Radicalizing Learning calls for a total rethinking of what the field of adult education stands for and how adult educators should assess their effectiveness. Arguing that major changes in society are needed to create a more just world, the authors set out to show how educators can help learners envision and enact this radical transformation. Specifically, the book explores the areas of adult learning, training, teaching, facilitation, program development, and research. Each chapter provides a guide to the different paradigms and perspectives that prevail across the field of theory and practice. The authors then tie all of the themes into how adult learning for participatory democracy works in a diverse society.

This text analyses the history of social movement & civil society theory within radical adult education & the Left. It argues that Gramasci did not advocate building civil society but proletarian hegemony.

This is a comprehensive and critical analysis of the philosophical foundations of adult education. Six major systems of educational thought -- liberal education, progressivism, behaviorism, humanistic education, radicalism, and conceptual analysis -- provide the framework for an examination of the views of prominent adult educators and major programs in adult education. This much-needed work contributes to our understanding of the personalities, issues, and programs in the field of education; it also stimulates readers to clarify their own personal philosophy of education. A bibliographic essay presents the developments in each of the six systems over the past 15 years. Three major areas -- phenomenology, critical theory, and feminist theory -- are discussed within this framework.

This book examines three sites of pedagogical innovation, all of which are explicitly activisms against the current political and pedagogical climate. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework including autonomous Marxism, post-anarchism, social movement theories and theories of critical pedagogy, it examines social movements though a pedagogical lens and attempts to understand how connections can be made between social movement learning and other initiatives and forms of higher learning. With studies of the London Occupy! movement; The Social Science Centre, a co-operative higher learning provider that practises popular education in city venues; and a university politically opposing the ‘student as consumer’ ethos, Spaces of Political Pedagogy connects these various projects as a continuum of educational experimentation, offering insights into the ways in which these sites practice pedagogy and the manner in which these practices could be implemented more widely to inform and improve struggles for wider social justice. As such, it will appeal to scholars of education and sociology with interests in pedagogy, social movements and activism.