Doing Critical and Creative Research in Adult Education

Front matter

Doing Critical and Creative Research in Adult Education

Case Studies in Methodology and Theory

Bernie Grummell and Fergal Finnegan (Eds.)

Contents

The European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA) ix Acknowledgements xi List of Figures and Tables xiii Notes on Contributors XV

1. Introduction: Doing Critical and Creative Research in Adult Education 1 Bernie Grummell and Fergal Finnegan

Part 1: Biographical Research, Oral History and Collaborative Storytelling

2. Biographical Inquiry: A Collaborative and Egalitarian Approach to

Adult Education Research 15 Barbara Merrill 3. Down to the River: People’s Memories and Adult Education 25

Emilio Lucio-Villegas

4. Transition to Adulthood: Learning from Young Adults through the Exploratory Use of Multiple Methods 37 Andrea Galimberti, Laura Formenti and Mirella Ferrari

5. Collaborative Story Telling: The Poetry of Everyday Life and the Challenge of Transcription 49 Siobhan Madden

Part 2: The Auto/Ethnographic Imagination

6. Doing Ethnographic Research in Adult Education: Reflections on Studying Citizenship in a Study Circle 63 Annika Pastuhov and Ari Sivenius

7. Autoethnography in, and as, Adult Education: Eavesdropping on a Conversation 73 David Mc Cormack, Jerry ONeill, Mary B. Ryan and Tony Walsh

CONTENTS

Part 3: Arts-Based Research and Creative Pedagogies

8. Finding Voice and Engaging Audiences: The Power of Arts-Based Community Engagement 89 Shauna Butterwick and Carole Roy

9. Education Will Set You Free: Research Poetry with Prisoners on Adult

Education Programmes 101 Sarah Meaney 10. Seeing the Unseen through the Feminist Museum Hack 115

Darlene E. Clover

Part 8: Creative Dissemination

18. Creative, Critical and Democratic Research Dissemination: Learners’ Lives and Further Education 217 Vicky Duckworth and Rob Smith vii

THE EUROPEAN SOCIETY FOR RESEARCH ON THE EDUCATION OF ADULTS (ESREA)

ESREA is a European scientific society. It was established in 1991 to provide a European-wide forum for all researchers engaged in research on adult education and learning and to promote and disseminate theoretical and empirical research in the field. Since 1991 the landscape of adult education and learning has changed to include more diverse learning contexts at formal and informal levels. At the same time there has been a policy push by the European Union, OECD, UNESCO and national governments to promote a policy of lifelong learning. ESREA provides an important space for these changes and (re)definition of adult education and learning in relation to research, theory, policy and practice to be reflected upon and discussed. This takes place at the triennial conference, network conferences and through the publication of books and a journal.

ESREA RESEARCH NETWORKS

The major priority of ESREA is the encouragement of co-operation between active researchers in the form of thematic research networks which encourage inter- disciplinary research drawing on a broad range of the social sciences. These research networks hold annual/biennial seminars and conferences for the exchange of research results and to encourage publications.

The current active ESREA networks are:

e Access, Learning Careers and Identities

e Active Democratic Citizenship Adult Learning

e Adult Educators, Trainers and their Professional Development e Between Global and Local: Adult Learning and Development e Education and Learning of Older Adults

e Gender and Adult Learning

e History of Adult Education and Training in Europe

e Interrogating Transformative Processes in Learning: An international exchange. e Life-history and Biographical Research

e Migration, Ethnicity, Racism and Xenophobia

e Policy Studies in Adult Education

e Working Life and Learning

ESREA TRIENNIAL EUROPEAN RESEARCH CONFERENCE

In order to encourage the widest possible forum for the exchange of ongoing research activities ESREA holds a triennial European Research Conference. The conferences

ESREA have been held in Strobl (1995), Bruxelles (1998), Lisbon (2001), Wroclaw (2004), Seville (2007), Linköping (2010), Berlin (2013), Maynooth (2016) and Belgrade (2019).

ESREA JOURNAL

ESREA publishes a scientific open access journal entitled The European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults (RELA). All issues of the journal can be read at www.rela.ep.liu.se. You can also find more information about call for papers and submission procedures on this website.

ESREA BOOKS

ESREA’s research networks and conferences have led to the publication of over forty books. A full list, giving details of the various publishers, and the books’ availability, is on the ESREA website. ESREA’s current book series is published in cooperation with Sense Publishers.

