To browse Academia. In this presentation, I discuss the widely recognised yet weakened position of active participatory citizenship and its role in the current debate on the responsibility of adult education as a medium for empowerment and emancipation from prioritised neo-liberal values. Within my line of argumentation, the immediate focus lies in the emerging roles for adult educators as plausible mediators for socio-political resistance.
I also cast some light on the need for adult education to be reformulated in ways that are enriched by diversity and the wide range of learning contexts and communicative practices that essentially pose new challenges.
Mabrey, T. Hoggan, Eds. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, This is of necessity ongoing, life wide and lifelong. Reflexive democracy involves intensifying democratic interactions that enable citizens to make their lives and conditions better through a process of discursive will formation Honneth, Further, we see this as a necessarily contentious process and we are mindful that democracy has only widened and deepened through the efforts of progressive social movements asserting their right to be treated as citizens even though these rights had not yet been legally or socially recognized Eley, There has been a historical link between adult education and the nurturing of social agents, who can shape and reshape concepts of citizenship in society.
In the era of migration, the adult education discourse of citizenship remains relevant. The findings of this study, although particularly pertinent in the context discussed here, are also applicable in most adult education settings, regardless of the type of course or students.
Defining adult education is an impossible task. It is such a multivalent and amorphous field, comprising different traditions, that definitions are bound to be exclusive, often deliberately so. Some types of adult education take the form of "adult schooling" and simply provide adults with a "second chance".
