by Tara Fenwick, Asst. Professor
Department of Educational Policy Studies
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, CANADA T6G 2G5
tara.fenwick@ualberta.ca

Draft material for a chapter in Understanding Adult Education and Training, 3^rd Edition,

Understandings of adult learning processes have undergone dramatic changes over the past few decades. New theories informing adult learning continue to appear, existing theories get attacked or reinvented, while educators must wonder where, amidst all the argument, lies the best approach for their practice. The answer of course is that there is no one best way to understand learning, just as learners and educators are each very different and constantly changing.

Certain notions, however, have been finally and firmly debunked: we state them here as assumptions upon which our own explorations of adult learning are based. The first has already been stated: that no one theory of learning or of facilitating learning trumps the others, and that there is no generic essentialised ‘adult learner’ that can be described in ways that accurately and responsibly portray the myriad differences and shifts that people experience. The increasing pluralisation of society has challenged any pretence that universal social and normative frames of reference can provide unchanging anchoring points for identity. Indeed, ideas of adulthood vary so widely, and cognitive processes prove so difficult to link with age, that announcing ‘adult’ learning as a unique and distinct category has become a dubious enterprise.

Our second assumption is that learning is not a mental process occurring in a vacuum. The context of a person’s life history, emerging through multi-faceted social interactions and cultural norms, influences what and how new encounters are engaged. The context of these new learning encounters -- their cultural, political, physical-environmental and social dynamics – are entangled with individuals’ actions, emotional responses, identity performances, and meanings about what is going on. Furthermore, ‘context’ is not a static container in which learners float, but active and dynamic; it is critical both to understand unfolding learning processes and to enhance educative opportunities.

Third, and part of the context question, the ‘learner’ is not an object separable from the ‘educator’ in teaching-learning situations. The positionality of the educator in terms of social identity-markers, privilege, personal and pedagogic relation to learners (as expert? as coach? as liberator? as observer? as arbiter? as commentator? as guide? as decoder?) affects how learners perceive, feel, judge, behave, and remember. Any consideration of learning involving a teacher must begin with educators’ self-reflection on their own entanglements in that context, analysing both their influence on and their biased perception of what is happening.

Mindful of these three considerations, we offer in this chapter various theories of adult learning grouped into four perspectives. Think of these as four different lenses for viewing learning processes. The learning as acquisition lens understands knowledge as a substantive thing – a skill or competency, concept, new language, habit, expertise, or wisdom – that an individual obtains through learning experiences. Learning as reflection is a lens focusing on learners as active constructors of knowledge, creating new meanings and realities rather than ingesting pre-existing knowledge. The practice-based community lens of learning focuses more on people’s ability to participate meaningfully in everyday activities within particular communities of practice than on their mental meanings. Going even further, the lens of learning as embodied co-emergent process challenges people-centered notions to portray learning as emerging in the relationships that develop among everyone and everything in that situation – people, spatial arrangements and movements, tools and objects. While appearing mutually oppositional, these four perspectives are not so clearly distinct as this categorisation implies. But even as they sometimes overlap and blur, each suggests its own definition of learning as a process of change, which is why one overarching definition here would be presumptuous. Furthermore the four perspectives represent only one approach to categorising the ways in which adult learning has been theorised.

While each advocates a different approach, one is not necessarily better or truer than the others. In fact, just as these different perspectives arose from different historical and contextual circumstances, and was shaped by authors’ different politics, philosophies and purposes, they each may be useful in illuminating movements and suggesting educative response in particular pedagogical situations. But they each deserve careful reading and, where possible, follow-up through the additional resources we have suggested. Sometimes it is too easy to reject an approach because it does not resonate with our personal experiences of learning and teaching. This shuts out not only the possibility of other people having very different experiences, but also of opening ourselves to challenging new explanations of learning which may demand that we step away from our personal worlds of comfortable beliefs and values. At the same time so-called traditional theories of learning are sometimes wrongly dismissed as simplistic, misdirected, or even morally reprehensible. While these allegations can be leveled at many theories, both old and new, certain historical ideas of adult learning that are maligned are also misrepresented or misunderstood. For example, psychological theories of adult development often are inaccurately portrayed as lacking attention to sociocultural contexts, an error that unfairly discards potentially fruitful theories.