Further information on ESREA is available at www.esrea.org

Emilio Lucio-Villegas Barbara Merrill Marcella Milana Henning Salling Olesen

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Editing the book has been a genuine pleasure, with thanks to all authors who contributed to the book. Their efforts, openness and patience is greatly appreciated. We would like to thank the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA), and in particular its steering committee. Our special thanks to the editorial board of the series, Emilio Lucio-Villegas Ramos, Marcella Milana, Barbara Merrill and Henning Salling Olesen who gave us such helpful feedback and advice. Our colleagues in the Department of Adult and Community Education in Maynooth University and the Centre for Research on Adult Learning and Education have also been very supportive. The book emerged from discussion at the ESREA Triennial conference at Maynooth in 2016. We want to use this opportunity to thank again the people who made this possible in ESREA especially members of the Steering Committee. We want to particularly thank Ewa Kurantowicz, Bernd Kapplinger, Andreas Fejes, Alice Bennett and KCAT, Peter Hussey, Mary Jennings, Mira Dobutowitsch, Meliosa Bracken, Pauline Oxley, Keith Murphy, Letitia Moloney, Maggie Noone, Eilish Dillon, Rose Gallagher and Roisin Clarke. We especially want to thank Angela McGinn as well as Breda Gibney and the dream team of David McGinn and Darragh Gallagher. Fergal wants to offer personal thanks to Fin Dwyer, Maya Finnegan, Tara Finnegan and Anna Zajko. Bernie wants to say a heartful thanks to Liam, Cillian and Fionn O Mochain.

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12.2.

FIGURES AND TABLES

FIGURES

River in present time (Guadalquivir River, Spain)

Fishing nets

Phonecards dress representing the exploitation of Filipino nannies The share of published and cited content of all articles published in three adult educational journals 2012-2018

The space of citations based on accumulated number of citations in five journals on adult learning, 2006-2014

Excerpt from formscoring.js (StartTest, 2016)

Results from ESOnline (Kennedy & Langan, 2016)

Giuseppe’s picture

Paolo’s picture

Luisa’s picture

The Deliberative Walks learning process wheel

Project postcard

The use of stories of transformative teaching and learning in classroom settings

TABLES

Publishers indexed in the categories Education and Educational Research included in Web of Science 2011 and 2016 by country, frequency and percentages

Indexed journals in the categories Education and Educational Research included in Web of Science 2011 and 2016 by language, frequency and percentage

The “Studentlab: Deliberative Walks” process xiii

143 209

Shauna Butterwick is Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia. For 25 years, she taught and developed courses in adult education. Feminist, arts-based and community-centred approaches have informed her research projects which have explored formal and nonformal adult education, particularly women’s learning, including women’s alternative learning pathways and their activism.

Darlene E. Clover is a Professor of Adult Education, Faculty of Education, University of Victoria, Canada. Her specialty areas include feminist, cultural and ecological adult education, and arts-based research and teaching methods. Her current study focuses on museums as spaces of epistemic gendered injustice and resistance and she is co-editing a forthcoming book entitled Feminist Critique and the Museum: Educating for a Critical Consciousness.

Vicky Duckworth is a Reader in Education at Edge Hill University. Vicky has developed considerable expertise as an educationalist and researcher in the field of Adult Literacy and Education. Presently, she is researching effective practice in the delivery and teaching of English and Maths to 16—18 year olds (DfE funded) and leading a UCU funded research project (with Dr. Rob Smith) which aims to understand and provide evidence of how the further education (FE) sector is vital in transforming lives and communities in 21st century Britain. Recent publications include Learning Trajectories, Violence and Empowerment amongst Adult Basic Skills Learners (Routledge, 2013); Landscapes of Specific Literacies in Contemporary Society: Exploring a Social Model of Literacy (Routledge, 2014); and Adult Literacy Policy and Practice: From Intrinsic Values to Instrumentalism (Palgrave, 2015).

Peter Ehrstrém is Head of Research for Regional Science at Abo Akademi University, as well as Associate Professor (Docent) in Regional Science, especially Urban Policy, at University of Vaasa. Ehrstrém specialises in questions related to urban transformation, civic participation and civic learning processes, with emphasis on interdisciplinary cooperation. Ehrström has prior experience as Assistant/Associate Professor in Adult Education and he was also subject responsible (sub) for Adult Education 2015-17, Abo Akademi University. Ehrström was Guest Professor in Lifelong Learning at University of Hamburg, Germany (April-December 2019). He is Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), M.Pol.Sc., and has a teacher’s degree in Social Sciences and History (for upper-secondary and secondary schools).

