Transforming Perspectives in Lifelong Learning and Adult Education. A Dialogue

The book constructs an interdisciplinary understanding (a landscape of perspectives) of adult learning and education, and critically reframes its transformative dimensions. The tensions at the heart of current understanding of learning, not least as "transformative", are explored through contexts, stories, and relationships. Form and formlessness are the core of the first chapter, followed by an historical and epistemological analysis of perspective. Critical thinking and psychoanalysis are then evoked to overcome easy and linear ideas of change. The material aspects of life - body matters, social justice, the aesthetical experience - are also explored, and finally the Big Questions of adult learning and life, and their spiritual or even religious background. The conclusion is that transformation is never an easy business, nor always desirable, thus interdisciplinary and auto/biographical inquiry can illuminate its multiple dimensions: social, contextual, cultural, cognitive, and psychological. Transformation is defined by the authors as a contingent struggle for meaning and recognition, social justice, fraternity, and the pursuit of truth. Its methodology is reciprocal and dialogical, since differences become the basis for all learning.