Adult learners' resistance revisited: How alienation is reproduced in a national lifelong learning education system
Session Abstract
This presentation addresses adult learners’ resistance in the national lifelong education system of the Republic of Korea. The study critically examined how a national institution’s top-down, bureaucratic pedagogical system for distance adult learners collided with their individual expectations and needs.
Target Audience
scholars, researchers, and students who are interested in critical adult education
Session Description
Despite an extensive interest in critical pedagogy in the context of adult education institutions and programs over the last several decades, the emancipatory value of adult learners’ resistance has been under-theorized concept in adult education research. Drawing upon critical ethnography, this research illuminated that the students critically reflected upon their social position and the societal value of their learning as a ramification of their resistance. To provoke a critical discourse on the politics of adult education, this study documented how adult learners experienced resistance through their participation in a national lifelong education system and consequently underwent the reproduction of alienation as a result of their learning.