The critical reader looks carefully at theories not only in terms of fit with one’s wisdom and dilemmas of personal experience, but also responsibility of argument (in providing evidence, balance, inclusiveness, and defensible agenda, claims, ethics, and exclusions) and productive potential for enhancing educational practice. While we have selected theories here that we believe represent responsible and productive argument, they each have their own limitations. It remains to educators to determine the utility for their own practice and philosophy of the perspectives presented here. As Collins (1991) advocates, the role of the educator is not to put theory into practice, but to engage thoughtfully with different theorisations and put oneself into practice.

Perhaps the most familiar to many educators, the ‘acquisition’ perspective examines how mental information processing occurs, how cognitive structures develop and change, and how a repertoire of new behaviors is acquired and used as practical intelligence or expertise. What is acquired is not just knowledge content, but strategies or capacities to develop new knowledge or cope with unfamiliar situations. The focus is on the individual, and particularly that person’s conscious rational activities of perceiving, interpreting, categorizing and storing knowledge. Schemata theorists for example, suggests that as learners we first acquire new information, interpret it according to our previous experiences, then evaluate and remember concepts using our existing mental schemata or categories, and restructure our concepts and organizing schemata as we are challenged by new experiences (Rumelhart and Norman, 1978).

What tends to be undertheorised is how social capital and situational politics influence cognition. This includes the politics of cultural recognition that influence what counts as learn-able knowledge or acquisitive processes. Thus, intuitive, emotional, embodied, spiritual or other ‘non-rational’ learning processes are overlooked by some acquisition theories. Nonetheless, theories of cognitive processing and expertise acquisition help illustrate certain cognitive strategies, as well as strong links between knowledge and particular contextual domains.

Historical ‘intelligence’ theorists such as Cattell, Sternberg and Gardner may be limited by cultural bias, essentialism and over-focus on academic ability, but all three explained adults’ cognitive development as the interaction of experience and environment with inherent capacity. Cattell (1963) suggested that adults have two domains of intelligence. Fluid intelligence includes inherited cognitive ability: memory, abstraction skills, and ability to perceive relationships, adapt to new situations, and solve problems. Crystallised intelligence is our content-knowledge: information, judgments, and meanings constructed through learning experiences. Later studies suggest that so-called fluid intelligence develops throughout adulthood, and that adults are skilled at compensating fluid intelligence through crystallised intelligence. Sternberg’s (1985) theory of triarchic intelligence emphasises both academic ability (verbal and logical-mathematical skills) and ability to perform in real-world contexts (practical intelligence). Sternberg also argues that much intelligent behavior is culturally-specific, deriving from the interaction of three dimensions: ‘components’, our internal mental mechanisms and processes; ‘experiences’ with certain tasks and situations affecting how we deal with new tasks; and ‘context’, or particular situations that determine what makes intelligent behavior. Gardner’s (1983) seven distinct ‘multiple intelligences’ also stress variance among individuals and contexts: musical intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, spatial visual intelligence, personal intelligence (understanding of self), inter-personal intelligence (understanding of others), linguistic intelligence, and logical-mathematical intelligence.

