Contemporary Adult and Lifelong Education and Learning: An Epistemological Analysis

Abstract

This chapter seeks to shed some light on the prevailing vocationalisation of adult and lifelong education and learning policy and provision. It does so through a framework of competing educational epistemologies, which are seen as being generated, shaped and selectively foregrounded through educational responses to the prevailing cultural context. Shifts in the nature of that context selectively favour different epistemologies, and may be used to explain: the historical hegemony of disciplinary epistemology; the episodic flourishing of constructivist and emancipatory epistemologies and—with the recent development of a neoliberal cultural context—also the shift from ‘education to learning’ in labelling the field, the contemporary ascendency of instrumental epistemology evident in the vocationalisation of the field, and the anticipated future decline of that epistemology, with the possible rise of a situational epistemology.