Challenging understandings of adult learning with southern theory : recognizing everyday learning through a critical engagement with northern theories

Abstract

This article is an example of doing Southern Theory through a critical engagement with Northern theories around learning, adult learning, adult education and related fields that help to exclude and erase non-dominant forms of learning such as everyday learning from theory, practice and policy. Adult education and learning play conflicting roles both supporting the maintenance of social inequality and at the same time working to challenge this and promote equitable access to resources and opportunities for marginalised groups around the globe. The field is however often dominated and shaped by predominantly Northern based adult learning and related theories that help to privilege mostly formal learning over other forms of learning, including everyday learning through what Connell (2007) calls erasure. This article focuses on a research project that investigated everyday learning and relied on a critical examination and active modification of key aspects of a selection of relevant Northern theories. This critical engagement produced a “patch-worked” theoretical framework that, I propose is more capable of recognising and responding to the localised everyday learning and knowledge from the research participant’s lives than the original Northern adult learning theories. It is argued here that such critical engagements with Northern theories are required to highlight their implicit localisations and challenge reifying tendencies. Furthermore it is suggested that such critical engagements can allow once limited theories to be put to more effective use in localised contexts to help address localised needs globally.