More recently, attention has focused on ‘practical intelligence’ (Resnick, 1987) and ‘emotional intelligence’ (Goleman, 1998), articulating dimensions such as self-awareness and empathy. Studies in practical intelligence are typically conducted on real-life tasks in everyday situations. For example, Scribner (1984) investigated and documented the practical thinking of workers in her pioneering studies of everyday thinking in a milk factory. She found that practical thought has five distinct features: it is marked by flexibility; it incorporates the external environment into the problem-solving system; expert practical thinkers adopt effort-saving as a higher-order cognitive strategy which informs the way they work; practical thought is highly reliant on domain specific knowledge; and practical thought actually reformulates and redefines problems for ease of solution. When applied in the context of a particular domain of work of knowledge, practical intelligence is often referred to as expertise. Expertise research commonly compares the performance of novices and recognised experts in a particular task or domain. Obviously this raises questions about who makes these novice-expert determinations and according to what criteria, but we can reasonably accept that there may be some consensus in a domain community about the existence of a range of effective practice and participants. Classically, expertise studies examined chess players (Chase and Simon, 1973); then branched to a variety of mostly vocational domains (such as medicine, nursing, law, bartending, taxi-driving, and the like). Chi et al. (1988) summarised the findings of these expertise studies. Experts appear faster and more economical; perceive large meaningful patterns in their domain; see and represent a problem in their domain at a deeper more principled level than novices; spend time analysing problems, especially when these are ill-structured; have superior memory, but only within their domain; and are aware of their mistakes and the complexity of problems they face. Particularly interesting is the repeated finding that experts excel mainly in their own domains.

These theories adopt the same theoretical approach as other intelligence theories: that individuals can acquire both knowledge and learning capacity in particular domains ranging from academic to everyday activity. Like earlier theories, these sometimes do not account satisfactorily for the sociocultural dynamics sustaining or thwarting learning, or how people who believe they may have acquired particular capacities find these decaying rapidly over time, or find themselves unable to apply these capacities spontaneously to new situations. Expertise studies do not explain how different expertise develops and is recognised (or not) in particular domains, how different dimensions of individuals’ lives contribute to their ‘expertise’, or why some individuals with lengthy experience in a domain are non-experts. Another way of conceptualizing acquired learning is suggested by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995). Rather than splitting experts from novices, they focus on the extent to which learning is more tacit (personal, embedded in action and perhaps unconscious) and more explicit (articulated, identifiable and conscious). Individuals and even groups supposedly acquire tacit knowledge through everyday experimentation or by unconsciously imitating others. When tacit is converted to explicit knowledge, they claim, it can be analysed and shared among people.

All acquisition theories have some explanatory power when examining the range of different individuals’ engagements with learning opportunities. These theories maintain that some concepts and practices do exist as a ‘body’ or discipline of previously developed knowledge, and that a learner encounters and integrates these. They suggest links among sociological and psychological theories of human behavior, and emphasise that learners do acquire competencies in ways that cannot be fully explained through structures such as social class, economic privilege, group affiliation, and networks. Acquisition theories also raise issues about ‘transfer’ -- translating and sharing knowledge among applications and groups. For example, expertise studies show that experts may develop procedure-bound routines that are locked into particular contexts, and blind them to the insight of relative novices. Nonaka and Takeuchi’s work suggests ways to ‘convert’ and move knowledge from tacit to explicit forms, and from one group to another.

However, acquisition theories tend to imply a fundamentally additive conception of learning. Their representation of knowledge as a substantive thing pre-existing the learning individual who ingests it is vehemently denied by critics, discussed below. Acquisition does not focus on the differential knowledge that people construct, individually and collectively, through different meanings of their experiences. Nor does it dwell on how adults revisit and re-construct these meanings, or how they often experience transformation of identities and knowledge through reflective learning processes.

This prevalent and influential adult learning perspective casts the individual as a central actor in a drama of personal meaning making. As learners reflect on their lived experience, they actively interpret what they see and hear, emphasizing aspects of greatest personal interest or familiarity, and so construct and transform their own unique knowledge. This means that in a classroom of adults listening to a presentation, each learner will most likely construct a very different understanding of what they are hearing (which may or may not approximate what the speaker thinks she is saying!).

Some writers associated with reflective constructivism such as Piaget (1966) focus on the individual, alternating between assimilation of newly constructed concepts, and accommodation of these constructs to new encounters. Others like Vygotsky (1978) focus on the social interaction between the individual and the environment, showing that in the process of constructing knowledge we affects those around us as much as we are affected by them. However all views share one central belief: as learners we construct, through reflection, a personal understanding of relevant structures of meaning derived from our actions in the world.

