Living Whitehead’s Vision: The Adventure of Adult Learning

Adult education is big business. More money is spent on adult education than elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education combined. Since the inception of the field a century ago, the study of adult education has grown to a sprawling, some would even say, chaotic enterprise, incorporating credentialing, licensing, career and citizenship training, as well as personal development. This book takes a new look at the field through the lens of process relational philosophy developed by Alfred North Whitehead. Rather than seeing the field analyzed into increasingly numerous disparate elements, this book looks at adult learning as an ongoing flow of educational experience with many integrated streams. In his classic essay, The Rhythm of Education, Whitehead depicted a process which flows from romance, to precision, to generalization. According to Whitehead, each phase in the rhythm represents an eddy of activity that replicates itself throughout the life of the learner.

Living Whitehead’s Vision examines rich exemplars of learning events in each phase together with their embedded theoretical strands to portray a continuing process from discovery, to mastery, to taking action in the world. In accordance with Whitehead’s caution to examine evidence in the richness of concrete events, this book offers examples of learning events at each phase that suggest strategies for assisting adult learning. These events are presented in the richness of their contexts and unfolding, rather than as dry results of controlled data gathering procedures. They draw information from over twenty-four exemplars as diverse as Aristotle, the Wright brothers, Julia Child, Alma Thomas, Rabindranath Tagore, James Lawson Jr., and Jimmy Carter. These chapters explore the theoretical strands interwoven into each particular phase of learning, including curiosity, play, embodied cognition, mastery, success, motivation, flow, resilience, critical thinking, wisdom, aging, and facing mortality. The book demonstrates how a process relational view of adult learning provides a coherent, logical, and systematic explanation of the diverse strands of adult learning. Finally, it explains how a process relational view provides a meaningful and hopeful perspective for approaching life in our challenging world of tumultuous change.