Radicalizing Learning: Adult Education for a Just World

Radicalizing Learning calls for a total rethinking of what the field of adult education stands for and how adult educators should assess their effectiveness. Arguing that major changes in society are needed to create a more just world, the authors set out to show how educators can help learners envision and enact this radical transformation.

Specifically, the book explores the areas of adult learning, training, teaching, facilitation, program development, and research. Each chapter provides a guide to the different paradigms and perspectives that prevail across the field of theory and practice. The authors then tie all of the themes into how adult learning for participatory democracy works in a diverse society.

Stephen D. Brookfield is Distinguished University Professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, Minnesota. For 40 years he has taught in England, Canada, Australia, and the United States. A four-time winner of the Cyril O. Houle World Award for Literature in Adult Education, he is the author of numerous books on teaching including The Skillful Teacher (Second Edition, 2006), Discussion as a Way of Teaching (Second Edition, 2005), and The Power of Critical Theory (2004), all from Jossey-Bass.

John D. Holst is an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he teaches graduate courses in critical pedagogy and the foundations of education. He has spent his 20-year career in community- and work-based adult education in Chicago, teaching in factory lunchrooms, hotels, church basements, government and nongovernmental organizations. He is the author of the book Social Movements, Civil Society, and Radical Adult Education and articles that have appeared in the Adult Education Quarterly, the International Journal of Lifelong Learning, and the Harvard Educational Review.