seven metaphors for education are found: education as administration, market, matching, democracy, policy work, integration and learning. Exploring empirical metaphors provides a rich illustration of coinciding meanings. In line with studies on policy texts, economic metaphors are found to dominate. This should be understood not only as representing liberal ideology, as is often discussed in analyses of policy papers, but also as representing economic theory. In other words, contemporary adult education can be understood as driven by economic theories. The difference and relation between ideology and theory should be further examined since they have an impact on our society and on our everyday lives.
The interaction of economic and pedagogical ideals in the context of workplace learning in Germany: a framework for empirical research – inspired by business ethics
As an effect of marketisation, the importance of workplace learning in Germany has increased. The article follows up on the long-standing discourse around the question of how economic and pedagogical ideals interact in this context. In order to develop a theoretical framework for empirical research, three major positions of the discipline of business ethics are introduced. Business ethics in more abstract ways deals with the very same question, namely how do ideas such as profit orientation interact with other norms and values? The new perspectives show that the discourse has been hitherto based on a specific understanding of economy. In order to derive an empirical answer to the research question, the question is re-formulated as follows: Which values are inherent in the decisions taken? Consequently, it suggests using the concept of ‘rationalities of justification’ for empirical research. The article shows how this concept can be applied by conducting a test run.
The murky waters of neoliberal marketization and commodification on the education of adults in the United States
We approach marketization and commodification of adult education from multiple lenses including our personal narratives and neoliberalism juxtaposed against the educational philosophy of the Progressive Period. We argue that adult education occurs in many arenas including the public spaces found in social movements, community-based organizations, and government sponsored programs designed to engage and give voice to all citizens toward building a stronger civil society. We conclude that only when adult education is viewed from the university lens, where it focuses on the individual and not the public good, does it succumb to neoliberal forces.
‘I cannot be passive as I was before’: learning from grassroots innovations in Ukraine
The study explores learning processes and outcomes inside grassroots innovations that are emerging in post-Euromaidan times in Ukraine. The study analyses the assumption that this non-traditional education space can be adequate for sustainability transition learning and critical consciousness development. First, the study describes, connects, and operationalizes the concepts of critical consciousness, sustainability transition, and grassroots innovations. Then, it analyses two cases of grassroots innovations (two online sharing platforms), using these operationalized concepts. The results show that learning and critical consciousness development inside grassroots niches are much more connected to previous experience, such as participation in the protest event Euromaidan, than to inner niche learning interactions. While, the online platforms keep alive some of the aspirations that motivated people to become a part of the Euromaidan protest. In this sense, such grassroots innovations keep the values and priorities of the participants “alive” and ensure that the critical consciousness that was acquired does not simply slide backwards. Do shocking events like Euromaidan protest have to happen in order to accelerate learning about values of solidarity and responsibility, as well as to develop critical consciousness needed for sustainability transition? Despite the impossibility to completely answer this question, this study gave some tips, suggesting components of critical conscious development needed for this type of learning¾dialog, reflection, action, leading to increase in efficacy and agency.
Editorial: Non-traditional participants in adult education and learning
Not Available._x000D_ Link to Appendix: http://www.rela.ep.liu.se/issues/10.3384_rela.2000-7426.201671/01/Appendix.pdf
Reclaiming the emancipatory potential of adult education: Honneth’s critical theory and the struggle for recognition
Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning built on the learning experiences of nontraditional adult students returning to education and on the critical theory of Habermas, more recently progressed by Honneth. This paper links transformation theory with the work of Honneth who in recent works advances ideas about identity development and freedom that allow us update gaps in transformation theory – that it has an inadequate understanding of the social dimension of learning. A new understanding of ‘disorienting dilemma’ as a struggle for recognition is suggested. This paper expands our understanding of the emancipatory intent of transformative learning. EU funded empirical research supports this new iteration of the adult learning theory. Implications are drawn for teaching non-traditional students in adult and higher education.
Like a rolling stone: non-traditional spaces of adult education
In this article, I try to explore the squeezing concept of adult education that provides a kind of identity to the field characterised by vagueness, diversity and the links to social justice. This diversity is also present when talking about the participants in the process. After presenting the concept of adult education, I explore three different experiences that I have referred to as non-traditional spaces of adult education. In the conclusion, I consider that the diversity, the production of knowledge, and the role of both teacher and learners are essential to define non-traditional spaces and non-traditional participants in adult education.
Informal learning processes of migrants in the civil society: a transnational perspective
The aim of the article is to examine the informal learning processes of migrants particularly in relation to their social engagements in associations, informal groups and transnational networks in the Estonia-Finland space. The theoretical framework relates to socio-cultural, situated learning tradition as well as transnational migration studies. In educational research, transnational perspectives are still relatively new and little explored. The research data (98 interviews) were analysed following theoryguided content analysis. Diverse learning trajectories in relation to the informants’ associational engagement were identified. Engagement in various social groups in transnational environments had widened the informants’ perspectives and understanding, enabling them to explore differences in societal conceptions and practices. Some of the informants had been acting as transnational brokers, conveying conceptions and practices between communities across national borders. There is a need to examine migrants’ learning trajectories in relation to their social engagements not only in the country of settlement but also in transnational spaces.
Academic success of mature students in higher education: a Portuguese case study
The increasing number and diversity of non-traditional participants who are now entering Higher Education Institutions (HEI) highlights the relevance of questioning on mature students’ academic success. Thus, the purpose of this study is to characterise mature students over 23 years old (MS23) of two Portuguese HEI, and understand their academic success. The study focuses on results obtained through a case study, based on quantitative and qualitative data: questionnaires and focus groups, respectively. We discuss the influence of different variables (such as: age, gender, area of study, schooling level at the entrance to the university, family monthly income) on MS23’s academic success, and we also describe some obstacles they face and changes they perceive when attending HEI. Results seem to demonstrate a similar tendency between data gathered on both HEI. Some recommendations for HEI, based on the results, are presented in the final section of this article.
Book review: Adult education policy and the European Union-theoretical and methodological
By Marcella Milana and John Holford. (Eds.). (Rotterdam: Sense Publisher, 2014). 194 pp., ISBN (open access e-book): 9789462095489
Book review: Writing for peer reviewed journals-strategies for getting published.
By Pat Thomson and Barbara Kamler. (Eds.). (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). 190 pp., ISBN 978-0415809313
Book review: Private world(s)-gender and informal learning of adults
By Joanna Ostrouch-Kaminsk and Christina, C. Vieira (Eds.) (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2015). 194 pp., ISBN 978-94-6209-969-2
Book review: Learning across generations in Europe
By Berhard Schmidt-Hertha, Sabina Jelenc Krasovec, and Marvin Formosa (Eds.) (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2015). 215 pp. ISBN 978-94-6209-900-5
Book review: Working and learning in times of uncertainty-challenges to adult, professional and vocational education
By Sandra Bohlinger, Ulrika Haake, Christian Helms Jørgensen, Hanna Toiviainen and Andreas Wallo. (Eds.) (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2015). 244 pp. ISBN open access e-book: 9789463002448
Book review: Researching and transforming adult learning and communities - the local/global context
By Rob Evans, Ewa Kurantowicz and Emilio Lucio-Villegas (Eds.). (Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2016). 197 pp., ISBN 978-946300-357-5
Adult education and reflexive activation: prioritising recognition, respect, dignity and capital accumulation
The economic crisis that emerged in 2008 put great stress on the so-called European project. The economic downturn put additional pressure on economically and educationally marginalised populations, who continue to experience high levels of unemployment and lower levels of access to societal goods. Activation is seen as one of the main strategies to combat unemployment. The EU also recognises a systemic shift in the nature of work, such that individuals will have several transitions between work and education during their careers. This is a significant societal level challenge that will likely pose greater stress on groups and individuals that are marginalised socially, educationally and economically. To deliver better long-term outcome it is necessary to adopt reflexive activation approaches. Reflexive activation is one in which unemployed people actively co-design the proposed resolutions. It is also embedded in a societal context. It is cognisant of citizenship, autonomy and human rights and leans towards traditional adult education values. The model of reflexive activation explored here is infused with understandings emerging from Schuller’s three types of capital and theories of recognition, respect and dignity developed by Honneth and others.
