Place Matters: Producing Power and Identity

Place plays a significant role in producing power relations in continuing professional education. Where we locate our CPE programs influences not only their purposes and processes but also produces the identities of the participating professionals and professions as well as the power professionals and professions exercise in society

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

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

(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

“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

The Problem of Power

The purpose of this paper is to examine various critical theoretical traditions for what power is and how it works

Rethinking Empowerment: Theories of Power and the Potential for Emancipatory Praxis

In this paper, we make the case that “empowerment” is still a concept which requires closer scrutiny, for both practical and theoretical reasons. Building on critiques of empowerment and on calls to more consciously address the power relations inherent in adult education, we lay the groundwork for a practical theory of action whereby education practitioners and researchers can work towards salvaging empowerment’s emancipatory potential

Towards a Critical Theory of Adult Learning/Education: Transformational Theory and Beyond

Given the great promise of critical theory to transform the field of adult education and its understanding of adult learning, indeed, to create, as Mezirow boldly proclaimed two decades ago, a critical theory of adult learning, where are we now

Cognition and Practice: Adult Learning Situated in Everyday Activity

Theories and procedures used to teach adults to write often lack an understanding of the central constitutive dimensions of activity, tools, and culture in adult learning. A situated view of teaching writing is introduced

Situating Cognition: Knowledge and Power in Context

Although adult education as a field has shown interest in the work of Lave and others concerning situated cognition, the authors argue that adult education as a field has misappropriated some of the central concepts of situated cognition