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Andreas Fejes is Professor and Chair of Adult Education Research at Linköping University, Sweden as well as one of the founding editors of the European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults (www.trela.ep.liu.se). His current research interests concern issues regarding the role of adult education for the social inclusion of migrants and questions about what the market orientation of adult education has on teachers, students, educational counsellors and principals.

Mirella Ferrari carries out research and training activities in numerous companies, her research interest ranges from adult education to corporate training. She pursues three key research areas: the process of learning of art through advanced technologies; social inclusion and training of migrants; and sociology of education. She is author of numerous articles, different curatorships and monographs with Franco Angeli, Ledizioni, Aracne, Guerini.

Fergal Finnegan is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Adult and Community Education, Maynooth University where he is a co-director of the doctoral programmes. His background is in community education and his research interests include transformative learning, biographical research, social class, equality and higher education. He is co-convenor of the ESREA Active Democratic Citizenship and Adult Learning Network.

Laura Formenti is Professor of Pedagogy at Milano Bicocca University, Italy, joint convenor of the ESREA Life History and Biography Network and present Chair of ESREA. Her research interests focus on adult learning and education as systemic and complex phenomena, embodied and embedded in layered contexts such as the family, organization, community, and larger society, that she investigates by using narrative, aesthetic and cooperative methods. She co-edited Embodied Narratives (2014, with L. West and M. Horsdal) and Stories That Make a Difference (2016, with L. West), both from the ESREA LHBN Conferences.

Andrea Galimberti is a post-doctoral Researcher at the Department of Human Sciences “Riccardo Massa”, Bicocca University of Milan. His research interests are connected to lifelong learning and mainly focused on transitions in learning and professional careers. He explores these themes through auto/biographical methods and from systemic and constructionist perspectives. He is co-convenor and member of the scientific committee of the ESREA network “Access, Learning Careers and Identities”.

Bernie Grummell is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Education and Adult and Community Education, Maynooth University. She previously worked with the School of Sociology and the Equality Studies Centre in University College Dublin. She is a co-director of the Centre for Research in Adult Learning and xvi

Education. Her research interests include social justice and inclusion issues in education, and participative, practitioner-based and arts-based research methods.

Ann Hegarty is a Maynooth University Pat and John Hume Scholar and the Irish Research Council Government of Ireland PhD Scholar as she completed her PhD in the Department of Adult and Community Education, Maynooth University. She has extensive experience as a literacy practitioner, community development facilitator and trainer of trainers. Her research interests include organisational development and equality issues including family literacy, masculinities, photovoice, women’s education, disability rights and workplace literacy.

Melissa Jackson is a graduate student in the Department of International Development at Saint Mary’s University, located on the unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her research is guided by a passion for community, and rooted in an anti-colonial, intersectional feminist perspective. Her work centres on themes of women’s livelihoods, social movement organizing, and resource defence.

Sophia Kitcher is a Presbyterian Minister and a Veterinarian from Ada, and has been working in the Ada area for several decades. She is an advocate with the Yihi Katseme, fighting for the return of communal access to and use of the Songor Lagoon, in Ada, Ghana. She has professional training from the University of Ghana (Legon), the Pong Veterinary College, the Institute of Local Government Studies (Accra), WHO, DANIDA, and has completed various international veterinary certificates (Egypt and Netherlands). She is currently Chief Animal health officer and Presbyterian Minister in New Ningo.

Jonathan Langdon is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Social Change Leadership at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. He has been working with social movements in Ghana for the last 18 years, and more specifically with the Yihi Katseme in Ada who are defending communal access to a salt yielding lagoon. His recent work connects with other resource contention hot spots in Ghana, as well as with Indigenous Mayan educators/ activists in Guatemala. He also works closely with climate justice movements and Mi’kmagq First Nation Water Protectors in Nova Scotia, and sits on the steering committee of the Nova Scotia Fracking Resource Action Coalition (NOFRAC).

Emilio Lucio-Villegas is a Professor on Adult Education at the University of Seville, Spain. He holds the Phyllis M. Cunningham Award for Social Justice presented in 2010. He is convenor of the ESREA Network: ‘Between Global and Local: Adult Learning and Communities’. His latest publication includes Adult Education and Communities. Approaches from a Participatory Perspective (Sense Publishers, 2015).