Exploring misery discourses: problematized Roma in labour market projects
The aim of this article is to analyse learning practices in labour market projects cofinanced by the European Social Fund (ESF) targeting unemployed Roma in Sweden. The empirical material consists of 18 project descriptions from ESF projects, as well as national and European policy documents concerned with the inclusion of the Roma in contemporary Europe. The contemporary empirical material is analysed in relation to a government report from 1956 concerning the ‘Roma issue’ in Sweden. The analytical perspective of the study is governmentality, and the analysis focuses on different kinds of problematizations and the discursive positioning of the Roma subjects. One of the main findings is that unemployed Roma are situated in various discourses of misery and constructed as in need of reshaping their subjectivities in order to become educable as well as employable.
Mind the gap! An exploration of the role of lifelong learning in promoting co-production and citizenship within social care for older people
Contemporary themes in public policy have emphasised co-productive approaches within both the access and provision of support services to older people. This paper provides a cross disciplinary exploration from its respective authors perspectives on social work and educational gerontology to examine the potential for lifelong learning and learning interventions from which co-production with those using social care services in later life might be better facilitated. Using an example from the UK, we specifically elicit how co-produced care can enhance the horizon of learning and learning research. The synthesis of ideas across these two disciplines could enrich understanding and provide essential levers for moving towards empowerment and emancipation by engaging with a more co-productive approach in social care for older people.
Examining work-education intersections: the production of learning reals in and through practice
Working within an assemblage analytic, this paper examines work – education intersections using the notion of learning reals. The learning real examined is learning as mastery and skills development. The concepts of embodiment and performativity guide the exploration. The paper draws on interview and observational data collected during a three year research project exploring the everyday learning (of employees) in a post-secondary education institution in Australia. The project was an industryuniversity collaboration between a group of professional developers from the organisation and a group of workplace learning academics. The assemblages making up learning as mastery are traced through examining the enactment of this real by a group of trade teachers, one of the workgroups participating in the project. I propose that this learning real was produced and made durable in and through the practices of the trade teachers. Furthermore, the ongoing performing of mastery produced particular effects, including the separation of theory and practice in the trade school. The notion of learning reals enables an exploration of the way particular ways of conceiving learning are made durable in particular workplaces as well as opening up the space to examine the partial connections between workplaces and educational institutions.
Understanding unskilled work as a condition for participation in adult education and training
This article discusses how to comprehend why people working in unskilled jobs are less likely than other groups to position themselves as educable subjects and engage in adult education and training. The article outlines how different research traditions examining recruitment to and participation in adult education and training reveal and explain distinctive participation patterns. These traditions are critically reviewed to identify how they provide specific understandings as well as certain blind spots. The review reveals a striking absence of research into unskilled work and thus a tendency to overlook how engagement in particular kinds of work condition people's perception of adult education and training. It is finally argued that future research must pay closer attention to people's specific work-life and examine how engagement in specific historical, social and material (changing) work practices condition their perception of adult education and training.
Copyright (c) 2015 The author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Between practicing and rehearsing: cultural awareness challenges in the military
In this article, we confront the tradition that understands cultural awareness training as the individual acquisition of intercultural competences with recent developments in the theorizing of culture and education. The question we ask is how to understand cultural awareness training if dealing with cultural diversity is not depending on individual competences but rather on the interaction between people on the ground. We will take three steps to discuss this point. In a first step we consider the challenge of cultural diversity for military organizations. The second step consists in a reflection on the notion of intercultural competences and the idea that intercultural competences can be acquired by individuals. In the third step we develop an alternative understanding of the preparation for intercultural interaction, based on Sennett's distinction between practicing and rehearsing (Sennett, 2012).
Social gravities and artistic training paths: the artistic vocation viewed through the prism of the concept of temporal form of causality
This contribution is based on a previous research dedicated to the life paths of art school graduates whose empirical data consisted of 13 autobiographical interviews. It cuts these paths into biographical periods and attempts to throw light on the relationships they have between each other. This contribution starts from an observation: in spite of candidates being admitted to an art school and obtaining the same degree, their artistic vocations take several different directions and are highly polarized in terms of social origins. This article brings out this dichotomy through the concept of temporal form of causality. It highlights biographical logics that determine the achievement of the artistic project by articulating archaeological and procedural analysis of the biographies, and it points out a certain number of social gravities that find their origin in the social space and that become significant over the life paths.
Core activities and career pathways of independent trainers-consultants in France
This paper presents some of the key findings from a 2013 survey achieved with a representative sample of 101 independent trainers-consultants, members of a French trade union. These results highlight more particularly their socio-demographic characteristics, their core activities and four main career pathways identified. This survey was part of a two years action research, conducted in a partnership between this professional trade union and university laboratories in the field of adult education. The aim was to improve the understanding of this specific professional group, of its ongoing professionalization process and its visibility as one of the actors of the continuing education and vocational training (CVET) system in France.
Editorial: cartographies of research on adult education and learning
Adult education research between field and rhizome - a bibliometrical analysis of conference programs of ESREA
Adult education research is frequently an own subject of research. Such research is often focused on the analysis of journals. This paper will instead analyse triennial research conferences of the European Society for the Research on Adults (ESREA) between 1994 and 2013. The research was carried out mainly via a bibliometrical program analysis of conference papers. Results support previous findings in the analysis of adult education research, but a number of differences or blind spots of ESREA and adult education research in general will become visible.
How pluralistic is the research field on adult education? : Dominating bibliometrical trends, 2005-2012
What the field of adult education research is and how it can be described has been a debated issue over the decades. Several scholars argue that the field today is heterogeneous, borrowing theories and methods from a range of disciplines. In this article, we take such statements as a starting point for empirical analysis. In what ways could it be argued that the field is pluralistic rather than monolithic; heterogeneous rather than homogenous? Drawing on bibliographic data of the top cited articles in three main adult education journals between 2005 and 2012, we illustrate how the citation patterns have tendencies of homogeneity when it comes to the geographical country of authorship, since the USA, UK, Australia and Canada dominate, as well as the research methods adopted, since qualitative approaches have near total dominance. Furthermore, there is a tendency to adopt similar theoretical approaches, since sociocultural perspectives, critical pedagogy and post-structuralism represent more than half of the articles in our sample. At the same time, the results of our analysis indicate signs of scholarly pluralism, for instance, in terms of authorship, since both early career researchers and established researchers are represented among the top cited publications. We conclude the article by arguing that empirical analysis of publication and citation patterns is important to further the development of reflexivity within the field, not least for early career researchers, who might benefit from knowledge about what has been recognized among peers as worth citing in recent times.
