Doctoral School „Klagenfurt Research Retreat (KRR) on Adult Education...

We are experiencing unprecedented disruption in our lives at the moment. It is worthbearing in mind in this period of flux that Adult Education was constituted by and as a response to complex and often highly disruptive social modernisation processes. Changes in the life course, shifts in employment and career paths, alterations in family structures and intimate relationships, the democratisation of everyday life, the corrosion of traditional patterns of community interaction and political struggles for equality have been crucial to the formation of a complex and varied field of Adult Education as we know it. As a result, transformation on varying levels and scales has long been adefining theme for both researchers and practitioners with a particularly strong emphasis on empowerment and emancipation. It covers learning and educational processes of adults in the fields of general, political and cultural education, as well as vocational education and training, work-based learning, and job-related further education, or professional development, and university continuing education. Adult Education and Learning is both organised in institutions and takes place as informal learning (planned educational work and free learning related tolife-world, workplace and social contexts). Adult Education itself is subject to transformation processes while aiming to initiate or support individual and collective processes of change/transformation. 

The Klagenfurt Research Retreat is conceptualized as a meeting of a scientific community on Adult Education and Transformation. It intends to offer a retreat from the usual and habitual environment and seeks to foster holistic learning processes. It enables researchers to meet in a pleasant and stimulating location, where workshops, debate and collective learning, and working on own research projects (writing labs) are combined with social activities.

We jointly explored the landscapes of adult education and learning in reference to the national/regional educational systems of adult education and learning of participants sharing information on the genesis, traditions and current trends of these various systems in relation to transformative possibilities and challenges. The Doctoral School also created space for debating concepts and approaches to transformation to bring to the fore the diversity and differences in transformation theories with regard to ALE research.

Our primary aim was to prioritize the participants’ research interests (doctoral theses and research projects) and create an arena for exchange, reflection, theorizing and exploring ideas in order to amend the respective research projects, and finally, to foster networking and establish a basis for a community of research in the research field on Adult Education and Transformation.