Postmodernity and its implications for adult education practice

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Abstract
The paper seeks to articulate a conception of postmodernity and its implications for adult education practice. Postmodernity is seen as being contemporary culture that is informed by: (1) a belief in and commitment to the interpretative nature of all perception, the cultural contingency of all belief, and the ontological contingency of being; and (2) a profound scepticism towards all claims to the privileging of knowledge. From this conception, a philosophical analysis is used to identify features of adult education programming that are indicated by it. The eight identified formal tendencies of postmodernist adult education engagement—dominant structural or curricular features of the engagement—are that it would tend to be: reflexively contextualized, indeterminate, expressive, participative, heterodox, phenomenal, critical, and de‐differentiated. It is suggested that a strongly postmodernist field of adult education practice would be incommensurably and irreducibly pluralistic and changeable. It would be wanting in any common self‐perception, values, visions, or purposes. Its postmodernist participants may be liberated, but into a profound sense of existential insecurity, and the vulnerability of exploitation in the postmodernist market place.

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