Adult education research: exploring an increasingly fragmented map
Against the background of internal developments of adult education as a field of study, and new external conditions for research, this article examines how the configuration of adult education research has been evolving, particularly over the last decade. Our analysis draws on a two-pronged approach: a reading of four seminal articles written by adult education scholars who have conducted bibliometric analyses of selected adult education journals; as well as our own review of 75 articles, covering a one-year period (2012–2013), in five adult education journals that were chosen to provide a greater variety of the field of adult education in terms of their thematic orientation and geographical scope than has been the case in previous reviews. Our findings suggest that the field is facing two main challenges. First, the fragmentation of the map of the territory that was noticed at the end of the 1990s, has continued and seems to have intensified. Second, not only practitioners, but also the policy community voice their disappointment with adult education research, and we note a disconnect between academic adult education research and policy-related research. We provide a couple of speculations as to the future map of adult education as a field of study and point to the danger of shifting the research agenda away from classical adult education concerns about democracy and social rights.
In this open issue we present five papers covering different adult education and learning contexts across different geographical spaces, ranging from Spain, Germany, Eastern Europe to Canada. The topics of research range from young people to retired people, adult educators and men and women reading self-help literature.
She reads, he reads: gender differences and learning through self-help books
Despite considerable scholarly attention given to self-help literature, there has been a lack of research about the experience of self-help reading. In this article, we explore gender differences in self-help reading. We argue that men and women read self-help books for different reasons and with different levels of engagement, and that they experience different outcomes from reading. We provide evidence from in-depth interviews with 89 women and 45 men. Women are more likely to seek out books of their own volition, to engage in learning strategies beyond reading, and to take action as a result of reading. Men are more likely to read books relating to careers, while women are more likely to read books about interpersonal relationships. We argue that these gender differences reflect profound political-economic and cultural changes, and that such changes also help explain the gendered evolution of adult, continuing, and higher education in recent decades.
The role of continuing training motivation for work ability and the desire to work past retirement age
Germany, relying on a pay-as-you-go pension system has increased regular retirement age to 67 due to its ageing population caused by decreasing birth rates and increasing life expectancy. Using data from the nationally representative 'Survey on continuing in employment in pensionable age', we investigate the relevance of training motivation for work ability and the desire to work past retirement age and whether differences between social groups reflect inequalities in training participation. Results show significant positive correlations between continuing training motivation and work ability and desire to work past retirement age. Differentiated for selected respondent groups the level of qualification has a significant influence. This effect was stronger than any differences with regard to gender or employment participation. Results imply external conditions only partly explain older workers' work ability or desire to work past retirement age. Compared to inequalities in training participation, motivation for continuing training is high across analysed subgroups.
A sociomaterial model of the teaching-learning continuum
It is widely accepted today that the range between informal and formal learning can be conceptualized as a continuum. Since substantial models are not available, the specific features of this continuum depend on one's preference. In this paper, I will propose a model for the continuum that defines its constituting variable 'formalization' and thereby its points and ends. Because the parameters of the learning process can reach different degrees of formalization, the continuum is split into sub-continua for each parameter. In a second step, the perspective on learning is expanded to the general teaching-learning process, with the consequence of complementing the learning continuum with a teaching continuum. In order to argue for entangled teachinglearning states and to address questions of materiality and causality, I draw on sociomaterial theories. Finally, some consequences for (adult) education research are discussed.
The self-perception of adult educators in Eastern Europe in the post-Soviet transitional period
This article addresses the self-images of adult educators in view of exercising their professional agency in contexts of social transformation after the fall of the communist regimes. It draws on research undertaken in Poland, Ukraine and Russia in 2009 which investigated the self-perception and self-evaluation of adult educators with regard to their own educational practice8211;vis-à-vis the challenges of transition in general and of the need of rethinking the dictatorial past in particular. The interviews with 91 adult educators in three countries illustrate the impact of socio-political change in the period of democratization on the concept of one's professional identity. They also demonstrate how transition policies create dilemmas for practice which adult educators accommodate or resist. The article discusses how different self-images are linked to socio-political challenges of society in the transition times. It analyses the possibilities, challenges, impacts and constraints of different perception and forms of educational practice in the light of the current situation in three countries.
Editorial: a human being is a human being is a human being is a human being–the issue of migration in Europe and the responses of adult education
Copyright (c) 2014 The author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The demands laid on the individual by increasingly fragmented life-wide learning imperatives lead to constant pressure on adults of 'migratory background' to display agency and take up a position vis-à-vis cultural-ethnic 'belonging', while around them an integration/assimilation debate continues to rage in German public discourse. The focus of this paper will therefore be the experiences of transition and transformation in learning biographies which are often experienced as self-'translation'. The paper will address agency, inclusion/exclusion in the learning biographies of young adults who straddle the precarious identity of German-Turk/Turk-German. I use here talk elicited in the learning biography of a student of Turkish origin. The assertion of agency-in-diversity is given voice in uneven ways. The extracts allow us to listen closely to the workings of agency in the subjective, shared experience related in auto/biographical narratives.
The learning migration nexus: towards a conceptual understanding
Learning and identity formation are inescapable facets of the upheavals accompanying migration; movement across social space inevitably involves reflection, questioning and the need to learn new ways of being and new identities. Although migration is characterised by complexity and diversity, this paper suggests that we can identify key learning perspectives which illuminate the nexus between learning and migration. It argues for an approach which grounds learning in an understanding of socio-cultural space, and highlights the significance of policy discourses surrounding migration and integration. Within the conceptual framework suggested, the nature of learning is seen as multifaceted, and as having the potential to have both positive and negative outcomes for migrants.
Is adult education a ‘white’ business? Professionals with migrant backgrounds in Austrian adult education
This paper is based on an applied research project, which examines the participation of migrants (first and second generation) as professionals in Austrian adult education. We present selected outcomes concerning barriers and encouraging factors in the careers of professionals with migrant background. Our main findings show the importance of the recognition of credentials, of social capital and of strategies to avoid discrimination on behalf of the institutions of adult education. Introducing the analytical perspective of critical whiteness, we conclude that Austrian adult education still has to reflect its own role in terms of white privileges. Finally we point out some approaches and strategies to widening participation and reducing discrimination in the professional field.
Migration and adult education: social movement learning and resistance in the UK
The article is based on data and evidence from a project of 'activist research' in migrant and refugee social movements in South Yorkshire U.K. The article argues that migrants' social movements have been neglected as important in the development of popular adult education in the U.K. The history of migrants' social movements from 1945 is sketched to demonstrate social movement influences on the content and ideological assumptions of state provision of adult education. The history also suggests a similar trajectory to 'old' contentious social movements like trades unions. The current research in migrants and asylum rights movements reported in the article suggests that migrants social movements are active and proficient in developing popular adult education initiatives including critical analysis of racist political and power discourses. The importance of these movements is demonstrated in a case study of a high profile campaign against the privatisation of asylum housing in Yorkshire by the world's largest security company G4S.
Social housing, multi-ethnic environments and the training of social educators: combined anthropological and educational perspectives
The paper presents part of a broader project that explores the role played by informal citizenship learning in social housing urban environments (SHe) and the related educational challenges for social educators, NGO practitioners and also researchers. In this article, in particular, I focus on issues related with social educators' and NGO practitioners' professional training. The aim of the paper, in this perspective, is to offer some introductory theoretical and methodological remarks for the training of NGO practitioners working in SHe. The basis for this reflection is the idea of informal learning (Schugurensky, 2000), the concepts of learning for reflexive citizenship and learning for active citizenship (Johnston, 2005) and anthropology of citizenship (Ong, 1999, 2003). In the research process, we have intersected instruments and methodologies coming from the different fields of anthropology and educational sciences. Our hypothesis consists in considering the possibility that exploring the professional field of social educators in SHe with an ethnographic approach could contribute to improve reflexive attitudes of social educators and shape their educational attitudes.
