Lifelong Learning

Conventional LLL

Conventional thinking about lifelong learning (LLL) is often limited by mostly taking traditional institutions and their divisions of labour for granted. These restrictions imply thinking about lifelong learning as predominantly “adult education”; as provisions for either (re)integrating marginalized groups and individuals or for people taking “further education” courses through higher educational institutions to qualify for new job requirements or in their spare time on a hobby-basis. This challenge is elaborated in chapter 1. However, LLL is not just adult education or further education, nor is it simply continuous, lifelong education. The first two tacitly presume LLL is something adults undertake after their school-based, initial training or education is finished. The last two presume that the designation LLL is primarily a question of education. But it’s not necessarily restricted to any of those. It is not merely done after or outside basic education or work, and it is not merely education as something conveyed didactically and approved formally.

Hence, although LLL may include them, it cannot properly be reduced to re-education, or to some form of readjustment required from the working population as current tasks change or become obsolete for political, economic, or technological reasons. Although there are many ways of teaching, didactics in general has to do with how to bring learners to a certain predefined level of competence or knowledge, to achieve certain learning objectives. But whether done for adjustment to work–life requirements or for personal interests, LLL is not just education. LLL should not be considered as something only taking place within the formal educational system, nor as only based on teaching. Admittedly, didactics can hardly be abandoned. But what is taught is not always what is learned, what is learned and needed is often not taught at all, and some things needed to be learned do not exist as predefined knowledge.

Expanding the concept

Hence, we’re exploring an ExpaLL more comprehensive than conventional LLL. It encompasses all kinds of learning throughout life, indicated by the differentiation between formal, non-formal, and informal learning. As such, learning happens everywhere, all the time but too often under non-conducive conditions. Hence, concepts of learning which are neither research-based in a conventional sense nor didactically defined need to be explored and developed to learn new things which are not yet known and cannot simply be pre-specified as learning objectives, as indicated by Engeström (2001), but also by certain strands of ancient dialogical philosophy explored in Chapters 6 and 7. We want to discuss lifelong learning as a concept and a practice which do not take the institutionalized divisions of labour for granted. ExpaLL is an open concept with the potential to transform the relationships between research, education, work, leisure, family life, and other institutionalized divisions of labour and sectors of society, especially between manual and intellectual labour. There has always been learning outside of and independently from organized didactics and societal educational systems. The challenge is to integrate formal, non-formal, and informal learning or at least make them compatible and supportive of each other throughout life. So, what could this mean? How could it be organized and done?

To challenge given institutionalizations and ways of organizing, ExpaLL needs to integrate individual and collective learning and to see different and currently separate areas interconnectedly to become consistent and sustainable. Hence, expanded lifelong learning must be inscribed into a form of sustainable, consistent, societal formation to avoid being reduced to restricted, competitive survival strategies for individuals, groups, regions, or nations. It cannot merely be about strategic learning for individuals, actors, or groups within non-sustainable social systems taken for granted. ExpaLL must be integrated systemically into a more comprehensive and coherent concept of socio-ecological sustainability where reconceptualization and reconfiguration of knowledge and learning, skills, practical organizational measures, and institutions are needed. Principally – in our times of “permacrisis”– everything is in the air. Consequently, ExpaLL expands the discussion about “adult learning” (Hall 2013, Hall et al. 2013, Hall et al. 2015, Zuber-Skerritt & Teare 2013) to explore what principles of “organizing for learning” could “look like” to permeate and transform social relations and institutions from “the cradle to the grave”. The present chapters on an expanded concept of lifelong learning, then, discuss and conceptualize the challenges and the way forward when questions about how to provide consistent preconditions for optimal learning “from the cradle to grave” are put on the agenda for the traditionally separate sectors of modern societies.

The different chapters

Chapters 1, 2, and 3 present and discuss conventional concepts of lifelong learning and what an expanded concept would mean in relation to a conventional one. Chapters 4, and 5, focus on how didactic efforts in educating professions in higher education could integrate or support a more expanded concept by being more self-reflexive. Chapter 6 shows how bringing in perspectives from ancient Mediterranean philosophy connects to current efforts at reinstating self-reflexion as an irreducible core of lifelong learning. As a follow-up to Chapter 6, Chapter 7 brings further perspectives from ancient dialogical philosophy to bear on how to integrate and expand concepts of lifelong learning into daily life “from the cradle to the grave”. The concluding Chapter 8 brings an experienced professor emeritus of anthropology’s reflections on how the lack of continuous learning throughout everyone’s lifetime and instead its continued apparently non-obvious character, is a major problem for both academic and general culture, even in the 21st century.