In adult learning literature, this view is embedded in the writings of Boud and Walker (1991), Kolb (1984), Mezirow (1991), Schön (1983), and many others. For Kolb (1984), learning is a tension and conflict-filled process oscillating between concrete emotional experiences and deliberate cognitive reflection (see chapter **). Although all adults are exposed to a multitude of life experiences, Kolb maintains, not everyone learns from these. Learning happens only when there is reflective thought and internal ‘processing’ by the learner, in a way that actively makes sense of an experience and links it to previous learning.

Schön (1983) has been a significant promoter of reflective processes to understand workplace learning. Schön’s view is that adults work amid uncertainty, complexity and value conflict, often managing problems for which few existing rules learned through formal training or past experience can apply. He argued that we learn by noticing and framing problems in particular ways, then experimenting with solutions. When we encounter unique problems or situations containing some element of surprise, we are prompted to reflect-in-action by improvising on the spot, thinking up and refining and retesting various responses. Afterward we reflect-on-action, examining what we did, how we did it, and what alternatives exist. Other writers have continued to refine Schön’s ideas of reflective practice. Boud and Walker (1991) for example emphasised the importance of an individual’s ‘readiness’ to learn from an experience and attention to feelings in reflection.

In the everyday process of meaning making and problem solving, these theories explain that we learn procedural knowledge (how to do things or solve problems) and propositional knowledge (what things mean) through reflecting on experiences. But in critical reflection people question how they framed the problem in the first place. Even if no apparent problems exist, the practitioner questions situations, asking why things are the way they are, why events unfold in the way they do. People also reflect critically to problematise their own actions, asking: Why did I do what I did? What beliefs inform my practice, and how are these beliefs helping or hindering my work?

Brookfield (1995, 2001) and Mezirow (1991, 2000) both have theorised how such critical reflection interrupts, reconstructs and thus transforms human beliefs. Brookfield (1995) suggested that when we reflect on our experience with ‘skeptical questioning’ and ‘imaginative speculation’, we could refine, deepen, or correct our knowledge constructions. The key is confronting and perhaps rupturing our deepest beliefs, including those dominant ideologies that we have uncritically absorbed from our cultural communities (2001).

Mezirow’s (1991) theory of ‘transformative learning’ is based on a tri-level concept of critical reflection on experience. When adults encounter a disorienting dilemma or undesirable outcome, reflection is often triggered. Reflection on the content of the experience (what happened?) or process they employed (how did it happen?) may promote procedural learning. But when reflection challenges the very premises under girding problem-solving processes (what’s wrong with how I am seeing what happened and how it happened?) we move toward a transformation in our worldviews. Mezirow has continued to argue, throughout the exhaustive debates gathering around his theory (see Taylor, 1998), that this process of vigorous critical reflection transforms our ‘meaning perspectives’ to become more ‘inclusive, differentiating, permeable, critically reflective, and integrative of experience’ (Mezirow, 1991, 14).

Autobiography – a process of purposeful critical reflection on our life stories to find meaning, weaving together many forms and occasions of our memoried experience – is championed by adult educators such as Dominicé (2000) and West (1996). Through autobiography, a person’s sense of self interacting with context becomes more apparent, for the individual watches and listens to the self acting in various contexts over periods of time. In a broader sense, autobiographical reflection helps learners understand the values and models of their changing environments – social, cultural, economic, political – and their own responses to these. Dominicé (2000) calls this ‘the difficult process of becoming oneself’ (73), interpreting one’s never-ending struggle for identity and life meaning, a process which ‘helps adults develop confidence and direction for future learning.’

Critical reflection is also fundamental in popular education or forms of learning that Allman (2001) calls revolutionary critical education. Unlike the individualistic theory of Mezirow, both are rooted in the collective. Through critical reflection combined with social action, groups develop new awareness of social inequities and oppressions they had taken for granted, and envision more just formations (see chapter **). These approaches celebrate praxis – the integration of critical reflection with real action, and support a shift in focus to practice.