Inclusion and exclusion factors in adult education of youth with a low educational level in Spain
In this paper we analyse, from a biographical perspective, youth participation in education and training, aged between 26 and 28 years, who have no qualifications or at most have a qualification corresponding to the Lower Secondary Education Certificate (LSEC) (ISCED 0-2), during the 10 years elapsed between the end of compulsory education (2000) and the time of the interview (2010). As regards their personal life stories, we cover a broad period which includes different stages in the transition into adulthood, stages which take place in a historical context in which we have moved from a time characterised by ease of access to employment among youth with a low educational level to another time in which youth unemployment levels affects over half of the workforce aged 16 to 24 and in which public policies supporting training and social and professional insertion of young people with a low educational level have been reduced.
Education as a response to sustainability issues
In the field of environmental education and education for sustainable development, there is a lively discussion about the paradox between acknowledging pluralism and taking into account urgent sustainability concerns. With this article, we aim at nurturing this debate theoretically and empirically. We draw on concepts of Latour and Marres that allow an analysis of educational practices that strive to take into account a multiplicity of views, values, interests and knowledge claims without resorting to an 'anything goes' relativism vis-à-vis the far-reaching implications of sustainability issues. We present an analysis of a guided tour of a CSA farm (Community Supported Agriculture) and articulate how the care for a sustainability issue can incite an interesting educational dynamic (understood as 'education as a respons'e) that emerges as a derivative of 'mastery'.
Editorial: Mapping power in adult education and learning
The multiple reals of workplace learning
The multiple reals of workplace learning are explored in this paper. Drawing on a Foucauldian conceptualisation of power as distributed, relational and productive, networks that work to produce particular objects and subjects as seemingly natural and real are examined. This approach enables different reals of workplace learning to be traced. Data from a collaborative industry-university research project is used to illustrate the approach, with a focus on the intersecting practices of a group of professional developers and a group of workplace learning researchers. The notion of multiple reals holds promise for research on workplace learning as it moves beyond a view of reality as fixed and singular to a notion of reality as performed in and through a diversity of practices, including the practices of workplace learning researchers.
Discourses on lifelong and lifewide learning portray everyday life as a pedagogical space where requirements for how to preferably improve oneself through learning are highly significant. Drawing upon the notion of governmentality, it could be argued that techniques operate within a range of practices to shape, foster and stabilize the assumed adequate ways to perform. Using that particular lens, the case of parenting was investigated to accentuate selves and self-work in narrations on family life in Norway. The analysis illustrates how the techniques of activation and comparison are at work to define, fashion and develop the responsible, involved and attentive parental self, thereby signifying pedagogical claims one should aspire to. However, how this is accomplished differs slightly within the social contexts of family life. Parenting, then, may be discussed as a powerful educative practice for fabricating capable and wellbehaved citizens of contemporary times.
Adult education and publishing Canadian fiction in a global context: a Foucauldian analysis
This paper draws upon findings from a research study on the relationship between fiction, citizenship, and lifelong learning. It includes interviews with authors from several genres, publishing houses, and arts councils. This paper explores many of the ambivalent outcomes of the shifting power elements in publishing that can simultaneously benefit and disadvantage the publication of a national body of fiction. Although focused on the Canadian context, fiction writers and publishers around the globe face similar challenges. Using a Foucauldian analysis, it considers the importance of fiction and adult learning in shaping discourses of citizenship and critical social learning.
Since the 1970s, various aspects of power have been at the focus of theoretical and empirical adult education research. Despite the actual interest in political and discursive aspects of power, this article emphasizes the importance of interactional studies when observing and identifying power based on various types of data. As for German interaction studies, three phases can be distinguished, characterized by a) observations of failed participation based on records of classroom behaviour, b) the identification of mutual power negotiation in classroom and counselling situations based on transcriptions, and c) the identification of the power of physical settings in adult education classrooms and in counselling sessions based on visual data. It is presumed that observing/identifying power in adult education classrooms and counselling sessions generally depends not only on the notions of power underlying the studies but also on the data types produced and the methods applied for their interpretation. In addition, the question is raised whether the identification of power can be considered a power practice used by adult education researchers.
Book review: Learning with adults: A critical pedagogical introduction
By Leona M. English and Peter Mayo. (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers., 2012) 269 pp., ISBN 9789460917684 (electronic bk.)
The University as power or counter-power? May 1968 and the emergence of a new learning subject
The events of May 68 in France constituted a moment of questioning of the power and of the social role of the University. Two of the philosophers who contributed the most to that questioning were Althusser and Foucault. Their thoughts on the way in which power, discourse and social institutions are articulated played a major role in awakening the students' political consciousness and in opening the doors of the University to social movements that had been, until then, left out of academic discourse. Their positions on the events triggered passionate reactions that ended up changing the institutions of higher education from the inside. The Faure law, issued in the aftermath of the protests, on November 12, 1968, finally acknowledged that higher education should be available to mature students. Taking into account the points of contiguity between conceptual apparatuses of these authors, this paper intends to offer a reflection on the power-effects of the scientific discourse issued by the University and on how its power was contested in a period of deep ideological and political fractures, leading to a paradigmatic shift that democratized the institution and to the emergence of a new learning subject.
Interrogating professional power and recognition of specialized knowledge: a class analysis
This article explores ignored dimensions of relations between professional power and recognition of specialized knowledge, specifically the relations of professional class positions and workplace power with advanced professional schooling and further education. Professional class positions, mediated by association and union memberships, are posited as and confirmed to be important determinants of both advanced educational certification and further education. The evidence is drawn from unique national surveys of the working conditions and learning practices of entire Canadian labour force including especially a 2004 survey with a large number of professional respondents. The major implication is that class positions should be incorporated in further studies of professional power generally and variations in professional learning in particular.
The transition from initial vocational training to the world of work: the case of art school students
This contribution is based on a recently finished study. It gives an important place to the empirical dimension and proposes the analysis of two life-paths in the artistic field set against a broader analysis of the whole of the corpus produced as part of this research. The methods of analysis are situated at the intersection of the narrative and the sociological fields. This contribution examines the passage from initial training to the world of work. It reconstructs the ordeal represented by this passage and shows the way this ordeal fissures identity and human agency. It conceptualises in particular the possible links between identity and agency and the social environment. It then proposes an analysis of the process of bifurcation. The failure of intended artistic projects gives way to a bifurcation. The analysis locates this process at the intersection of selfimprovement and the search for social roots. Bifurcation gives way to the emergence of a new polarisation of action and to the reconstruction of a new system of networking with the environment. This contribution looks back at the whole of the analysis through the spectrum of low human agency.
Book review: The Confessing Society–Foucault, confession and practices of lifelong learning
By Andreas Fejes and Magnus Dahlstedt (London and New York, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2013) 122 pp., ISBN 978-0-415-58166-0
Book review: Popular education, power and democracy – Swedish experiences and contributions
By Ann-Marie Laginder, Henrik Nordvall and Jim Crowther (Eds.). (Leicester, UK: NIACE, 2013). 288 pp., € 29.95, ISBN 978-1-86201-579-1
Copyright (c) 2013 The author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Editorial: What's new in a new competence regime?
