2019 Annual Conference

Adult Development

Concurrent Session (45 minutes)

This presentation will consider adult education as a pathway to human flourishing.  It will examine how adult educators can facilitate human flourishing through practices and disciplines that are less compliance-focused and concerned with institutional control, and more liberatory, transcendent, and metaphysical. 

Through this presentation, adult education theorists and practitioners will gain insight into the practices and disciplines that lead to human flourishing.  Participants will be encouraged to review their own teaching philosophy and instructional experiences and learn ways to strengthen opportunities for adult learners to flourish in work and life.  Researchers will learn potential new directions for future research.

Participants will gain an understanding of human flourishing as an outcome of adult education. They will recognize how the practices, disciplines, and virtues that enhance human flourishing through adult education provide a necessary balance to established doctrine and dogma while resisting unhealthy social forces. They will increase their knowledge of practices that deepen contemplative learning, strengthen communities, and value relationships. After examining their own philosophy and practices, participants will be able to apply their new knowledge to promote human flourishing.

Human flourishing focuses on well-being and the pursuit of virtues and practices that move us closer to values and approaches in adult education that have proved worthwhile over time. Connecting human flourishing to adult education, Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen have elaborated a capabilities approach to development in which one’s well-being is defined, not by an end-result such as wealth or leisure, but as focused on the central role community and context play in the generation of meaning and well-being.  The ethical requirements of human flourishing include coming to know and build the qualities that advance human well-being.  In a practical way, human flourishing orients adult education toward human encounters valuing mutual recognition, reconciliation, healing, belonging, dialogue, and critical reflection.   

Context and community, central to human flourishing, influence how people perceive truth. Communal resources, such as families, cultural institutions, and religious communities, are keys to constructing a life of virtue-oriented towards human flourishing and social progress. This approach would recognize that human experience is grounded in people, communities, places, and histories. These intersubjective, lived realities reveal aspects of human relations, social structures, and mutual recognition that facilitate emancipatory knowledge, critical to adult education.  

This session will introduce the concept of human flourishing as a significant goal of adult education.  It will describe a capabilities-based approach, outline dispositions that lead to human flourishing, and provide educational methods for developing these competencies in adult learners. It has the potential to move the discussion of values, contextually informed practices, and shared symbolic universes to a higher priority in the interest of social progress.  It will describe various ways that instruction can develop the capacity for flourishing in adult learners. The format will include an oral presentation, a multimedia slide show, and a discussion with session attendees.