Chapter 1 is written by Olav Eikeland and Marianna Papastephanou to explain what is meant by expanding the concept of lifelong learning. (ExpaLL). ExpaLL concerns not only adult and further education, or only continuous and lifelong education. LLL is not merely undertaken by adults after basic training or education, nor is it merely “re-education” as “readjustment” of the work force. It is not merely a question of providing formal education. ExpaLL concerns learning throughout life in all contexts. To discuss the best preconditions for ExpaLL, institutionalized divisions of labour and divisions between formal, non-formal, and informal learning must be included. Hierarchical models and mechanical metaphors have dominated societal and organizational structures throughout Western history, models which do not easily adjust to ExpaLL. The need is becoming increasingly obvious, however, for providing preconditions for the continuous learning of how to improve collective performance and functioning while simultaneously satisfying individual and social needs. Broader criteria independent from market requirements, private profits, and business competition are needed. Reflective spaces are needed as permanent structures for individual and collective learning and collaborative cooperation in and between organizations. Dewey’s vision of transposing experimentation from laboratories to everyday contexts to form a learning culture is one of the approaches explored here. Action Research, with its Dewey heritage, is therefore a useful approach to explore ExpaLL.

In Chapter 2 Marianna Papastephanou discusses different shifts from education to learning and the current “learnification” ideology. As Olav Eikeland also remarks in this anthology, there has been a shift from lifelong education towards lifelong learning. This shift has been received with mixed feelings by educators and educational philosophers. Some welcome it and others chastise it. A main trend in educational philosophy maintains that we should go beyond learning and refuse the learner identity. For representatives of this trend such as Gert Biesta, learning is per se individualistic and promotes “learnification”, i.e., a pernicious politics of learning at the expense of relational educational experiences. While acknowledging the significance of this critical trend, this chapter argues that we should not incriminate just any learning wholesale. For instance, Eikeland’s notion of learning in this anthology operates through critical reflection on culture, history, nature, and interaction in everyday life and is not subservient to the politics of learning that the trend in question chastises. We should therefore acknowledge the complexity and diversity of the issue of learning along with its risky politics. To make this more concrete, the chapter refers to Castoriadis’ example of learning in the city and the latest co-option of city learning by discourses of learnification. It concludes with some thoughts about lifelong learning being determined by previous learning experiences often in need of revision through a more transformative, periagogic outlook.

In Chapter 3 Cecilia Bjursell demonstrates that “lifelong learning” is a concept which is used in different contexts and in different ways. Two intertwined perspectives of “lifelong learning” are highlighted here: (i) “lifelong learning” as policy; and (ii) “lifelong learning” as theory. What they have in common is the assumption that learning takes place throughout the duration of a person’s life and that learning takes place in various contexts in a person’s everyday life. The meanings which have been associated with the concept of “lifelong learning” can be differentiated via the perspectives mentioned above, but there is also an interplay between political intentions (as expressed in policy) and philosophy of pedagogy (as expressed in theoretical frameworks). While the “lifelong learning” concept is most frequently occurring in policy work, it is primarily “lifelong learning” as a philosophy of pedagogy which can provide us with important insight into the development of lifelong learning in a professional context and in society.

Chapter 4 by Stine Bundgaard explores lifelong learning in the context of higher education through a reflective learning approach called Reflective Practice-Based Learning, pragmatism, and reflective practice. Lifelong learning is illuminated as a process that cannot only be measured through knowledge, skills, and competencies, but it will more closely encompass human wonder including research, education, work, leisure, family, etc. The education of social workers emphasizes reflection as a method of connecting educational/theoretical fields with practice and actions in the formation of a sustainable professional identity, where curiosity and reflection are essential. Lifelong learning is seen as a process that combines the individual with the collective learning space turned to Reflective Practice-Based Learning as a room for the individual to explore its own drive to learn.

Chapter 5 is written by Hedvig Skonhoft Johannesen. It explores reflexively how university teachers facilitate the learning of adult master students with vocational backgrounds at a master’s programme in vocational pedagogy, discussing the student’s negotiations in appropriating university cultural codes, while bartering recognition of their prior learning as skilled craftsmen and workers. The concept of expansive lifelong learning is unpacked and discussed through examining the multiple meanings of learning contexts, knowledge cultures, and andragogy necessitated in exploring how adult master students learn in thesis group work at the university. A twofold approach of pathways into expansive lifelong learning is developed in a sociological sense with the habitus theory of Bourdieu and through perspectives of transformative learning. The discussion concerns how transformative learning and sociological critical thinking could democratize and foster expansive lifelong learning as contributions to pedagogical and organizational learning for the university in bridging vocational and academic Bildung.