Ambiguities and paradoxes in a competence-based approach to vocational education and training in France
This article aims to show the effects of the prevalence of the competence regime within several sectors of vocational education and training in France. The first part of the article outlines the origin of the concept of competence and the evolution of its meaning. Later, the underlying theoretical and epistemological foundations are examined and two different paradigms are distinguished. The second part of the article focuses on ambiguities and paradoxes of effect of competence approaches, in specific educational programmes in the healthcare professions and social work in France. This study is based on the analysis of a corpus of documents concerning French vocational education and training that use a competence-based approach
The paper provides a critical analysis of the notion of generic or transversal skills contained with European Union policy discourses. The author presents a conceptual framework that challenges the idea that generic skills are universal, transferable and autonomous. An alternative analysis is put forward that argues the case for contextualising skills and knowledge within particular understandings and cultures that are more collective than individualistic in nature. The arguments are framed within wider cross-disciplinary debates in linguistics, geosemiotics and social-cultural theory and build upon an earlier paper exploring core skills in the UK (Canning, 2007).
From workers education to societal competencies: Approaches to a critical, emancipatory education for democracy
This article presents two conceptions concerning critical political education for workers, developed in Germany in the 1960s and the 1990s respectively. First, the conception of "Sociological Imagination and Exemplary Learning" ublished in 1968 by the German philosopher and sociologist Oskar Negt (1975). Further the elaboration of this conception, which since the 1980s is known as "Societal Competencies" (Negt, 1986). These competencies concern fundamental knowledge, which enables people to make political judgments, and act politically in democratic societies in an enlightened and reflected way. This conception deliberately distinguishes itself from the economic, instrumentalist notions of key qualifications and key competencies, which at least since the 1970s have been discussed with the aim of maintaining individual employability and competitiveness. 'Societal competencies' aim for individual and collective emancipation, the development of the capability to make judgments, and autonomy in the sense of the enlightened political agency and participation in democratization processes.
Beyond the current political economy of competence development
Competence is a concept imported into the adult and continuing education arena from the psychological terminology of human resource development in work organizations. It has been elevated to a societal and political level as part of a new discursive regime. This article points out the significance of the particular circumstances in which the competence discourse has emerged, and argues for its critical investigation within a Marxist framework. A new discourse of learning and competence reflects a new material dependency of capital(ism) on the concrete quality of work and workers, requiring a total program of learning for work. This opens a new arena of political struggle over the direction of learning processes and the participation of workers in work and society. The socio-economic realities and new understanding of the interrelationship between knowledge, skills, learning and practice central to the competence concept, raises a potential issue about the role of work and the living worker in a capitalist economy. This requires a re-development of the notion of economy based in the value and interest of working people, and enabled by the full development of the competences of the workers themselves. A notion of the "political economy of working people" is proposed as a framework for investigating the potentials of competence development for enhanced democracy.
Adult learning, education, and the labour market in the employability regime
The purpose of this paper is to draw on the research and scholarly literature to explore the changing discourses and perspectives concerning adult learning, education, and the labour market in the employability regime. The focus of the nalysis is a Nordic context. The dominant employability regime maintains a technical-rational perspective on learning and employability. Education is predominantly regarded as an instrumental preparation for the labour market. The future demands of the labour market are largely unknown, however, and vocational and professional training may not provide sufficient preparation for the increasing complexities of work. Theoretical discussions have been dominated by an alleged mismatch between individual competence and the qualifications that are required in the world of work. There is no consensus regarding how the gap should be described, explained, or bridged. New demands on educational design have emerged, and ideas related to liberal education and 'bildung' have been reinserted into the political agenda, offering general preparation for a wider array of challenges.
The disjuncture of learning and recognition: credential assessment from the standpoint of Chinese immigrant engineers in Canada
To better recognise foreign qualifications, many OECD countries have promoted liberal fairness epitomised by universal standards and institutional efficiency. This paper departs from such a managerial orientation towards recognition. Building on recognitive justice, it proposes an alternative anchoring point for recognition practices: the standpoint or everyday experiences of immigrants. This approach is illustrated with a qualitative study of the credential recognition practices of the engineering profession in Canada. From the standpoint of Chinese immigrants, the study identifies a disjuncture between credential recognition practices and immigrants' career stage post-migration. Taking this disjuncture as problematic, it further pinpoints recognition issues such as redundancy and arbitrariness, a narrow focus on undergraduate education, and a deficit view of training from other countries. While some of these issues may be addressed by improving administrative procedures, others demand a participatory space allowing immigrants to become partners of assessment, rather than merely its objects.
Editorial: Approaches to research in the education and learning of adults
Learning and knowing: Narratives, memory and biographical knowledge in interview interaction
The qualitative research interview engages with experience of social reality in sites of social interaction. Research interview respondents provide insight in biographical interviews into the significance of critical change processes for their individual and collective learning. Auto/biographical narratives of learning, are emergent, evolving accounts produced in a learning space hedged in by the demands of the "reflexive project of the self" which throw the individual more than ever before in processes of lifelong or life-wide learning onto their biographical resources. These resources can be understood as representing individual learning processes which are capable of furthering the creation of new cultural and social structures of experience, new forms of biographical knowledge which emerge out of the precarious balancing-act between routines and learning transitions. Research interviews embedded in interaction and participant reflexivity, addressing the learning transitions told in talk, access the construction of knowledge as adults move on to new biographical spaces and position themselves anew.
The scholarship about transformative learning theory has continued to grow exponentially, although much of the research is redundant with a deterministic emphasis while overlooking the need for more in-depth theoretical analysis. Explanations for this oversight are numerous, including a failure to ground research in primary sources, an over-reliance on literature reviews of transformative learning, lack of critique of original research; marginal engagement in positivist and critical research paradigms, and a lack of involvement in transformative learning by European adult education scholars. In order to stimulate theoretical development, this paper discusses five specific issues that will hopefully provoke further discussion and research. They include the role of experience, empathy, the desire to change, the theorys inherently positive orientation, and the need for research involving positivist and critical approaches.
Performative ontologies: Sociomaterial approaches to researching adult education and lifelong learning
Sociomaterial approaches to researching education, such as those generated by actornetwork theory and complexity theory, have been growing in significance in recent years, both theoretically and methodologically. Such approaches are based upon a performative ontology rather than the more characteristic representational epistemology that informs much research. In this article, we outline certain aspects of sociomaterial sensibilities in researching education, and some of the uptakes on issues related to the education of adults. We further suggest some possibilities emerging for adult education and lifelong learning researchers from taking up such theories and methodologies
Between external prescription and local practice The uses of official knowledge by adult education professionals in Portugal
This article presents the results of research where the main objective was to achieve a better understanding of the uses made by professionals in the adult education sphere of the official knowledge that provides the framework and guidelines for their work. The study was undertaken using Bernsteins theoretical model of the structure of official pedagogical discourse, and employed an essentially ethnographic fieldwork methodology to analyse the work of a team of adult education specialists working in a local development association in the north of Portugal. The results of the study show that the team was able to make both reproductive and recontextualising use of official knowledge, thereby demonstrating that, even in workplaces where external prescription is extremely influential, it is possible to put official knowledge to alternative i.e. more effective, locally-adapted use.
Comparing Popular and State education in Latin America and Europe
In the 1970s, a radical adult education movement in Latin America, operating outside the state and engaging in what it called popular education, sparked world-wide interest in its educational theory and practice. More recently, with a change in state formations in Latin America, the movement has reconsidered its potential relationship with the state. Though Europe has its own history of popular education, some have argued that advanced economies and welfare states co-opted any strong independent educational movement: today popular education is more likely to take place within and against the state, rather than outside it. Based on literature review, personal interviews and site visits, this article (a) discusses what is understood by popular education (b) outlines the development of popular education in Latin America, examining its relationship with different types of state (c) considers differences between Latin America and Europé and what, if anything, popular educators in the two regions might learn from each other.
