This article argues that the phenomenon of a genetic/cultural “adaptive-lag” is both the motive for the human predisposition to engage in transformative learning and the origin of anxiety and associated ego-defences that mitigate against the likelihood of transforming epistemic assumptions. Dodds’ (2011) ecopsychoanalytic interpretation of Winnicott’s concept of a holding environment provides the conditions to reduce the impact of ego-defences by containing anxiety and therefore supporting the transformation of epistemic assumptions. Such holding environments are conceived to extend from intimate familial and social relationships to include wider ecological interconnectedness. Narratives, literature, and evidence from clinical psychedelic drug studies highlight how an increased sensitivity towards the natural nonhuman world diminishes ego-defences, enhancing the possibility for transformative learning. The implications for educational settings are that complex and difficult learning should not be ameliorated and that conditions enabling learners to recognize and manage their own anxieties will enhance epistemic transformation.

No abstract

This paper offers a frame to reflect on the role of aesthetics in the development of a critical pedagogy for social justice in adult education. Arts-based research and practice have the power to illuminate the participants' views, ideas, and feelings, as well as the systems of values that are embedded in their contexts. Critical thinking and awareness are the result of relational and political processes, triggered by experience and going beyond subjectivity. The authors aim at defining a pedagogical practical theory that celebrates complexity, opens possibilities, develops the new, and triggers deliberate action, rather than fostering specific behaviours or learning. The paper itself is a piece of that pedagogy, developed through a cooperative method of writing-as-inquiry (duoethnography), here triggered by a photographic exhibition and resulting in the dialogic exploration of feminism in the authors' lives. In this example, it is shown how individual voices can be juxtaposed to develop an open, transforming theory of feminism, identity, and education. IntroductionThis paper is the provisional result of an ongoing dialogue among us, and involving many other learners. It is not meant to present a polished theory or accomplished practice, but to foster further dialogue. Our approach is centred on relationships as the fabric of learning: as adult educators and learners ourselves, we interpret education as the creation of dialogic spaces for enhancing critical consciousness about those issues which are relevant for our lives, individually and collectively, but often silenced. Critical pedagogy seeks for the transformation of the relationships, actions, and discourses we live by. In this respect, we share a common interest towards art as a fundamental human experience and a powerful trigger of learning. We use it extensively in our work in university, with professionals, and with distressed parents and disenfranchised subjects. We also use it to explore our theories, practices, and epistemologies: art illuminates, in fact, our mind frames and relationships to knowing. Art sustains a kind of knowing which is out of reach for the purposeful, rational mind.In the last few years, we developed multiple conversations (from the Latin cum + versari, 'hanging around in the same space') around our pedagogy by sharing biographic and ethnographic narratives, artworks, poems, and readings. We visited exhibitions, read poetry and watched movies, among us and with others, as ways to develop our theories and practices of adult education. In this paper, we aim to build a provisional but satisfying theory of the relationship between aesthetic experience and adult learning.A theory is satisfying when it addresses relevant issues in people's lives, not least the researcher. Besides, it appears beautiful, true, ethical, convincing, and useful. A good enough bunch of ideas that speak to our emotions, feelings, and values.

A panel convened around the idea of intersubjectivation, loosely conceived as a process of actively, consciously, and reciprocally adjusting the structures and power dynamics of our social relations, thereby mutually (and consensually) reconfiguring our subjectivities and, over time, our wider cultures. Through a series of explorations of how one may elicit, reach, or realize a shared sense of intersubjectivity, the panel reflected on and challenged conceptions of the human subject as unitary, discretely embodied, economically accountable, and objectively measurable by a proscribed set of validating criteria. Speakers invited, allowed, or insisted upon the (re)presentation of hidden, unrecognized, or misconstrued aspects of subjectivities: their own or other people’s. While considering varied examples, variously presented, of the process we came to call intersubjectivation, something happened in the room: feeling intensified… shifted… becoming more… an enhanced sense of intimacy perhaps… affectively charged empathic stillness … sensations of interconnection. And we became. Using recollections and reflections from those present, this paper attempts a representation of what happened in the room, intangible yet perceptible—precious and alive—in hope of building understanding of how intersubjectivation may be conceptualized and achieved, whether actively intended or obliquely manifested through some peripheral, perhaps-parallel perhaps-integral, process.

No abstract