One problem with explaining adult learning as a straightforward matter of individuals reflecting carefully and even critically upon their experiences is that we are embedded so thoroughly in our cultures that we may not be able to distance our thinking from our own experiences. Garrick (1999), for example, reminds us that what we imagine to be our ‘experience’ is in fact created by the particular discourses comprising a situation. These discourses shape how we perceive what Schön called ‘routine’ and ‘non-routine’ problems, how we interpret our own actions, and what knowledge we consider worthy of learning. A second problem with mentalist reflective views of learning is their separation of thinking from acting. A growing shift to conceptualise learning as more relational and contextual than reflection-based is evident among situative theorists (i.e. Greeno, 1997; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Rogoff, 1990; Wenger, 1998). These argue that learning is rooted in the situation in which a person participates, not in the head of that person as intellectual concepts produced by reflection. Knowing and learning are defined as engaging in changing processes of human participation in a particular community of practice. A community of practice is any group of individuals who work together for a period -- such as a sports team, a workplace department or project group, a class, or club -- developing particular ways of doing things and talking about things that their members come to learn. Lave and Wenger (1991) argue that individuals learn as they participate by interacting with the community (with its history, assumptions and cultural values, rules, and patterns of relationship), the tools at hand (including objects, technology, languages and images), and the moment’s activity (its purposes, norms, and practical challenges). Thus knowing is interminably inventive and entwined with doing. The objective is to become a full participant in the community of practice, not to learn about the practice. The community itself defines what constitutes legitimate practice.

Further in this vein, activity theory presents an ‘expansive’ view of learning rooted in practice (Engeström et al., 1999) that has been taken up in many recent analyses of workplace learning and innovation. Learning is distributed throughout a community, and viewed as change in a community’s joint action. The object is a problem at which activity is directed: this object shapes activity, determines the horizon of possible action, and is eventually changed into an outcome. The community’s activity is shaped by its rules and cultural norms, division of labor and power, and ‘mediating artifacts’ (language, tools, technologies) that it uses to pursue the object – and in fact, uses these to shape the object. Learning occurs as a cycle of questioning something in this activity system, analysing its causes, modeling a new explanation or solution, implementing this model in the system, reflecting on it and consolidating it. But unlike individualist reflection-on-experience models, activity theory views learning as the collective construction and resolution of successively evolving tensions or contradictions in a complex system. The learning process involves the system’s objects, mediating artifacts, and perspectives of participants (Engeström et al., 1999).

In workplace contexts, Gold and associates (2000) emphasise how language in a community of practice determines what is considered good and right in that community, and what counts as truth and reality. This phenomenon is most evident in the community’s stories. These stories are value-saturated, and function as a ‘reflective infrastructure’ to make sense of what is taking place. They not only provide a resource for everyday talk but also, more importantly, preserve the community from outside disturbances (which can be named as negative, or as countering the community’s best interests). Through dozens of direct and indirect exchanges with others throughout a single day, individuals adopt various positions and identities, adapt their behavior, choose new action, and contribute to the ongoing network of meanings and collective action. The community itself learns, write Gold and Watson, by improvising new practices through these networks in response to a problem or difficulty.

A study of community learning in a prominent flute manufacturing plant (Cook and Yanow, 1993) showed that learning is as much about preservation of distinct practices as about innovation. As each flute was passed to the next craftsperson to work on, comments focused on the ‘right feel’ of the flute (for this firm) to perfect its build or correct an ‘odd feel’ in its workings. Thus as novices were being initiated through practice, the community was learning to adapt to newcomers’ idiosyncrasies while preserving its own identity. An individual cannot be considered separately from the configuration. Every practical judgment made amidst everyday ‘hot action’ (Beckett and Hager, 2000) is embedded in the sorts of activity and talk and one-to-one interactions that are allowed and tacitly understood in a particular community of practice.

Wildemeersch et al. (1998) suggest that individuals change by being exposed to different configurations in community relationships. As individuals interact across different communities, they bring meanings from one group to another, in turn challenging the new group’s definitions of reality. Always there is tension between the individual’s beliefs and societal meanings. Neither is determined completely by the other, and both are always shifting through the interactions in relationships. But key to both the individual and societal learning is ‘a continuing process of dialogue and co-operation with people located in other configurations . . . making unexpected connections.’

