Creating text, making worlds : re-viewing adult education as a critical practice

This thesis comprises a selection of publications with accompanying commentaries and introductory and concluding chapters. The themes around which the thesis is organised are experience, learning and subjectivity; the theory-practice relation in adult education; the place of the `practical' in the adult education curriculum; paradigms and the practice of research. The publications are grouped within these themes and each thematic grouping is accompanied by a commentary which takes up and elaborates issues raised within each theme. The themes chosen centre on significant aspects of adult education both as a field study and a field of practice. The idea is to illuminate the inter-relationship of theory, practice and research in adult education. In order to do this, attention is not focused simply on practice problems within adult education. Instead adult education is seen as a critical practice, a practice of bringing together theory and practice through an engagement with particular kinds of texts located `outside' practice. The concept of re-view, understood both as a `looking back' on and a critical interrogation of practice provides, it is argued, a significant resource for doing this. The notion of adult education as a textual practice, a practice of creating texts and making worlds is examined and exemplified in the thesis. The question of writing and textuality and the consequent reflexivity which this gives rise to is recognised as a necessary element in the process of re-view, in looking critically at adult education, and generally for adult education as a critical practice.