Introduction: Contemporary World and Adult Learning and Education

Abstract

The book Navigating through Contemporary World with Adult Education Research and Practice is an assembly of different topics, reflections, novel theoretical analyses and examples of good practices, hopes and worries of a number of researchers and adult educators from various countries and continents. It represents the combined effort to respond and navigate through accelerating growth of research and practice areas of adult education reflecting different contexts, opportunities and challenges present in our contemporary realities. The diversity of theoretical as well as practice related approaches and perspectives encompassed in the chapters of the book emphasize the long way contemporary adult learning and education has come. From the negation and resistance to its establishment as a separate academic discipline, through those understandings that categorized it merely as a method of teaching for adults, to current growing plurality of paradigms and concepts exploring learning in almost every aspect of adult life — today we are contemplating and implementing not only what adult learning is and should be, but also what it could become for individuals, groups and larger communities in the long run. While some of the adult education research and practices nowadays are more inclined to the ideas of neoliberalism, other point to a welfare state as a framework for the adult education model that has a more holistic and human-centered approach. However, it is not the case of “either-or”. There is a substantial body of work representing growing responses to the current situation marked by the rise of neoliberal thinking and weakening of the welfare state, and it is situated between those traditions. Such research and practices of adult education and learning promote novel and creative ways of approaching adult education and learning based on self-organizing, community learning and collaboration. They are clearly overcoming the impression that there is nothing there between social justice and While some of the adult education research and practices nowadays are more inclined to the ideas of neoliberalism, other point to a welfare state as a framework for the adult education model that has a more holistic and human-centered approach. However, it is not the case of “either-or”. There is a substantial body of work representing growing responses to the current situation marked by the rise of neoliberal thinking and weakening of the welfare state, and it is situated between those traditions. Such research and practices of adult education and learning promote novel and creative ways of approaching adult education and learning based on self-organizing, community learning and collaboration. They are clearly overcoming the impression that there is nothing there between social justice and While some of the adult education research and practices nowadays are more inclined to the ideas of neoliberalism, other point to a welfare state as a framework for the adult education model that has a more holistic and human-centered approach. However, it is not the case of “either-or”. There is a substantial body of work representing growing responses to the current situation marked by the rise of neoliberal thinking and weakening of the welfare state, and it is situated between those traditions. Such research and practices of adult education and learning promote novel and creative ways of approaching adult education and learning based on self-organizing, community learning and collaboration. They are clearly overcoming the impression that there is nothing there between social justice andWhile some of the adult education research and practices nowadays are more inclined to the ideas of neoliberalism, other point to a welfare state as a framework for the adult education model that has a more holistic and human-centered approach. However, it is not the case of “either-or”. There is a substantial body of work representing growing responses to the current situation marked by the rise of neoliberal thinking and weakening of the welfare state, and it is situated between those traditions. Such research and practices of adult education and learning promote novel and creative ways of approaching adult education and learning based on self-organizing, community learning and collaboration. They are clearly overcoming the impression that there is nothing there between social justice and privatization of adult education and, therefore, opening and exploring new possibilities to create, organize and research education and learning of adults.