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Silvia Luraschi, PhD, is a Pedagogist in “Educational and Communicational Sciences” at the University of Milan Bicocca and a qualified practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method. She is interested in studying embodied and aesthetic transformation in contemporary social contexts for an ecological, with body-mind-soul, critical and reflective approach to education and learning. Publications in English include “Traversing a story. A reflective exploration of the role of a researcher” (2016 in Before, beside and after (beyond) the Biographical Narrative, edited by R. Evans) and “How do you Breathe? Duoethnography as a Means to Re-embody Research in the Academy” (2017 co-author, in Re-enchanting the Academy, edited by A. Voss & S. Wilson).

Siobhan Madden has been involved in feminist community education/activism in Ireland for over twenty-five years. She received her PhD in Adult and Community Education from Maynooth University in 2017. Her research interests include collaborative narrative methodologies, the politics of voice and subjectivity, and feminist counter-rationalities to neoliberalism.

David McCormack is a Lecturer in the Department of Adult and Community Education, Maynooth University where he is Co-Director Counselling and Adult Guidance Programme. He is interested in teaching and researching around the emotional dimensions of Transformative Adult Learning and sees Autoethnography as a powerful genre supporting this work.

Sarah Meaney is associate staff with the Adult and Community Education Department in Maynooth University, where she works as a researcher and educator. She uses poetic transcription and theatrical methods to bring research outside of the academy and into the public sphere for social purpose and engagement.

Barbara Merrill is an Emeritus Academic in the Centre for Lifelong Learning at the University of Warwick, UK. Her research interests include issues of class and gender in relation to the learning experiences and the learner identity of adult students, particularly in higher education, European comparative research as well as biographical narrative approaches to research. Barbara is a member of the Steering Committee for ESREA (European Society for Research on the Education of Adults) and coordinates the ESREA Access, Learning Careers and Identities Network.

Erik Nylander is Associate Professor of education at Linköping University and a visiting fellow at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. His current research focuses on educational research in Singapore and Sweden from a comparative bibliometric perspective.

Cormac O’ Keeffe is Director of Digital Learning at INSEEC U., Paris, France. His research focuses on socio-material theory and the influence of digital technologies xviii on learning and assessment. He is currently investigating the role of international organisations in shaping narratives around educational attainment.

Jerry O’Neill has worked in further, adult and higher education contexts for twenty years in Scotland and Ireland. He has a keen interest in developing his own creative, critical and participative modes of practice and inquiry for personal and socially transformative ends.

Lovisa Osterlund is a Bibliometrician at the Department for Publishing Infrastructure (PI), Linköping University, providing bibliometric analyses of different units at the university, in addition to assisting in the interpretation of these and providing suggestions for a publication strategy and research projects.

Annika Pastuhov is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with Mimer — Swedish network for research on popular education at Linköping University. Her research interests include questions concerning ethnographic knowledge and the democratic ideals and practices of popular education, particularly in the Nordic countries.

Milosh Raykov, PhD, is an associate professor of Research Methods and Sociology of Education at the University of Malta. His research interests include educationwork relationships, the impact of labour unions on participation in education and service learning

Carole Roy is Professor in the Department of Adult Education at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada. Her work has focused on older women’s activism and more recently on the use of documentary films and documentary film festivals for sharing relevant grassroots stories, building community, and fostering solidarity.

Mary B. Ryan is Head of Adult and Community Education Department in Maynooth University and a Group Analytic Psychotherapist. She is Co-Director of the suite of Counselling and Adult Guidance Programmes. Her doctoral research involved a Narrative Inquiry into professional practice as a psychotherapist working in adult education.

Ari Sivenius, PhD, is a university lecturer at the School of Educational Sciences and Psychology, University of Eastern Finland. His research interest includes the methodology of educational sciences, especially qualitative research.

Rob Smith is a Professor of Education at Birmingham City University. His body of work explores the impact of funding and marketisation on further and higher education. His recent research with Vicky Duckworth focuses on further education as

XiX a space for trans-formative teaching and learning. Other research interests include Social Justice and Leadership in Further Education.

Alison Taylor is a professor in Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She is currently leading a mixed methods study of university students and part-time work. Her previous research focused on community service learning in universities.

Tony Walsh was, until recent retirement, a member of the academic staff and Head of Department at Maynooth University, where he continues as Director of the Centre for the Study of Irish Protestantism. He is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Anabaptist and Pietist Research at Elizabethtown, Pa, and editor and contributor to a number of books and articles on radical education, narrative and religion.

