Doing critical and creative research in adult education

Abstract

This very welcome collection presents 17 different methodological approaches to adult education research, each illustrated by a relevant case study, together with a useful introduction and overview. The papers are organised uneasily into 8 sections based on different broad methodological approaches: uneasily because, as the editors point out in their introduction, adult education itself, and the field of adult education research, are not well-defined. Furthermore, different methodological approaches often overlap, so that the result, almost inevitably, is an uneven spread of papers between the different sections of the book. Individual chapters focus on biographical research, oral history and storytelling (4 papers); ethnographic and auto-ethnographic studies (2 papers); arts-based and pedagogical research (3 papers); digital research methods (1 paper); sound and visual research (2 papers); embodied and movement research (2 papers); mixed methods and quantitative research (2 papers), and a final chapter on creative dissemination. The majority of these highlight the methodological issues raised by the inclusion of the voices of adult learners, both as research informants and as researchers in their own right, and of the centrality of dialogic modes of interaction with research subjects. These chapters are framed by the editorial introduction, which clearly establishes the book ’ s theoretical starting points: that (a) the field of adult education research does not have clearly-agreed boundaries; (b) that this fuzziness aligns well with the broadly-domin-ant epistemology of the field of adult education, which the editors see as ‘ a democratic and collaborative ethic which seeks to identify and foster progressive transformative possibilities for individuals, communities and society through research, teaching and learning ’ ; (c) that some research methodologies are nevertheless characteristic and more appropriate to the field than others; (d) that these broad methodological approaches typically feature, at least to some extent, both the involvement of their research subjects as co-researchers, and an explicit pedagogical purpose among the research objectives: that is, to benefit its research subjects