Editorial: The effects of policies for the education and learning of adults - from 'adult education' to 'lifelong learning', from 'emancipation' to 'empowerment'
Copyright (c) 2012 The author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Political globalization and the shift from adult education to lifelong learning
This article reflects on the shift in vocabulary from (adult and continuing) education to (lifelong) learning and the ideological and purposive orientations it carries. It does so by critically addressing the changes occurred in policy discourses concerned with the education of adults after WWII at transnational level. The main argument is that the shift in vocabulary has been favoured by an increased voice acquired by transnational and inter-states entities (i.e. OECD, UNESCO, EU) in educational matters, however in combination with a change in political emphasis, at least within the European Union, from creating jobs opportunities towards securing that citizens acquire marketable skills. While both trends seems to point at the demise of the nation state as a guarantor for social justice, more research is needed to deepen our understandings of the interplay between transnational and nation-state levels; thus the article concludes by suggesting a research agenda to move in this direction.
From lifelong education to lifelong learning
When we think about current adult education in the context of the uneven and contradictory social and economic impact of globalization, it necessarily implies thinking about the transfer from the paradigm of lifelong education to the paradigm of lifelong learning. We shall examine the essential quality involved in the social significance and the political dimension of each of these paradigms, because, since the post-war period, both became innovative educational policy strategies capable of mobilizing and transforming society. We would like to stress the importance of rethinking the role of adult education today in the light of the responsibilities shifting from the state to individuals, arising from the implications of this transition of paradigms: we do this by framing it in the context of the socio-productive restructuring movement, which speeded up the move from the so-called model of qualification, associated to social emancipation, to what is known as the model of competence (later competences), which is associated with individual empowerment. Therefore in this article we intend to question this new policy direction, which is associated with a conceptual and methodological shift in adult education practices, by using the prism of a critical sociology of education.
Discursive turns from 'Bildung' to managerialism
The article focuses on the struggles over ethos in academic adult education tradition that grows from the frameworks of student generations in Finnish adult education. It brings together elements of present-day analysis and historically sensitizing memory data on generations of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. My interest here lies in how the rhetoric of lifelong learning and education has revised the basic assumptions of adult education. The data suggest that the dominant narrative of adult education is increasingly the discourse of marketization. Finnish present-day student generations seem to have lost their intrinsic connections with the Scandinavian traditions of popular enlightenment and the values of equality and basic logics enabling 'second chances' for all adult citizens within the Nordic welfare state. One of the results of the analysis was the following question: Should we reinvent adult education again from the standpoint of sustainable development of 'ordinary people'?
This study explores language regarding career and career development in European policy documents on career guidance in order to disclose underlying view(s) of these phenomena conveyed in the texts. Qualitative content analysis was used to approach the subject in the texts, followed by a sender-oriented interpretation. Sources for interpretation include several sociological and pedagogical approaches based upon social constructionism. These provide a framework for understanding how different views of career phenomena arise. The characterization of career phenomena in the documents falls into four categories: contextual change, environment-person correspondence, competence mobility, and empowerment. An economic perspective on career dominates, followed by learning and political science perspectives. Policy formulations convey contradictory messages and a form of career 'contract' that appears to subordinate individuals' careers to global capitalism, while attributing sole responsibility for career to individuals.
This text is about life narratives, memory and time as basic elements in autobiographical research. Aspects of these have seemed important to me whilst I have been conducting and coordinating a research project involving a team of researchers from Brazil and other countries. In this article I take the memory of the individual narrator as the focus, despite the fact that the memories of narrator and researcher are intertwined and co-defined through social and cultural relations and that the narrators´ memory and the analysis and the interpretation of the narrator and researcher are intertwined and complementary to each other. I deal with time since the narrator's perspective on the past reality is involved in any narration. _x000D_ _x000D_ The article has four parts. The first is focused on the research approach in general. Among other concepts I distinguish between autobiographical research, life stories and life narratives. The second part is focused on a specific research project that studied peoples' memories about distinguished educators and education development in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. This project offers the backdrop for understanding representations of memory and time. The third part draws on examples from this project to clarify the dimensions of memory and time as I understood them. Finally, in the last part, but not aiming to conclude, I relate these findings to some concepts from the literature.
Life history approaches to access and retention of nontraditional students in higher education: A cross-European approach
Higher education participation has become an important focus for policy debate as well as for scholarly research. Partly this results from ongoing attempts to expand the higher education system in line with wider policies promoting a 'knowledge economy'; and partly it results from widespread policy concerns for equity and inclusion. In both cases, researchers and policymakers alike have tended to focus on access and entry to the system, with much less attention being paid to the distribution of outcomes from the system. This paper reports on a multi-country study that was aimed at critically understanding the experiences of non-traditional students in higher education, and in particular on the factors that helped promote retention. In doing so, the study straddles the sociology of social reproduction and the psychosociology of learner transformations.
In line with current trends towards a positive and enhancement-led perspective, this account of a research project carried out in a Scottish university considers the student nurse experience as a lens for examining retention enablers. Two phases of interviews with final year students from a diverse cohort, many of whom were adult learners, informed the development of a series of themes and recommendations for better understanding factors which encourage persistence. A combination of grounded theory thematic analysis and narrative interpretation was used in this research to encourage a rich biographical component.
Book review: Community education, learning and development
By Lynn Tett (Third Edition) (Edinburgh, Dunedin Academic Press Ltd., 2010) 126 pp., 17.99 €, ISBN 978-1-906716-10-3 First published 2002 as Community education, lifelong learning and social inclusion
Copyright (c) 2011 The author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
International learning communities for global and local citizenship
In this paper, I describe our ongoing international project in engaged educational ethnography and participatory action research with young adults and consider its relevance for a discussion on the community-building role of adult education in a globalized context. I use the example of our case study to suggest that adult educators can generate viable communities by creating learning spaces that nurture critical consciousness, a sense of agency, participation and social solidarity among internationally and culturally diverse young adult learners. Furthermore, I argue that participation in international learning communities formed through this educational process can potentially help young adults become locally and globally engaged citizens. International learning communities for global citizenship thus present a proposition for conceptualizing the vital role of adult community education in supporting democratic global and local citizenship in a world defined in terms of cross-cultural and longdistance encounters in the formation of culture.
This paper examines the learning experienced through participation by men in two quite different two motor sports organisations in Western Australia. It relies on interview data from volunteers about what they do and what they learn as a consequence of their participation in staging complex but safe, competitive, public events. The paper provides evidence of a deep well of learning and wide range of skills produced as a consequence of participation. This learning would rarely be recognised as education or training, illustrating the need for caution when concluding that adult education is not taking place and learning outcomes are not being achieved other than through courses where teaching occurs, or in contexts that are regarded as literary. What men skills men learnt, though significant as outcomes, were not the object of the motor sport activity, supporting Biesta's (2006) view that the amassing of knowledge and skills can be achieved in other valuable ways aside from through education.
