Generative Knowing explores the mystery of learning from the unknown
in ways that reveal that learning is a dynamic phenomenon, encompassing
both personal and societal contexts.
Dewey defines learning in terms of experience, reflection, continuity,
and interactivity. When learning happens, it eventually solidifies into
reliable truths that become a shortcut for taking action or making
decisions--thus a habit of learning is formed and becomes rigid.
Generative knowing is an emerging theory of adult learning that seeks
the not-yet-foreknown potential that waits to be uncovered in the
richness of experience. The book delivers vignettes of different lived
experiences of being and becoming, signaling multiple ways in which a
person shapes and transcends traditional conceptions of self-other
binary activating the power to respond to the ongoing complex evolution
of self and society.
Generative Knowing seeks to accomplish four goals:
- to offer a unique exploration of learning, positioned as
response-ability that illuminates the relatedness of learning and
complex, ambiguous, unsolvable challenges that are recognizable in
society as social challenges (i.e. forced migration)
- to present and distinguish an emerging theory of adult learning,
generative knowing. Generative knowing emerged as a distinct learning
disposition at the intersections of personal meaning making capacity
(developmental psychology) encountering the characteristics of rising
ambiguity (complexity sciences) and the lived experience of undergoing
experience
- to make visible and help others make the connections between
generative knowing at a personal level and the complex, ambiguous
unsolvable challenges in today's society, and
- to provide illustrations of what generative knowing entails, how it
shapes personal and societal transformation and how that may support
educators, facilitator activists and change activists to make space
for generative knowing when complex challenges call for both
personaland societal transformations.
Adult education as a field of practice is presently grappling with how
adults learn in a world being recomposed by a global pandemic.
Generative knowing--defined as ways of being and becoming that
creatively activate potential--restores many rhythms of learning,
helping readers gain fresh perspectives on how learning emerges from the
unknown. The vital and personal stories in this book guide readers to
walk in the territory of the unknown and to pay attention to the
sensations of entanglements of self with multiple societal forces as a
new way of learning.
Perfect for courses such as: Adult Learning Theory │ Adult Learning
Theory & Praxis │ Adult Development │ Transformative Learning │
Phenomenology │ Narrative Inquiry │ New Materialism │ Creative Research
Methodologies
