Abstract
The practice of adult learning and education (ALE) in Hong Kong is lesser known to the wider community of ALE practitioners due to lack of exchanges with international peers. There is a small community of full-time ALE practitioners working mainly in university continuing education schools but a larger body of uncharacterised or alternative practitioners can also be found. Essentially, both types of practitioners are conservative in their outlook and they adopt strategies that align with market needs and priorities set by public funders. Under the backdrop of neoliberalism which has harmonised ALE practice worldwide, a dominant form of individualised learning makes it difficult to promote group learning for societal advancement. ALE practitioners in Hong Kong are no exception to this influence and have been found to profess philosophical orientations favouring the behaviourist/narrowed progressivist notions of learner empowerment for economic and personal gains. Given recent worldwide renewed enthusiasm in making ALE responsive to societal issues, this paper examines the options and learning areas that ALE practitioners in Hong Kong can make their contributions to, such as: health advocacy, climate justice, and media literacy. Through engaging in these aspects of work, practitioners will have to incorporate methods of facilitating group learning in formal and non-formal ALE programmes and courses. An embrace by practitioners of the original notion of progressivist philosophy in adult education may emerge as one of the outcomes to make ALE practice inclusive, relevant and socially responsible. Even with the ongoing COVID-19 health crisis, it is deemed even more pressing to pursue a balanced practice approach that can take care of individual's skills transformation for post-COVID economy as well as developing human bonds that would help to make society progressive as a countercheck to neoliberal-inspired individualistic adult learning.
Highlights
Adult learning and education (ALE) has traditionally been a loosely defined field of work staffed by practitioners who are guided less by formal theory than by situational reactions that require both experience and insights to perform their daily work and respond to exigencies
Conceptualising about the philosophy of ALE practice and clarifying about practitioner's values and belief have been active topics pursued by graduate students and academic researchers alike, where work on the latter was facilitated by the influential Philosophy of Adult Education Inventory (PAEI) developed by Zinn [2]
This paper examines why Hong Kong is such an anomaly and it seeks to find ways for adult educators to move closer to the international ALE practice community
Summary
Adult learning and education (ALE) has traditionally been a loosely defined field of work staffed by practitioners who are guided less by formal theory than by situational reactions that require both experience and insights to perform their daily work and respond to exigencies. At the level of practice-oriented discourse, a number of articles written by long time scholars, practitioners and policy advocates of adult learning have called for a renewed search of meaning for ALE practice in contemporary times. Reflecting on his long period of association with the field, Knox [3] highlights the importance of employing a global perspective to inform local practice. A commonality that runs through the renewed practice-oriented discourse is that ALE as a field of practice must make itself useful to the target audience This has direct implications on how practitioners choose to structure the way they carry out their practice. An international exchange of ideas on ALE practice is naturally an interrogation of each other's values in ALE practice with potential for catalysing useful changes
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