In recent years academic interest in social movement learning (SML) has flourished. "Studies in the Education of Adults" has arguably emerged as the premier international forum for exploring the links between adult learning and movements for progressive change. In parallel to this subfield, yet largely in isolation from it,…

Traditionally, adult education has had a focus on learning connected to social purpose. In the current neoliberal climate, lifelong learning is increasingly defined as an endeavour whereby individuals must situate themselves in a competitive position in order to succeed in the global marketplace. Radical educators who believe that education should…

In this paper I explore the relationships between lifelong learning and emancipation. On the one hand I raise critical questions about the idea of lifelong learning, particularly highlighting the tendency to turn social and political problems into learning problems and thus into issues that need to be resolved by individuals and their learning,…

This article will explore lifelong learning and community participation for older women. In doing so, it will draw on empirical work undertaken with the National Federation of Women's Institutes in England and Wales in the UK; and the Sydney Older Women's Network in Australia. The article will briefly outline something of the policies and…

This paper explores learner progression for participants in community-based adult learning (CBAL) provision in Scotland. It focuses on learners' perceptions of progression drawn from analysis of life history interviews carried out with ten adults who had participated in community-based adult learning. The analysis of data was undertaken in three…

Universities traditionally construct ethical, as well as educational goals in their mission, which they attempt to promote not only through their graduates, but sometimes directly to the wider community. This study explores how targeting lifelong learners through the medium of educational tourism might be one such way in which universities can…

There is a need for a theoretical understanding of education and learning in social movements which takes into consideration the diverse ways in which learning occurs as well as the social, economic and ecological conditions in which movements emerge. These material conditions set opportunities and constraints for the generation and distribution…

This paper considers the positioning of work in community learning spaces through insights drawn from a particular case of adult community education in Victoria, Australia. Despite the rhetorical location of adult community education in Victoria as a legitimate and important sector of post compulsory education and as part of the platform on which…

This article explores the significance of theories of the post-human for lifelong learning. Drawing upon the works of Karen Barad and Bruno Latour, it suggests that education has focused on the learning subject as a result of an a priori assumption of a separation of matter from meaning, the object from the subject. By contrast, a post-human…

This paper explores educational decision-making within a life course perspective. It draws on interviews carried out with 34 people, ages 30-81, as part of a longitudinal study into educational experiences of part-time mature students in continuing education at a London university. It considers to what extent their decisions about study are…

Can adult educational research on learning and identity counter the individualising of neoliberal government policy that seeks to constrain educational "choices" to those that contribute to government economic agendas? This article notes the recent move within post-compulsory education research towards an engagement with Bourdieu because of…

Donald Swanson, a library scientist at the University of Chicago, has coined the phrase "undiscovered public knowledge". As a university-based adult educationalist I am particularly interested in the "undiscovered public knowledge" which lies in the spaces beyond the academy, especially in the many associations, groups and movements involved in…

From 1912 to 1975 the Department of Extension at the University of Alberta provided an impressive range of programmes and services to people across the Canadian province of Alberta. The four Directors of Extension at the University of Alberta during this period became leading figures in the history of adult education in Canada. They positioned…

This paper critically examines popular discourses of pedagogy circulating in adult education theory and practice: pedagogy as (heroic or nurturing) person, as prescriptive strategy, as political purpose, and as situated practices. I argue that problematic conceptions and desires can be identified across these discourses that lead to orientations…

This article explores the question of what we might understand to be a learning context within discourses of lifelong learning. If we identify learning as both lifelong and lifewide, how then can we frame a meaningful notion of context and what is its relationship to learning? These are important questions that have been explored within work on…