2016 Annual Conference

This session explores understandings of knowledge as contextualized and emergent. Examples from Kenya, Haiti, Mesoamerica, and complexity science will demonstrate principles of knowledge as relational, situated, partial, and emergent. Participants will explore implications for this approach to knowledge for understanding their adult learners and for shaping their pedagogies and institutions.

This session is intended for adult educators working in a range of settings. The understanding of knowledge as contextualized is useful to all educators. Those working in community and non-formal education settings may already be educating in ways that build on local knowledges. Those teaching in more formal settings such as higher education, military, adult basic education, or workplace education may benefit from the opportunity to examine their own educational practice and the ways the principles presented in the session can help their institutions educate learners from all cultures more effectively.

Culture is what allows human systems to evolve. If we think of culture as shared meaning schemes, shared conceptual understandings, which are grounded in shared lived experience, then it is these shared elements that make up local or indigenous knowledges. Our knowledge bases are in constant evolution and it is through these processes that we ‘grow’ as humans. New ideas take form, existing ones transform. Complexity offers us insight into the recursive and dynamic nature of things taking and changing form, including knowledge. All ‘culture’ is a rich landscape of learning, and adult learning environments are ones in which many cultures come together. This session will focus on ways in which we as adult educators can grow our own capacity to draw on diverse knowledge bases, to bring them into relationship with each other, in order to facilitate new and co-emergent bodies of knowledge. We will examine ways our pedagogies and organizations can be more responsive, more generative and in greater alignment with the way ‘the world works’ through the refinement and evolution of our collective knowledge.