Transformations: (re)generating research in adult education?
The title of the conference suggested to me questions of (auto)biography, questions about the power of telling of our lives in relation to our research in adult learning and teaching. In this paper I will reflect on my own stories, and the stories of participants in two research projects, about transformations, to explore how we might re-generate research in adult learning and teaching. I will self consciously adopt a storytelling methodology for writing and presenting this paper as a potential (re)generative strategy. I will begin the paper with some memory work (Haug, 1987; Davies et al, forthcoming) of my own relationship to the field of adult learning and teaching and to the exclusionary practices of the discipline.
Learning in Community: The Song and Dance Women of the Fiery Cottage
This paper looks at how learning is opened up when it occurs in a loving and living space. Working together in a small cottage in a university campus has brought unexpected rewards to the theoretical learning of each of the inhabitants. The history of the women who have passed through this place resonates in the conversations. The place itself provides the conditions for sewing the frayed fabric of creative learning. In the hollow of this lies the shared meaning making that seeps across boundaries. There is a sense of the hidden, subversive unnamed and uncontested which gathers us into the living experience of learning. Here we celebrate the [in]competent, maverick and illegitimate. And here the questions are revealed as seeds for challenging theories of knowledge. We ask, if learning is fundamental to life then what happens when we celebrate the living? We are not attempting to arrive at definitive answers but to open up a conversation with multiple voices.