Ethical practice in adult lifelong learning: a reflection on its shifting nature and significance for the future

ABSTRACT

It is argued here that ethical practice and being in adult lifelong learning are best understood as a feature of competing adult lifelong learning epistemologies informing practice and engagement in the field at all levels. The conceptions of ethics immanent to the epistemologies are not directly identifiable with any of the normative theories of modernist ethics, although they are tangentially informed by the critique generated in and between those theories. Of the five epistemologies and conceptions of ethics identified as important in the field, disciplinary, developmental and emancipatory epistemologies and ethics have been variously prominent throughout its history, but design epistemology and ethics are now generally dominant. However, in response to changes in the contemporary cultural context, the latter are now transforming into a reflexive epistemology and ethic of authenticity, raising the prospect of a number of morally disabling tendencies, the recognition and avoidance of which emerges as an imperative for the future of the field.

KEYWORDS:

• Lifelong learning
• Ethics
• Adult education
• Epistemologies
• Contemporary cultural context

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard G. Bagnall

Richard G. Bagnall is Professor Emeritus at Griffith University, Australia. His scholarly work is in the social philosophy of adult and lifelong education, with particular emphasis on the ethics and epistemology of educational theory, advocacy and policy. It has been published largely as papers in a wide range of scholarly journals and books in and pertinent to the field. His earlier work sought to explore and expose the limitations, weaknesses and inhumanities of commitments and enthusiasms that tended to characterise our practice as adult educators. More recently, his work has focused on theoretical perspectives that may help us to make sense of our practices and commitments as adult lifelong learning practitioners and advocates. The work reported in this paper is of that sort, in its exploration of the idea that the nature of ethics in the field is immanent to the epistemologies that inform our practice.

Steven Hodge

Steven Hodge is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University, Australia. His main research interest is curriculum, in particular processes of curriculum development and interpretation and ways the representation of curriculum serves to valorise certain kinds of knowledge and skills and occlude others.

Paddy O’Regan

Paddy O’Regan is a Lecturer at Griffith University, Australia. His professional interest as a social worker has included the professional education of psychotherapists and responding to workplace trauma. His research has focused on the challenges and dilemmas of providing humanistic professional education in the changing cultural context.