The frontier between the south of Spain and Portugal is established by the river Guadiana. Lying next to the sea, the cities of Ayamonte (Spain) and Vila Real de Santo António (Portugal) face each other on opposite banks of the river. The research that feeds into this paper is focused on these two cities. We study specifically how identity is built in this cross-border area. To do this, in a first phase of this study we organized eight focus group interviews. In the second phase of this research we conducted biographical interviews to deepen some of the analytic categories we were dealing with. _x000D_ _x000D_ These results lead us to state that the territory, and the views that people hold on this territory, are still very important in identity building. This includes both culture and identity as strategic elements in the construction of both development and educational processes. Additionally, one has to ask where people learn the elements that determine these processes. The images of ourselves and the images of the other – that make up stereotypes of both the Spanish and the Portuguese – are built in what kind of contexts and through what types of educational processes? We will try to answer these questions
Editorial: Adult education and the community
Diverse views on citizenship, community and participation
In this article, we look at three photographs that each (re)present a space of citizenship and community. In examining each photo, we question our assumptions about adult education and community building practices. In each of the three cases, we adopt the same approach. We start by focusing on a particular place where present-day citizenship nowadays takes shape and observing what is to be seen at this location. This observation forces us to view that particular place in sharp focus and to direct our attention to the specific citizenship practice emerging there. This is an exercise in paying attention, which helps us to take notice of the singular way in which citizenship and community play a role in that particular context. In line with this, we also formulate some critical observations regarding a number of mainstream concepts in policy discourse such as social cohesion, active citizenship, lifelong learning, etc. These terms often represent programmes that close off the space in which an original contribution to adult education can be developed rather than opening it up. In analyzing these three images, we do not aim to construct a fully-fledged theoretical framework nor to develop a method. Rather, we wish to open the possibility of seeing things differently and altering our way of thinking.
The first section of this paper is a discussion of the paradoxes contained in definitions of the word 'community' and deliberately foregrounds and makes problematic conflicting meanings before arguing for a third definition and practice of community. This third definition and practice celebrates and even transcends contradictions within an active learning model of education in the community, aimed at tackling inequality and prejudice. The second section offers an autocritical narrative account of an education in the community project that illustrates how such a practice of community making can be achieved within an educational framework in which pupil is teacher and teacher is pupil and in which an imaginative, creative approach is deployed to construct a community making practice. The paper draws on understandings from community development, inclusive and creative education, emancipatory action research, postcolonial and post-structuralist theory.
Adult education and the State: Gramsci, the historical materialist tradition and relevant others
This paper focuses on the relationship between adult education and the State within the context of hegemonic globalization and the all pervasive neoliberal ideology. It draws from a variety of sources and provides an overview of discussions concerning the State giving pride of place to the Historical Materialist tradition in the area. Using a Gramscian perspective, it argues that contrary to the widespread mantra that the state has receded into the background in this era of globalization, we argue that the State remains ever so present in this context and, if anything, remains central to the Neoliberal project.
The aim of this paper is to explore the concept of compelling space for learning. The research presented uses an auto/biographical methodology to explore nurses' learning. Theoretical perspective is drawn from biographical approaches and ideas around development of the self, to examine the nature of people's experience. The argument is advanced, through the narrations of three study participants from a PhD study, that there is a need for nurses to have space to tell their stories of learning and to reconnect with personal experience. The narrations focus upon learning by mistake, developing an interpretive imagination and using biography in teaching and learning and have something to contribute to the development of spaces of learning. This is developed further by considering how biographical method and reflexive responses offer opportunity to find the personal voice and make spaces more compelling and integrative as a different form of pedagogy for nurse education.
The development of the professionalism of adult educators
To investigate the development of the professionalism of adult educators, we compare individuals' narratives of their professional work at different times in their biographies. Using data from a qualitative longitudinal study, the paper includes two case studies through which we show phases of learning in the development of professionalism. We reconstruct forms and meanings of learning in this process. The study allows insights into differences in professional learning during the life course and the influence of institutional and social context in the development of professionalism.
Professionalisation and quality management
The quality of adult educators is on the agenda of European educational policy and the scientific community in Europe. In these contexts, professionalisation and quality management are often conflated. This paper is based on the hypothesis that quality management and professionalisation follow two different approaches. The paper outlines the two approaches with a focus on their two different logics. After a brief comparison of the two approaches, the paper examines the conflation of these two approaches in the expertise Key competences for adult learning professionals (Research voor Beleid, 2010). The paper ends with a plea for acknowledging the boundaries between professionalisation and quality management, and shows ways of building bridges between them without neglecting their essential differences.
Contradictions in adult education structures and policies in Austria
This article analyses the structural influences on the professional development of adult educators and their relation to education policy using Austria as a fairly average example of the diversity in European adult education. The position of adult education is first analysed in the course of the development of a lifelong learning strategy, showing a set of basic contradictions that are institutionally embedded in educational practices and policies. The consequences of these constellations for professional development in adult education are then examined, and a policy analysis undertaken based on institutional theory and using literature, documents and secondary data. This analysis shows that the contradictions in the institutional structures and policies inhibit both the development of a lifelong learning strategy as well as the professional development of adult educators. The competence development and quality assurance approaches adopted in Europe contribute only very modestly to the development of adult education in Austria.
Competing discourses and the positioning of students in an adult basic education programme
This article presents a case study of the learning processes of students enrolled in an adult basic education programme in the social and health care sector in Denmark. Theoretically the project draws on 'positioning theory', i.e. a poststructuralist approach. The issues being researched are how the students are positioned and position themselves in relation to the discourses mobilised in the programme. A qualitative inquiry, the empirical aspects consist of observations, interviews and studying documents. In addition to suggesting that competition exists between the opposing discourses mobilised in the programme, the preliminary constructions presented in this article point to processes that involve the inclusion and exclusion of students.
In the framework of videoconference classrooms at local learning centres in Sweden
This article explores the practice of videoconferencing and draws on interaction in class based on ethnographic ieldwork carried out at local learning centres in Sweden. The study is based on participant observations focusing on communication and the role of the teacher in a videoconferencing class. The results of the study shed light on different functions of the teachers' questions such as rhetorical, expanding and provocative. Further, talk in videoconferencing lacks systems of proper back-channel cues and communication often fails as a result of low feedback. The study also shows that there is a lack of balance in the distribution of utterances between the teacher and the students and that interaction is often one-way. The teacher becomes an actor in class reacting against low feedback. Questions and statements posed by the teacher are designed to break through the barriers of mediating technology. Also interaction patterns are impaired by misunderstandings and the practice is described as a learning space imbued with the rationale of communication technology.
The claim to be a profession traditionally assumes the need for a University level qualification. In a previously unregulated area of practice, the development of a professional qualification is thus central to the professionalisation process. In Scotland, the development of a Teaching Qualification for Adult Literacies practitioners became the focal point for the tensions in the broader professionalisation project and a site of discursive contestation in an emergent field of practice. This paper explores the play of power and resistance, drawing primarily on two separate but related research studies– a policy analysis and an exploration of practitioners' conceptualisations of practice. Whilst the first study explicitly used the methodological framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2003) and the second, Personal Construct Theory (Kelly, 1955), they are connected by their postmodern focus on language use and an interest in how practitioners are managed by and, in turn, manage and mediate managerial and professional forms of power; both aimed to examine 'how discourse figures in the processes of change' (Fairclough, 2003, p. 205). Brought into relationship with one another in the context of the nexus of power relations formed by the development of the new qualification, they illuminate the multiple 'projects' competing discursively in the space.