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BERNIE GRUMMELL AND FERGAL FINNEGAN

1. INTRODUCTION

Doing Critical and Creative Research in Adult Education

Academic scholarship on adult education and learning has developed a great deal over the past thirty years. Within adult education there has been a great deal of methodological creativity and innovation linked to the commitment to doing research in a critical and participatory manner. While there is a significant body of work which explores how to do research in a creative and critical way using a specific methodological approach and/or from a particular theoretical perspective in adult education [for example biographical methods e.g. Merrill and West (2009), feminist research Chilisa and Preece (2005) or visual participatory methods Butterwick & Roy (2016) etc.], there are relatively few publications on methodologies and methods that explore diverse ways of doing critical research on adult education and learning in a single volume. Typically, researchers, students and lecturers on adult education courses find themselves relying on handbooks and guides to research from cognate disciplines in the social sciences. Although, interdisciplinary ‘borrowing’ is inevitable and valuable, we think in a mature and established discipline there is a clear need for a book which explores a range of research methodologies which are directly orientated to the contexts, themes, values and problematics of the field. As such this collection seeks to address this gap and offer readers insight into the exciting and diverse range of critical research methodologies being used in contemporary adult education.

The book does not approach research methods in an abstract or schematic way. The emphasis is on the craft of research as a practical, ethical and theoretical endeavor that happens in specific contexts. In selecting the contributors, we have sought to include a wide range of case studies using diverse methodologies in order to capture the vitality and complexity of contemporary adult education research. This includes contributions on biographical, narrative, embodied, arts and mediabased and ethnographic methods alongside the critical use of quantitative and mixed methods. Each of the chapters take up the themes of criticality and creativity, whilst also reflecting on the purpose of these research methodologies as they are applied in a variety of settings and contexts.

Using case studies the contributors explore the links between research, pedagogy and creative forms of transformative social, cultural and political agency and address how creative research can support meaningful learning in education institutions as well as non-formal settings. In doing so the contributors illuminate a range of

© KONINKLIJKE BRILL NV, LEIDEN, 2020 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004420755_001 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 License.

approaches that combine the critical and the creative, and challenge epistemologies that erase the complexity of social phenomena. The book also considers how we can co-create and disseminate research in meaningful collaboration with a variety of learning communities and publics. Several chapters explore the histories and intellectual legacies that can be drawn upon to feed a sense of creativity in critical research as we think this will be of use to both experienced and novice researchers in adult education and in other social sciences.

CRITICALITY AND CREATIVITY IN ADULT EDUCATION RESEARCH

A good deal of the development and diversification of critical adult education research follows patterns which are evident across the arts, humanities and social sciences (Merriam & Cunningham, 1989; Leavy, 2009, 2014; Hesse-Biber & Piatelli, 2012; Denzin & Lincoln, 2011). It would also be a mistake to exaggerate the homogeneity of adult education: it is an international and highly diverse field of practice and research. Nevertheless, adult education has certain well-established areas of interest as well as methodological tendencies and orientations linked to the historical formation and development of the field (Duke, 1999; Rubenson & Elfert, 2015). These characteristics and trends have been noted in recent research on its journals and research networks (Fejes & Nylander, 2014; Käpplinger, 2015).

Some of specificities of adult education research can be linked to the processes, relationships, beliefs, and epistemologies valued by adult education practitioners more widely. There is, we believe, a type of what Gramsci (1971) called ‘good sense’ — a type of critical and ethical orientation — generated by the field as a whole which also informs the assumptions of many academic researchers. To be precise, this is a democratic and collaborative ethic which seeks to identify and foster progressive transformative possibilities for individuals, communities and society through research, teaching and learning. Of course not all adult education researchers share these values and orientations but they are very widespread. This has fostered a type of criticality that can be discerned across the collection and is marked by a sensitivity to questions of power in learning and research.

How this ‘good sense’, this criticality, is articulated and instantiated varies a great deal, yet one can point to other shared coordinates beyond a broad commitment to democracy and transformative education such as; a strong critique of the positivist assumptions which dominated research and knowledge in the social sciences, an abiding interest in questions of social justice and power; a holistic approach to learning and education which is not, nor can be, sectorally or institutionally defined; and an emphasis on the importance of non-formal and everyday knowledge. In concrete research terms this has manifested itself in recent decades in terms of a preference for intensive, qualitative methods alongside the widespread use of ‘horizontal’ collaborative research processes which aim to be participatory and engaging.

