Remaking Communities And Adult Learning

What responses is adult education providing to the great global problems: climate change and the environment, populism and racism, gender inequality, social and economic inequality? The ESREA Research Network between Local and Global – Adult Learning and Communities and the authors collected here argue for socially engaged community-based research which promotes critical democracy and popular education and drives powerful research methodologies: participatory research, feminist research, ecological research activism, posthumanist research, and more. The first part of the book looks back and forwards to the contribution to adult learning and community development played by participatory research in the making and remaking of community and society. In the second part, the focus shifts to pedagogies of possibility and change, knowledge creation and the transformation of pedagogies of inclusion. The third part, on activism and change, turns its attention to the motivations for activism and their individual and collective forms of expression. The final part considers re-making and 'doing' society and community, in particular during the COVID-19 pandemic. For researchers interested in participatory and emancipatory social research, gender and biography research, or community-university research partnerships, Remaking Communities and Adult Learning presents adult learning as a site of resistance for sustainable and creative andragogic practice.

Representative of a wide range of adult education and lifelong learning frameworks and experiences, this book gives voice to emerging perspectives and offers thought-provoking critiques of established practices and accepted theories. Those in the adult education academy, as well as other voices often excluded from the discourse in adult education, offer critiques of the social, political, economic, and historical forms of hegemony in the discipline. They analyze the ways in which these hegemonic norms and practices have affected adult learning environments and the participation rates of varying groups and shed light on how adult education as a field of practice can marginalize individuals based on their ethnicity, race, gender, class, language, age, or sexual orientation. These critiques provide a powerful statement about silence, invisibility, and the marginalization of the other, and suggest that adult educators may complicitly, if not implicitly, marginalize adult learners. This book will provide professors and students, adult literacy teachers, corporate trainers, community-based organizers, and others with alternative ways to think about adult education practice, adult learners, and the multiple, intersecting realities that influence the teaching/learning transaction. In so doing, this book provides practitioners and academicians with a forum to dialog about emerging theories and practices, and through the discourse they can begin to merge theories and practices through language that is accessible and inclusive.

Adult education offers the potential to enhance the individual's sense of agency to direct and improve their future; this is especially important in times of significant societal unrest. It may lead to social change and even social justice. This book begins with a new consideration of historical perspectives of radical adult education in the UK and how these might inform planning for future adult education which is both relevant and emancipatory. The volume aims to capture some of the 'messiness' of adult education through analysis of a wide range of its many forms and a focus on the learners themselves, the different kinds of providers and the wider community around them. Individual chapters offer insights into an environmental community gardening scheme, provision for refugees and asylum seekers, the radical role of volunteers, the impact of discussion groups for older people and the National Community Service scheme for young adults. The book considers the significance of the Sustainable Development Goals, each of which includes targets linked with adult training, awareness-raising or education. Considering the factors for effective adult education programmes for social change, this volume questions the extent to which it can be argued that positive social change results from adult education. Active learning, group learning and education which is practical, flexible and individualised may provide the best routes ahead. The wide-ranging case studies demonstrate the importance of recognising and valuing adult learners' prior knowledge, and the need for alternative approaches to assessment.

Honorable Mention, 2017 Phillip E. Frandson Award for Literature in the Field of Professional, Continuing, and/or Online Education presented by the University Professional and Continuing Education Association This groundbreaking book critiques the boundaries of where adult education takes place through a candid examination of teaching, learning, and working practices in the social periphery. Lives in this context are diverse and made through complex practices that take place in the shadows of formal systems: on streetscapes and farms, in vehicles and homes, and through underground networks. Educators may be family members, friends, or colleagues, and the curriculum may be based on needs, interests, histories, and cultural practices. The case studies presented here analyze adult education in the lives of sex workers, LGBTQ activists, undocumented migrants, disabled workers, homeless youth, immigrants, inmates, and others. Focusing on learning at the social margins, this book challenges readers to reconceptualize local, national, and transnational adult education practices in light of neoliberalism and globalization.

This original and challenging book introduces the ground-breaking concept of ‘invisible education’, theorising it with critical posthuman concepts and demonstrating it through a wide range of empirical research. Invisible education is the learning that happens in everyday life: it is invisible because it is purposively ignored and devalued, and it is education because it is powerful and formative. Far from being marginal, this is where the future is being formed. The book challenges the feel-good fiction of social mobility through formal education, replacing it with the new concept of future mutabilities, shaped through invisible education. The book is the first to bring together lifelong learning and critical posthumanism and does so in ways that are mutually illuminating. The book draws on a wide range of funded empirical research on invisible education: exploring landscapes, animals and things (material, immaterial and uncanny), activism, volunteering and work, home lives and care, and global contexts of conflict. It charts how invisible education plays a crucial role in the lives of marginalised people, including young people, activists, postverbal people, carers, women escaping domestic abuse and many others. Combining posthuman ideas with memoir, poetry, art and fiction, it is creative, intellectually stimulating and readable.

This volume critically explores themes of belonging, learning and community, drawing on a range of research studies conducted with adult learners in formal and informal contexts and employing interdisciplinary theory from education, feminist theory, cultural studies and human geography. Dominant but simplistic and regulatory ideas and practices of learning community in higher education and lifelong learning are critiqued. Instead, Jocey Quinn argues that learners gain most benefit from creating their own symbolic communities and networks, which help to produce imagined social capital. A rich variety of empirical data is used to explore and demonstrate how such imagined social capital works.

Can adult education and learning be understood without reference to community and people’s daily lives? The response to be found in the chapters of this volume say emphatically no, they cannot. Adult learning can be best understood if we look at the social life of people in communities, and this book is an attempt to recover this view. The chapters of this volume reflect ongoing research in the field of adult education and learning in and with communities. At the same time the work of the authors presented here offers a very vital reflection of the work of the ESREA research network Between Local and Global – Adult Learning and Communities. The chapters showcase the broad range of professional practice, the variety in both methodology and theoretical background, as well as the impressive scope of field research experience the authors bring to bear in their papers. The first section provides the broad view of research into adult learning and community development emphasising how social movements are at the heart of local and global change and that they are critically important sources of power. The second section focuses in on the practice of educators/mediators working in local and regional contexts in which the tensions of the wider policy and discourse environment impact on adult learners. The third section privileges the view at the close level of research inside local communities in the field. International researchers and practitioners, particularly young researchers, who are active in adult learning and in local/global communities will be interested in this book. The emphasis of the chapters is on participatory and emancipatory social research. Empowerment of women in rural communities, involvement of communities in social and environmental movements, power-sharing in community research projects and the exposure of hegemonic, globalising forces at work in ethnic communities are among the themes developed in this volume.