Critical Learning

This ambitious multidisciplinary volume assembles diverse critical-theory approaches to the current and future states of networked learning. Expert contributors expand upon the existing literature by analyzing the ethical aspects of networked learning and the ongoing need for more open, inclusive, and socially engaged educational practice. Chapters explore in depth evolving concepts of real and virtual, the processes of learning in, against, and beyond the internet, and the role of critical pedagogy in improving social conditions. In all, coverage is both realistic and positive about the potential of digital technologies in higher education as well as social and academic challenges on the horizon.

This book weaves together critical components of student development and community building for social justice to prepare students to engage effectively in community-campus partnerships for social change. The author combines diverse theoretical models such as critical pedagogy, asset-based community development, and healing justice with lessons from programs promoting indigenous knowledge, decolonization, and mindfulness.

This book weaves together critical components of student development and community building for social justice to prepare students to engage effectively in community-campus partnerships for social change.

Deeper learning, dialogic learning, and critical thinking are essential capabilities in the 21st-century environments we now operate. Apart from being important in themselves, they are also crucial in enabling the acquisition of many other 21st-century skills/capabilities such as problem solving, collaborative learning, innovation, information and media literacy, and so on. However, the majority of teachers in schools and instructors in higher education are inadequately prepared for the task of promoting deeper learning, dialogic learning, and critical thinking in their students.

This book is written at a time when our own field of adult education is under assault from a variety of capitalist and neoconservative forces pressuring us… to turn away from the causes of criticality, lifelong learning, and education for freedom. Rather than succumb to these pressures, we have hope that our long term goals of education for life and living can and will be accomplished alongside professional and vocational education. This book offers new insight into what is a very dark moment of our human civilization.