There is growing research interest in how adult education can better respond to an increasingly diverse student population as part of realising inclusive education. However, less attention has been given to practice oriented perspectives that examine how inclusion is enacted as a dynamic, situated process in everyday teaching. This study examines how teachers navigate the challenges involved in shaping inclusive adult education in Swedish municipal adult education (SMAE), drawing on the theory of practice architectures. Qualitative survey data were collected from teachers in eight SMAE institutions. The findings show that teachers encounter challenges embedded in cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements within a marketised system. These arrangements both enable and constrain their efforts to realise inclusive education. Teachers respond by adopting different strategies, ranging from disengagement and workaround solutions to market responsive and professionally accountable approaches, illustrating the uneven conditions shaping inclusive practice.
This study explores how cultural practices function as informal learning environments for adults, focusing on a kuda kepang community in Pal Tiga Puluh village, North Bengkulu, Indonesia. It examines how local knowledge, adult learning, and cultural continuity are connected through participation in traditional performance. Using a qualitative case study, data were collected through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with community members. Thematic analysis identified four interrelated learning domains: embodied practice, oral transmission, communal participation, and spiritual experience. These domains were associated with the development of technical skills, cultural identity, social cohesion, and perceived emotional empowerment. The findings suggest that the sanggar functions as a community-based learning environment in which knowledge is acquired through observation, repetition, dialogue, ritual participation, and intergenerational relationships. The study contributes to adult education by showing how culturally situated learning can broaden predominantly individual and cognitive understandings of adult learning.
Many adult educators support arts-based methods to spark discovery and influence change. Concurrently, other scholars express caution about such creative approaches because they may lead to unintended consequences like resistance or alienation. As three adult educators from separate departments brought together by a university reorganisation, we reflect on our differing experiences with arts-based teaching. Informed by critical friendship, narrative inquiry, and critical incident analysis, we explore the concept of creative metacognition as situated self-awareness of one’s (a) creative strengths and (b) contextual conditions. Using the humorous terms squares and flakes to caricature pedagogical norms with arts-based approaches, we examine our motivations and rationales. In doing so, we practise collective creative metacognition to uncover themes and tensions about applying arts-based methods with mid-career adult learners. Our inquiry encourages dialogue and respect for divergent approaches to arts-based methods in adult education and also promotes collective creative metacognition as a helpful practice.
This paper examines how choral singing functions as a site of adult education within social movements through a case study of ‘Warszawianka 1905’ as performed by the Prague Revolutionary Choir. Combining dialogical autoethnography, new-materialist diffractive analysis, and autophenomenography, we conceptualise the song as actant, historical witness, and teacher. We propose a ‘pedagogy of redundancy’, i.e., the use of purposeful cycles of listening, choral recitation, rhythmic chanting, humming, and iterative performance which lowers shame, builds affective and social reserves, while enabling translanguaging, improvisation, and rapid public uptake. Framed as ‘strategic deep andragogy’, we offer a 4R heuristic: Repeat, Relax, Reframe, Resound, showing how the collective voice binds bodies, memories, and political imagination across languages and generations. Productive tensions between nostalgia/critique and canonisation/improvisation animate identity work. In addition, we note the limits of a single-song regional focus and outline pathways for comparative research.