Truth claims then become problematic. Knowledge is not judged by what is ‘true’ and ‘false’ but by what is relevant in this particular situation, what is worth knowing and doing, what is convenient for whom, and what to do next (Chaiklin & Lave, 1993). The emphasis is on improving one’s ability to participate meaningfully in particular practices, and moving to ‘legitimate’ or more central roles within communities. What is meaningful must be negotiated between different individuals’ desires (including the desire to belong), the community’s changing requirements for certain forms of participation, and contextual features accepted as constraints.

Critics of the situative view, however, have raised concerns about the monitoring of a community’s practices: what about patterns and procedures that are unjust or dysfunctional, confounding the community’s core purposes? What about inequitable opportunities to participate in a community – how do people who are excluded or marginalised become more fully involved, and what does it mean to be on the periphery? What about traditions – how does a community break free from habitual practices that become rigidly resistant to improvement or change? Others have wondered how the situative view accounts for power flowing through a community, delineating centers and margins, granting control to some, garnering conflict among others, and maintaining hegemonic beliefs and norms of acting. Some claim that learning viewed as increasingly meaningful participation in a community of practice still separates individuals from group, humans from environment, subject from object, and body from mind.

In search of holism, practice-based perspectives of learning have continued to evolve and merge with other disciplines including complexity theory, ecology theory, cybernetics and technocultural theory. A range of rich learning theories have appeared in the past two decades that move entirely away from a rational brain-centered view of learning to an embodied ecological view, exploring how cognition, identities and environment co-emerge simultaneously through learning.

For example, enactivist learning theory (Maturana and Varela, 1987; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 1991) purports that the systems represented by person and context are inseparable, and that change or cognition occurs from emerging systems affected by the intentional tinkering of one with the other. Humans are completely interconnected with the systems in which they act. Maturana and Varela (1987) have represented the unfolding of this interconnection as a series of ‘structural couplings’. When two systems coincide, the ‘perturbations’ of one system excites responses in the structural dynamics of the other. The resultant ‘coupling’ creates a new transcendent unity of action and identities that could not have been achieved independently by either participant. Educators might understand this phenomenon through the example of conversation. As each contributes, changing the conversational dynamic, other participants are changed, the relational space and governing rules among them all changes, and the looping-back changes the contributor. This is ‘mutual specification’ (Varela et al., 1991), the fundamental dynamic of systems constantly engaging in joint action and interaction. As actors are influenced by symbols and actions in which they participate, they adapt and learn. As they do so, their behaviors and thus their effects upon the systems connected with them change. With each change these complex systems shift, changing their patterns of interaction and the individual identities of all actors enmeshed in them. Thus environment and learner emerge together in the process of cognition, although this is a false dichotomy: X there is no context separate from any particular system such as an individual actor.

Ecological learning theory also considers knowledge to be embedded in conduct and constantly enacted as we move through the world. Davis, Sumara and Kaplan (2000) argue against the notion of ‘tacit knowledge’ (implying that it exists within independent cognitive agents, and drives their actions), explaining that particular actions unfold in circumstances that evoke them. For example, a ‘choreography of movement’ can be seen among any group of people working together. In fact, argue Davis and Sumara, we often find ourselves quickly swept up in collective patterns of behavior and expectation when we join a community, even patterns we might consciously disparage. Much of this joint action leaks out of our attempts to control our actions through critical reflection. The problem lies not in ‘false ideology’ or underdeveloped critical abilities that should be educated, but in a misleading conceptualisation of the learning figure separated from the contextual ground. Ecological theory draws attention to the ‘background’, and examines myriad fluctuations, subtle interactions, intuitions, and the series of consequences emerging from any single action. The focus of learning here is not on the components of experience (which other perspectives might describe in fragmented terms: person, experience, tools, community, and activity) but on the relationships binding them together in complex systems.

