ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a critical rationale for practice in the training of adult educators. If adult education as an area of practice is to develop any measure of distinctive professional identity, then its practitioners need to have their activities informed by a sense of common purposes. The purposes of graduate adult education are several, and the extent to which each of the following applies depends partly on the relative experience of the learners involved. As a form of adult learning, critical reflection entails more than purely cognitive activities such as logical reasoning, or scrutinising arguments for assertions unsupported by empirical evidence. The orienteering concept informing the actual conduct of graduate adult education programmes is that of the critically reflective practitioner. The importance of learning from peers in graduate adult education programme can be overstated. One of the most effective ways of operationalising the continuous interactional negotiation of purposes, methods and content of graduate adult education is to use learning contracts.