The desire to do research differently and conduct critical research with rather than about people demands theoretical and methodological creativity. It calls for a willingness to rupture hierarchical relations in order to create new collaborative spaces of learning and research (and significantly many of the contributors to the collection treat collaborative pedagogies and research as intertwined activities). It positions participants as active co-creators of knowledge (Freire, 1972; Dominicé, 2000) emphasizing openness and responsiveness rather than prescribing meanings (Yang & Lawrence, 2017). It is worth recalling that the origins of Participatory Action Research are in adult education (Hall, 1992) and the creative ferment of emancipatory movements in the global south. This approach means research in adult education is often viewed by researchers as a collective learning process which has the potential to lead to significant transformation, empowerment and even for some emancipation (Duckworth & Smith, 2018). The focus cannot therefore be on ‘data gathering’, but sparking and encouraging collective and critical knowledge production with people. Being critical in this sense is not only being aware of one’s concepts, goals and methods but of constantly exploring how the means and ends of research are connected and enmeshed in specific contexts and power dynamics.

Working collaboratively with people requires different modalities of research; with criteria of validity, reliability, ethics and quality based on the capacity of researchers to be truly responsive to what they learn through dialogue. This orientation in critical adult education research has required developing research methods which allow for the exploration of the nuances and textures of social and educational experience (Lucio-Villegas, 2015). Researchers seek to elaborate methodological approaches which are cognizant and reflexive of people’s experiences; drawing on the diversity of people’s interests (hooks, 1995, Dutton & Knightley, 2007, Leavy, 2014). We would argue, the source of a great deal of creativity is an ethical and political desire to find new terms for the production of knowledge.

Once we think collaboration between what the researcher wants to know, and what the participant wants to be known is important, research methodologies which respect and celebrate a variety of ways of being and ways of knowing becomes crucial. As a result, there is a very strong interest in research methods, such as arts-based approaches which offer multimodal ways of revealing, analyzing and expressing this. As Richardson (2000) identifies, creative methodologies should open up interpretive responses and should be artistically shaped, satisfying, and complex. This requires developing a wide array of arts, multi-media, narrative and embodied methods that reflect the diversity evident in people’s ways of being and knowing the world. These methodological innovations often transverse the tendency to solely rely in academic research on traditional written and oral forms of expression (for example surveys, interviews or fieldnotes in the social sciences) and to conduct research for example through the modes of song, theatre, poetry, photographs, social media, and movement. This involves drawing out people’s experiences of their worlds in ways that acknowledge the past, present and future, as well as the richness of their context and culture (Clandinin & Connolly, 2000; Ellis & Bochner, 2008). Creativity in this sense is linked to trying to tap into the imaginative resources that allow us to communicate and access to each other’s social worlds.

The methodologies explored in this book illustrate this commitment to collaborative, participatory, multimodal inquiry and treats research above all as a layered learning process. This requires high levels of reflexivity and examining subjectivity and positionality as an integral part of research process and to ask what is ‘really useful knowledge’ for adult education as a field (Connolly, 2008, see also Etherington, 2004). It involves, we think, sitting with uncertainty and emergence, allowing space and time for the form to emerge as part of the reflective process (Marshall, 2008). Crucially, we also think it means acknowledging the importance of context — in social and relational terms — in thinking about and doing research. Critically reflecting on the research process and ensuring it is consistent with the ethos of adult education throughout all the stages of research becomes paramount.

As noted earlier there is a clear preference for intensive, qualitative methods evident in contemporary adult education (Fejes & Nylander, 2019). But of course there is a risk that this can become an article of faith which blocks or limits critical research. There is also a way of approaching quantitative analysis and conducting mixed methods within a critical perspective that is oriented towards the people with whom we research. This criticality focuses on what is measured and how it is made ‘knowable’ within quantitative and mixed methods approaches and to what end this is used (such as in the use of large-scale datasets in adult literacy or critically questioning the gatekeepers and role of journals in our own field)

Criticality and creativity thus ultimately depend on openness and a willingness to rethink what we do and find new modes of dissemination that engage and empower people. The field of adult education research is changing (not least because of the use of ‘big data’ and the development of social media) and this requires new forms of critical research. Questioning methodological assumptions formed in an earlier period is crucial — for example, does the assumption that a rejection of positivism necessarily means a preference for qualitative approaches really hold good today?

THE ORIGIN OF THE BOOK

This collection of essays emerged from the debates and discussions that took place at the 2016 European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA) Triennial conference. Established in 1991 and consisting of twelve different research networks, ESREA has become one of the best-known organizations concerned with academic research on adult education (Slowey, 2016). Its twelve networks meet annually or bi-annually in different parts of Europe. The Triennial conferences offer space for the various networks to come together, meet and share ideas and it has become an important event for adult education researchers globally.