Anti-racist pedagogy typically focuses on helping learners identify and counter racist ideas and actions they detect in themselves and others. Sympathetically and skillfully, the leader of this activity is charged with helping people detect subtle racism as evident in racial micro-aggressions and aversive racism. This pedagogic process is crucial…

Adult education scholarship has been racialized through the lens of Eurocentric theory and research. Theoretical paradigms such as Africentrism struggle to gain academic legitimacy as discourses of transformative learning, critical thinking and self-direction--all grounded in the European Enlightenment tradition of the individual pursuit of…

Critical theory is one of the most influential theoretical frameworks influencing scholarship within the field of adult and community education. This chapter outlines what constitute the chief elements of critical theory using Horkheimer's (1937/1995) classic essay as a touchstone for this analysis. It argues for a set of adult learning tasks that…

The U.S. government's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) estimates that in any given year, 14.8 million American adults (about 6.7 percent of the adult population) suffer from clinical depression or major depressive disorder, as it is sometimes called (NIMH, n.d.). In Canada, a recent study projected the estimate of sufferers much higher…

Reexamines critical theory as a response to Marxism and repositions ideology critique as a crucial adult learning process. Argues that a critical theory of adult learning should focus on how adults learn to recognize and challenge ideological domination and manipulation. (Contains 31 references.) (SK)

Erich Fromm proposed that learning to penetrate ideological obfuscation and overcome the alienation it generates is the learning task of adulthood. He believed adult education would make people aware of ideological manipulation and prepare them for participatory democracy. His was a Marxist humanism aimed at the creation of democratic socialism.…

Adult educators engaged in critical practice must address four issues: (1) the connection between their own political commitment and encouragement of learners' critical thinking (CT); (2) whether CT should be based on one intellectual tradition; (3) accessibility of the language of CT to learners; and (4) balance between CT's liberatory…