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.