ESREA 2022 - 10th triennal conference - New Seeds For a World to Come. Policies, Practices and Lives in Adult education and Learning
Date : du 29-09-2022 au 01-10-2022
Appel à communications ouvert jusqu'au : 31-01-2022
Lieu : University of Milano Bicocca
Modalité : présentiel
Organisation : European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA)
Programme :
Two years have passed since ESREA’s Triennial Conference in Belgrade “Adult education research and practice between the welfare state and neoliberalism”. Meanwhile, adult lives and learning have dramatically changed individually and collectively. The need to limit the spread of Covid-19 stopped face to face meetings for a long time and fueled the fear of the other. Educational organisations, schools, universities, museums, had to significantly revise their practices to ensure the continuation of their mission.
The 10th Conference will inevitably be marked by the experience of the pandemic, but we want to make it a positive, reflexive moment to look at the future. Adult education research and interventions are now asked to mobilise their best energies, knowledge, and creativity to interrogate the many controversial, non-linear effects of the ongoing ecological, economic, social changes, and to offer plausible and sustainable answers. We have chosen an ecological metaphor for the title, not least to remember the relevance of climate justice and the need for adult education research around it. New emerging landscapes, physically and metaphorically, are bringing more challenges, especially for the vulnerable and dispossessed. Yet, every crisis can bring new opportunities. There are lessons learned and to be learned.
This Triennial Conference will be a great occasion to gather the ESREA’s community, after all this disruption, and celebrate with joy our 30 years of outstanding activities in enhancing research, refining, and innovating methodologies, publishing books and a journal, organising hundreds of events, seminars, conferences, and seasonal schools. From its birth, ESREA has played a pivotal role, in Europe and beyond, and will continue, making its seeds growing and offering good research and sound theories and methodologies, to show how research in adult education can sustain communities and individuals with vital energy, beyond merely absorbing the impact of adversities, to promote, instead, better life and knowledge.
What are the means now, to create better adults’ lives and worlds? As researchers and practitioners, we are called to nurture hope, which is not passively awaited, but elaborated by exchanging ideas, acting, and in collaborating in imagining a livable, just, an ecologically sustainable world to come.
During the conference, there are questions that we want to ask to each other: What are the effects of the current crisis at micro, meso and macrolevels? How does gender, age, class, ethnicity, prior education, the presence or absence of services, shape reactions, possibilities, and answers to emerging problems? How are adult lives and learning changing under the pressure of these global challenges? What kinds of research are being conducted? What type of research is needed? What methodologies, or theories, can help in understanding and sustaining good and just practices?
Are there any seeds for transformative resilience?
More specifically, we will welcome proposals for papers, symposia, workshops, and
posters addressing the following questions:
− How are European, national, and local policies of adult education responding to emerging needs and challenges? What is the role of adult and lifelong education and learning in the European Agenda and Recovery Plan, in different countries? How are these policies shaping a future world?
− The health pandemic is also connected to a pandemic of fake news, hate speech, alternative facts, and new forms of populism. Reactionary social movements, already existing, have grown stronger. Does civic, popular, or liberal education still have a role to play for younger and older adults, from all social conditions? Can adult education be a public space or agora for discussing and deciding democratically how peoples want to live?
− How is the new economic scenario influencing workplace, work-based and work-related learning? How can educational agencies, guidance and career practitioners, and services for employability support better lives through learning and education?
− Did adults develop new knowledge, strategies, or attitudes during the pandemic, to take care of themselves and their proximal systems? Did relationships take up new forms, or was the neoliberal mantra of individual responsibility reinforced by the lockdown?
− Are there now new learning spaces and how do learners and adult educators respond to them? Did the crisis provoke researchers and practitioners to question dominant teaching and learning paradigms and the aims of education? Is this bringing to new forms of ecojustice sensitivity and behaviors?
− What are the long-term effects of top-down decisions, control, and discipline? How are these repeated and habitual experiences affecting adults’ agency, social participation, mobility, and proactivity? Does adult education and learning promote new collective and critical practices, e.g., informal learning in social or ecological movements, volunteering, or new digital environments? How can education contribute to integrating older people, especially the most vulnerable and lonely, in these new scenarios and life arrangements?
− What can we learn from history, from knowing about Europe’s recovery after two World Wars, or social movements in the Seventies? Or from ESREA’s history, after 30 years? What is the legacy of adult educators of the twentieth century, men and women, who tried to create spaces for democracy through dialogue and nonviolent resistance to power?
− How is culture and art – theatre, literature, poetry, dance, music, photography, and popular art – showing and teaching adults about the past, present and future, about fundamental values, criticality, human struggles, and ways to sustainable happiness? Which role do educational providers and professionals play in supporting adults’ cultural education and bridging possible gaps between arts and education? What kind of methods can enhance cultural transformation and learning?
As said, the conference will be an occasion to celebrate the 30th birthday of ESREA. We are looking forward to reconnecting with some of our “founding mothers and fathers”, as well as new generations of researchers, and PhD students, to remember the past and re-design the future together. We plan to create events, such as a dedicated roundtable and a reception, and we hope that ESREA’s networks will organise panels and symposia where the intergenerational exchange will be fostered.
As always, special attention will be given to supporting PhD students and early career researchers in the program: a preconference with dedicated activities and supervision meetings, a prize for the best paper, bursaries, underpinned by a friendly, generatively critical style of engagement a in our community.
URL : https://esrea.org/.../
mot(s) clé(s) : alphabétisation et éducation des adultes
