Abstract
Development, like so many other words in the discourse surrounding adult learning, sounds on the surface unobjectionable, even benign. Education, learning, training, change, development – these can only be good, only improving, can’t they? My position is that these terms are always problematic; that is, that although they seem on the surface to be empirically neutral, when they are employed in speech and used to justify action they are always normatively based, always representing a set of interests deemed to be inherently desirable by those holding them. In this chapter, I want to explain more fully how normative and empirical elements are always interwoven in understandings of community development. I also want to argue that the concept of community development can be reframed in a way that grounds it in the normative pursuit of true democracy – a democracy that is participatory and economic. As part of this reframing I need to examine the learning tasks facing adults that this notion of community entails. These are learning to develop a worldview in which individual and collective well-being are seen as fundamentally interwoven, learning to develop agency, and learning to develop collective forms of association, communication and production.
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Brookfield, S. (2012). The Impact of Lifelong Learning on Communities. In: Aspin, D., Chapman, J., Evans, K., Bagnall, R. (eds) Second International Handbook of Lifelong Learning. Springer International Handbooks of Education, vol 26. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2360-3_53
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