Learning for Food System Justice: Exploring Action Research and Knowledge Production in the Local Food Movement

I explore how adult educators can contribute to food system justice through the lens of action research. The Applachian Foodshed Project provides a contemporary illustration of action research focusing on community food security. Implications emphasize food system movements as legitimate spaces for adult educational inquiry

Collective Impact in/for Adult Education: A Framework for Collective Action to Address Community Complexity and Resilience

We explore how adult educators may (re)position their praxis to focus on the social action goals of adult education by envisioning the possibilities of Collective Impact (CI) and evaluation capacity building. Implications emphasize the potential of achieving collective impact outcomes to address community complexity, resiliency, and systems-level change

Seeing What Needs to be Seen, Saying What Needs to be Said: Discourse Analysis for Critical Adult Education

We explore several prominent traditions of discourse analysis and their potential for critical scholarship in adult education. Conclusions include key insights for adult educators to engage with the theory and practice of conducting discourse analysis

(Re)Situating Cognition: Expanding Sociocultural Perspectives in Adult Education

We review key sociocultural perspectives of learning and cognition to begin to “make good” on the promise of situated cognition in adult education by incorporating its too-often ignored political analysis

Learning Through On-Farm Apprenticeships: Labor Identities and Sociocultural Reproduction within Alternative Agrifood Movements

On-farm apprenticeship is a site of sociocultural learning for beginning farmers, and also for identity politics, mediated by social movement learning processes. This critical ethnographic case study examines this activity

“Social Learning” for/in Adult Education? A Discursive Review of What it Means for Learning to be “Social”

Our paper reports on a critical discourse analysis of “social learning” in the literature. We not only emphasize the kinds of investigations that have focused on social forms of adult learning but exemplify what it means for learning to be “social” in the field of adult education

Are all Contexts Learning Contexts? Rethinking the Relationship between Learning and Context in Adult Learning Theory

We explore the “question of context” as a discursive practice in adult learning literature to reveal how the act of identifying learning contexts within complementary (and at times confusing) discourses of adult learning affects our means to understand and organize learning. We specifically focus on the way cognitive and situated conceptualizations of learning are utilized, challenged, and reconfigured in social and in/nonformal learning discourses to give meaning to the relationship between context and learning. We conclude with implications for rethinking the “static” understanding of context in adult education research and practice to expand our contemporary views of learning-in-context

Situated Learning and On-Farm Apprenticeships: Political Implications of Negotiating Apprentice Identity

By drawing upon the tradition of situated and activity perspectives of adult learning, this mixed methods study underscores the sociocultural and politicized processes by which farmer/learners negotiate apprentice identity. Our findings offer implications for the formation of equitable apprenticeship learning experiences and career pathways

Development of Peer Educators within Paraprofessional Community-Based Adult Education Models: An Experiential Learning Perspective

In community-based peer education models, it is necessary to understand the relationship between learning, context and paraprofessional identity construction. Social relations are important in community education program implementation (Merriam, Caffarella, & Baumgartner, 2007); impacting power structure within communities and organizations (Cervero & Wilson, 1994, 2006). Drawing upon a current research project of community-based nutrition education, we explore the conceptual and practical role of experience in paraprofessional educator models and focus on the situated, contextual experiences of paraprofessionals in the communities they work and live as unique, challenging, and potentially positive for learning outcomes

Learning from Practice Stories & Reflective Practice: A Narrative Analysis of Community-based Activism by Community Food System Practitioners

Using narrative inquiry, this paper exemplifies the creation of practice stories, and the reflective practice that is embedded, that gives meaning to the place-based activism of community food system practitioners as a legitimate form of adult education. Implications for understanding and navigating ontological politics in practice are shared