Incorporating principles of complex adaptive systems, this ecological perspective recognises that systems in which human beings are implicated all learn, whether at micro-levels such as immune systems or at macro-levels such as weather patterns, a forest or the stock market. Studies have shown that these systems – not just the human beings whose behaviors are embedded in them -- remember, forget, recognise, hypothesise, err, adapt and thus learn (Davis et al., 2000). A system is continually inventive and self-modifying, adapting to changes within it and around it through interactions at micro-levels whose effects form patterns all by themselves. The outcome of all these dynamic interactions of a system’s parts is unpredictable. The key to a healthy system – able to adapt creatively to changing conditions -- is diversity among its parts. A human body, for example, relies on highly specialised subsystems that not only each respond to different circumstances and different needs, but also have learned to co-habitate and communicate with one another. Thus learning is the continuous improvisation of alternate actions and responses to changing situations, undertaken by the system’s parts. More sudden transformation can occur in response to a major shock to the system, throwing it into disequilibrium. Computer-generated images of systems undergoing disequilibrium show that they go through a phase of swinging between extremes, before self-organizing gradually into a new pattern or identity that can continue co-habiting with and adapting to the other systems in its environment. After the episode the system resumes its continuous improvisation, although more resilient and more flexible to learn its way through anomalies it encounters.

Learning is then defined as ‘a process through which one becomes capable of more sophisticated, more flexible, more creative action’ (Davis et al., 2000, 73). Learning processes are not limited to human individuals and communities, although human beings do function as whole systems that learn, adapt, organize and transform themselves as distinct identities. But human beings also are part of larger systems that learn, adapt, organize and transform themselves as distinct identities. As parts of these continuously learning larger systems, humans themselves bear characteristics of larger patterns, larger identities – a little like the single fern leaf resembling the whole fern plant. The difference is that humans participate in many complex learning systems at once.

Actor-network theory (ANT), while not explicitly a learning theory, deserves mention for its increasing use in adult education to explain how relationships work in a learning system. As described by writers like Latour (1993), any changes we might describe as learning -- new ideas, innovations, changes in behavior, transformation – emerge through networks of actors. Actors are entities (both humans and non-humans) that have become mobilized by a particular network into acting out some kind of work to maintain the network’s integrity. This work links actors together through intermediaries (texts, products, services, money), in a process of translation. Each entity becomes an actor by translating its will into another actor through an intermediary, such as a student translating a teacher into a disciplinarian through a particular set of behaviors. Each entity also belongs to other networks in which it is called to act differently, taking on different shapes and capacities. A blackboard, for example, is a technology that embeds both networks that produced it and networks that have established its use possibilities and constraints. In any classroom actor-network the blackboard can be ignored, manipulated in various ways, or ascribed different forms of power. Thus, no actor has an essential self outside a given network: nothing is given in the order of things, but performs itself into existence. Like most contemporary theories, ANT is continually being revised and rolled in new directions as it responds to its challengers (Law and Hassard, 1999).

Critics of systems-based learning theories point out that humans seem to become dehumanized and anonymous with all this emphasis on objects, machines, action, networks and systems. Furthermore, a complex system can continuously learn and adapt itself very effectively for oppressive, destructive, even evil purposes. So how can individual parts of the system, such as humans in a certain social system, learn in ways that may change the system’s direction to more generative, democratic, healthy directions? Here is where we can begin to explore ways for adult educators to insert themselves productively and ethically into continuously adaptive learning systems.

SOME FINAL REFLECTIONS

In this chapter we have outlined four lenses through which to understand adult learning. We argued at the outset that a single unified ‘theory’ of adult learning is neither desirable or possible, that learning cannot be construed as solely a mental process existing within the mind of an individual, and that in a teaching-learning context, any consideration of the learner must necessarily involve an understanding of the role of the teacher. Moreover we argued that educators need to critically reflect on their position with respect to different theoretical perspectives. For this reason the final section examines ways in which educators can approach the variety of learning theories available. It will be clear to the reader that there is an entanglement between perspectives for understanding adult learning and perspectives for engaging with theories of adult learning. It should also be clear to the reader that we advocate the adoption of multiple perspectives, and that closure on any single perspective reduces rather than enhances the possibilities of adult learning.

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