Editorial: Professionalisation – the struggle within
Learning democracy in a Swedish gamers' association: Representative democracy as experiential knowledge in a liquid civil society
To explore the role of civil society organizations in learning democracy this article combines the concept of democracy as 'phronesis' with neo-institutional theory, as well as with Hannah Pitkin's concepts of representation. It presents a case study (based on qualitative research) of how democracy is learned in SVEROK, a Swedish youth organization focusing on activities such as computer and role-playing games, activities often associated with informal organization. In SVEROK they are organized in an organization sharing many features with established Swedish organizations, including hierarchic formal representative democracy. The norm in SVEROK is a pragmatic organizational knowledge focusing on substantive and formal representation. Organized education plays only a limited role. Learning is typically informal and experience-based. An organization similar to earlier national organizations is created by self-organized and self-governing associations in government-supported cooperation. The case study supports Theda Skocpol's argument that organizational structure is vital to democratic learning.
Establishing a new scholarly journal can be justified by the functional needs of a welldefined scientific discipline – or as opposition to its institutional and paradigmatic framework. This is, however, not the case with the European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults (RELA). It is, rather, so that the journal is part of the emergence of a scientific community, very deeply embedded in societal practices at the same time as it is reconstructing intellectually these practices and their context as scientific objects. In this case, the journal can attempt to provide an arena and some of the communicative resources for academic and broader social development of such a community. To fulfil this mission, its rationale and specific goals are equally related to a diagnosis of these societal practices and some visions for the role of scientific inquiry in these practices. As two of the six editors of RELA, and responsible for the editorial work of the first issue of the journal, we will discuss why this journal has been launched, and how the editors want to position it in the area of the education and learning of adults.
Copyright (c) 2010 The author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Book review: The State, civil society and the citizen: Exploring relationships in the field of adult education in Europe
By Michal Bron Jr., Paula Guimarães and Rui Viera de Castro (Eds.) (Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2009) 229 pp., 42.50 €, ISBN 978-3-631-58593-1
A democracy we can eat: a livelihoods approach to TVET policy and provision
In Southern Africa, theories of adult education have remained modelled on imported paradigms. The urgency of particularly the first of the Millennium Development Goals, 'to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger' generally translates into policy and provision of skills training based on purely economistic considerations. In practice, lifelong education and learning occurs most commonly as part of other social practices and in the guise of community development. This article outlines the livelihood approach as a conceptual and methodological tool for a locally grounded understanding of what constitutes 'work' particularly in the context of poverty and high-risk environments. It argues that the principles of interconnectedness, relationality and agency are central to understanding livelihood practices and that participatory processes of data collection, dialogue and analysis should inform education and training policy. Programmes and curricula that fit in with the livelihood strategies of people have a greater chance of being supported and the process that leads to such understanding could provide a democratic model for adult education elsewhere.
Aggression, recognition and qualification
The article analyses the emotional aspects of a professional training process in the light of the participants' experienced societal status. A detailed text analysis of interviews with a group of social pedagogue staff in Danish Youth clubs focuses on a particular vulnerability and their aggressive perception of other students with social problems, and interprets it partly as a reaction on the paradoxical situation adults in continuing education, and partly in the perspective of their experience of not being recognized as a profession. The last section of the article further explains the deep hermeneutic text analysis applied, which combines psychoanalytical concepts of socialisation with a language game approach.
Invisible colleges in the adult education research world
Invisible colleges - researchers' networks of communicating academic work - are power-generating actors shaping research fields. A key question concerns the relation between local research communities and their dependence on global actors. A key arena is articles and citations in academic journals. An actor-network-inspired empirical investigation of the geographical origin of articles and references in the journal "Studies in the Education of Adults" and a check of references to journals in "Adult Education Quarterly" was made. The origin of articles and study objects in the International journal of Lifelong education was also analysed. Some conclusions can be drawn from the material. One is the heavy impact of "real" geographical location, i.e. the origins of texts and references are located in very specific areas on the map, i.e. in spite of the possibilities of cyberspace and global mobility. Another conclusion is the unilateral relation between an Anglo-American centre and a periphery in the distribution systems of texts. Adult education is faced with a contradictory situation between culturing invisible colleges in adult education and getting resources in the emerging economy of publications and citations through membership in other invisible colleges.
Workplace 'learning' and adult education
This article reviews diverse representations of learning evident among published accounts of workplace learning across fields such as adult education, human resource development, management and organisation studies. The discussion critically addresses the question of how to mediate a multiplicity of definitional, ideological and purposive orientations. The argument here is that the issue is not perspectival, but ontological. The critical problem lies in mistaking learning as a single object when in fact it is enacted as multiple objects, as very different things in different logics of study and practice. Particularly in the contested arena of work as a site of economic conflict and production, learning needs to be appreciated as a messy object, existing in different states, or perhaps a series of different objects that are patched together through some manufactured linkages.
Thinking about the future of educational research requires a conceptual resource that is itself both imaginative and multiple and at the same time articulates a world with those self-same characteristics. This is provided by the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Discussion of the future of research is located in a context of lifelong learning in the contemporary moment of ubiquitous electronic communication. I argue that the research process, contrary to the model of science, can be better understood as rhizomatic rather than arborescent and powered by desire rather than objectivity. Lifelong learning is a rhizome and requires a rhizomatic approach and sensibility on the part of the researcher. The hyper-connectivity of the Internet reinforces this development influencing the way research is carried out and the way its knowledge outcomes are distributed and used – a research without hierarchy and authority.
On the incommensurability of adult education researchers' worlds
The article consists of two parts. The first part shows how the idea of lifelong learning turns away from an earlier understanding of adult education, replacing it with a new vision of learning activities as natural processes of participation in culture. For adult education as a research field this means a paradigmatic shift that is radical, thus difficult and costly. A transition from teaching to learning lays the foundations for a discourse that implicates a reconceptualisation of the most basic theoretical categories and methodological competences of research practices. This change of leading research paradigm creates a situation that each discipline finds difficult. Analysis presented in the second part of the paper describes the situation among Polish researchers in the field of the education of adults. Describing the divided research community, the author emphasizes the difficult position of young researchers and proposes a typology of their attitudes towards their professional roles and academic career.
The role of adult educators towards (potential) participants and their contribution to increasing participation in adult education - insights into existing research
Increasing participation in adult education and addressing certain (disadvantaged) target groups is not only a professed aim of educational politics on both the national and the international level, but also a pedagogical goal. Target group and participant orientation are fundamental concepts in this process. This article discusses results of a recent German research project which examined the perspective of adult educators. The question is raised as to how far adult educators believe that target groups and participant oriented quality and the promotion of competences among adult educators may contribute to an increase in enrolment in further education. By examining the attitudes of adult educators with regard to target groups and participant orientation possible ways of improving target group participation and participant orientation on the institutional level are suggested. Furthermore, the article touches upon research questions, asking how research on potential participants and actual participants could be linked to research on educational programmes and the profession.
Is there still a place for social emancipation in public policies?
The consolidation of the welfare state in Europe after World War II allowed for the development of adult education programmes aimed at social inclusion, economic growth and democratic citizenship. Lifelong education, proposed by UNESCO (1970s), allowed countries to build adult education policies combining the needs of economic growth and increasing democratic social demands, based on adults' emancipation. In the last two decades, the European Union (EU) orientation for lifelong learning has stressed the formation of education and training to prepare workers to be more productive, and the creation of partnership (public/private) provision, according to managerial rules and procedures. These two distinct political approaches have influenced the evolution of adult education in Portugal. In this paper we argue that the civil society organisations (CSOs) of Portugal today are trapped within a set of technical procedures that have been established in the name of lifelong learning and that EU programmes have made it very difficult for CSOs to escape national state control. This situation impedes innovative and alternative attempts to promote social emancipation.