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The 'Professional Practices in Adult Education and Lifelong Learning' series examines questions and matters relating to the field of adult education and lifelong learning.

Experiential learning has an important role to play across all educational sectors. This book examines five perspectives of experiential learning, providing elementary explanations and critically examining theories surrounding experiential learning. The author also explores various pedagogical strategies and the role of the educator within the practice of experiential learning. Chapters in this book include: Why a book about experiential learning?: introduction and background; What is the theoretical base?: different conceptions of experiential learning; How and what do people learn from experience?; Critiques and debates; So what?: roles for adult educators; Now what?: approaches for educational practice; and What's next?: further research about experiential learning. Show less

Drawing from critical management studies and critical pedagogy, this article proposes principles and practices to support the emerging critical human resource development (HRD) field as one stream among existing theories and practice of HRD. A critical HRD would challenge the subjugation of human knowledge, skills, and relationships to organisational or shareholder gain and focus on transforming workplaces and HRD practice toward justice, fairness, and equity. Because both HRD practices and critical perspectives themselves are so diverse, a critical HRD must be formulated in sufficiently broad terms to encourage a variety of conceptual developments including discursive, gendered, materialist, and anti-racist lines of analysis. Theoretical dilemmas of a critical HRD are discussed, such as ideological contradictions between the radical orientation of critical theory and the managerialist or performative frames to which much HRD practice is accountable. Possible configurations of a critical HRD are described, as these might play out in contexts of HRD practice.

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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 the problematic conceptions and desires can be identified across these discourses that lead to orientations of control and discipline, animated by moral essentialism, in the teaching-learning relation. In an effort to conceptualise more open, generative and compassionate orientations, two interconnected forms of pedagogical relations are explored: ethical and ecological. Ethical relations are examined as ongoing coping: appropriate responsiveness in the immediate, reminiscent of Levinas’ ‘caring encounter. Ecological relations have to do with attunement to biological as well as social, political and cultural interconnectivity: the ongoing co-specification of elements improvised in complex systems, The concluding implications for educators encourage a movement to less grand and totalising, more local and contingent orientations - ‘poorer’ pedagogies. The paper is theory driven, drawing from complexity theory and pedagogical writers aligned with local, ecological conceptions of teaching and learning.

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