Making Space

Representative of a wide range of adult education and lifelong learning frameworks and experiences this book gives voice to emerging perspectives and offers thought-provoking critiques of established practices and accepted theories. Those in the adult education academy as well as other voices often excluded from the discourse in adult education offer critiques of the social political economic and historical forms of hegemony in the discipline. They analyze the ways in which these hegemonic norms and practices have affected adult learning environments and the participation rates of varying groups and shed light on how adult education as a field of practice can marginalize individuals based on their ethnicity race gender class language age or sexual orientation. These critiques provide a powerful statement about silence invisibility and the marginalization of the other and suggest that adult educators may complicitly if not implicitly marginalize adult learners.This book will provide professors and students adult literacy teachers corporate trainers community-based organizers and others with alternative ways to think about adult education practice adult learners and the multiple intersecting realities that influence the teaching/learning transaction. In so doing this book provides practitioners and academicians with a forum to dialog about emerging theories and practices and through the discourse they can begin to merge theories and practices through language that is accessible and inclusive.