This paper argues that the new social movements are particularly privileged sites for emancipatory praxis. Old social movements are differientiated from new, and the new social movements are interpreted primarily as defenses of the threatened lifeworld and ecosystem. The specific nature of the learning challenges within particular movements is examined. The author hypothesizes that diverse movements may be crystallizing into a new historic movement.

Jürgen Habermas's works help us to think imaginatively about knowledge, learnining, and the human condition. Many adult educators draw on his ideas to provide them with and ideal standard for their education practice and a deep understanding of the cardinal purpose of the adult education vocation.

No abstract

This paper argues that listening is a seriously neglected theme in adult education theory and contemporary philosophy. It postulates that critical reflection on listening is particularly salient in our world of manifest socio-economic inequality, cultural conflict and adversarialness. This paper contends that we learn to listen, and that political listening can be usefully understood as a pedagogical practice of democratic citizenship. Listening must be cultivated by persons and collectives if we are to hold civil society together with minimal, but crucial, solidarity and commitment to the commonwealth. Learning to listenThe metaphor of voice has gained prominence in North American political culture in the last three decades. Those who had been excluded from full dialogic participation sought to be recognized and heard within the public sphere. The 'politics of recognition' (Taylor 1992) and the 'politics of inclusion' (Cohen and Arato 1992) have been salient features of North American politics since the late 1960s. These struggles for recognition and respect have been arguably one of the most creative tendencies in recent public life. Slowly and painfully, global cultures are learning to hear about race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and indigenous knowledge-forms. The powerful and the privileged-those who simply assume their voices will command attention in public spaces-are being challenged to open their ears to the silenced who speak in different accents, tonalities and colourations.Yet a socially responsible adult education for the 21st century cannot be complacent about our personal and social capacity to listen to each other. In our world of thinning cultural cohesion and competition for scarce resources and recognition, our political life can easily drift into bitter forms of adversarialness. Equally distressing, Honneth has argued in The Fragmented World of the Social (1995) that respectful communicative interaction is becoming more difficult every day. He says that changed conditions of work, the loss of traditional life-scripts and the shift from cultural production to consumption have eroded the 'subject's ability to communicate ' (1995: 222). It is time to bring listening out of the theoretical basement.Some adult education thinkers have understood that listening is an intentional pedagogical practice. Freire took his most powerful metaphor from the human Dr Michael Welton is professor of adult education at

No abstract