Learning in social action: a contribution to understanding formal education

This book examines the non-educational contexts and informal circumstances through which incidental learning takes place and emphasises the importance of such learning in adult education. The author suggests that involvement in voluntary organisations, social struggles, and political activity of every kind provides powerful learning opportunities. The core argument is the notion of adult learning and education as complex and contested social activities. The dominant view of adult education in the English-speaking world excludes a large proportion of adult learning. The author uses case studies of a range of environmental, women’s, worker and political struggles from the USA, Australia, Brazil and Zimbabwe to explore how involvement in social action can help people to ‘unlearn dominant, oppressive ideologies and discourses and replace them with oppositional, liberatory ones, even if such processes of emancipatory learning are inevitably complex and contradictory’. He relates these processes of informal learning in contested contexts to current perspectives in adult education and proposes an innovative, more radical agenda in adult education theory and practice.

This book examines the non-educational contexts and informal circumstances through which incidental learning takes place and emphasises the importance of such learning in adult education. The author suggests that involvement in voluntary organisations, social struggles, and political activity of every kind provides powerful learning opportunities. The core argument is the notion of adult learning and education as complex and contested social activities. The dominant view of adult education in the English-speaking world excludes a large proportion of adult learning. The author uses case ...  [+] Show more