[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"doc-seo-589360-105":3,"detail-sidebar-cat-0-en-105":81,"doc-detail-589360-en":130},{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":6},0,"ok",{"site_id":7,"language":8,"slug":9,"title":10,"keywords":11,"description":12,"schema_data":13,"social_meta":74,"head_meta":76,"extra_data":78,"updated_unix":80},105,"en","turning-theory-on-ourselves-some-resources-and-constraints-for-adult-educators","Turning Theory on Ourselves - Some Resources and Constraints for Adult Educators","","Turning Theory on Ourselves explores the responsibility of adult educators to theorise from within their own practice rather than standing outside it. It examines an earlier ethical grammar for assessing the integrity of efforts to change others through adult education, and situates the discussion in debates over truth, certainty, and transformative learning. 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The article argues for engaging ethically with how education seeks to change others, while examining the educator’s own role in that process.","Answer",{"name":66,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":67},"How does the author relate adult education to debates about truth and certainty?",{"text":68,"@type":64},"The discussion is framed through contemporary debates on whether truth and certainty are possible in understanding and changing the world. This shapes how transformative adult education is justified and practiced.",{"name":70,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":71},"What ethical challenge does the article identify as pivotal?",{"text":72,"@type":64},"Maintaining adult education as a transformative force while respecting students’ integrity as co-participants. 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It begins with an earlier effort to construct an ethical grammar to audit the probity of working to change others through adult education. This is situated in terms of contemporary debates about the possibility of truth and certainty in understanding and changing the world. Maintaining the vision of adult education as a transformative force in society while respecting the integrity of our students as co-participants in this process is identified as a pivotal challenge. Constraints on engaging with this challenge are analysed and further resources for turning theory on ourselves are suggested.  \nIntroduction  \nSometime around the mid-1980s, I began to ask questions about the nature of my engagement with adult learners. At that stage, I had been teaching sociology and social philosophy since 1970, initially on the University College, Galway and later the University College, Cork (UCC) extra-mural diploma programmes. I enjoyed it like no other kind of teaching, before or since, in a career that has encompassed primary, post-primary and university levels. The centres were dispersed throughout Connaught and Munster. Arriving at night in often remote locations to meet adults who had committed themselves to threehour sessions, twice-weekly in settings not always most appropriate to or comfortable for adult learning, encouraged a gratifying sense of missionary zeal. Student response was predominantly positive and learners spoke of benefiting in diverse and often surprising ways. To me, the sessions appeared informal and collegial an environment in which ideas were processed and experiences were shared and analysed. So, what was the problem?  \nI found it difficult to articulate the nature of my discomfiture. Certain questions prodded me. A central theme of the UCC sociology course was debunking, helping students to question the taken-for-granted perceptions and beliefs by which they interpreted their world and lived their lives. Yet, I as the teacher, could remain above this and largely control the agenda for the process – the targets for debunking and the conceptual, thematic and ideological resources tobe used. No one queried my authority to invade their private world of belief and practice in this fashion. In what I read about adult learning encounters at that time and heard at conferences, teachers in such settings were encouraged to see themselves as learners also. But it was I who mediated the new ideas and regulated and monitored class discourse. No one asked if and how I had changed. Isat no end-of-year examination. While, as sociologists, we prided ourselves on taking the side of the underdog and on giving credibility to the perspective of the disadvantaged, it was the sociologists themselves who often regulated the diagnosis of people’s problems and directed the prescriptions for change.  \nLooking at the practices of other adult educators, I could identify specific change ideologies, including a fading Catholic social reconstructionism, the‘option for the poor’, social and community activism, modernisation, liberalism, feminism, egalitarianism, etc., all sitting alongside the new terminology of facilitation, collaboration, leadership, participatory learning, etc. and confirmed with ritualistic piety in the reorganisation in semi-circle form of the desks in the local vocational school. Despite efforts on my part to acknowledge the adult status of my students, in the selection of content, collegiality at the interpersonal level, recognising and using their personal expertise, prior learning and experience and deploying my own life events as resources, an unease with the apparent relentless pervasiveness of the power disparity between them and me continued to prevail.  \nIn grappling with these dilemmas, I tried to cons","cbCaiqDvpm4jeDOO","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaiqDvpm4jeDOO","pdf",246075,"English","# Abstract\n# Introduction\n## Ethical grammar and transformative role\n## Core questions about commitment, objectives, legitimacy, power, and dialogue","[{\"question\":\"What main argument does the article make about adult educators?\",\"answer\":\"Adult educators should not be outside their own theorising. The article argues for engaging ethically with how education seeks to change others, while examining the educator’s own role in that process.\"},{\"question\":\"How does the author relate adult education to debates about truth and certainty?\",\"answer\":\"The discussion is framed through contemporary debates on whether truth and certainty are possible in understanding and changing the world. This shapes how transformative adult education is justified and practiced.\"},{\"question\":\"What ethical challenge does the article identify as pivotal?\",\"answer\":\"Maintaining adult education as a transformative force while respecting students’ integrity as co-participants. The author focuses on constraints that hinder this challenge and suggests additional resources.\"}]","Turning Theory on Ourselves - Some Resources and Constraints for Adult Educators | PDF",1792067039]