ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a framework for understanding the work of adult educators and for reading the book. It begins by distinguishing between a model of professional education which assumes that practitioners need to be introduced to a body of ‘necessary knowledge’, and a model which assumes that practitioners are ‘practical theorists’. Behind different schools of thought in education there are radically different views of how knowledge is discovered and used. One view is that knowledge is constructed scientifically. According to this approach, educational knowledge can and should be developed in the same way that knowledge is built in the natural sciences. The scientific, instrumental, technical, or positivist approach to education as a field of practice and study was dominant during the half of this century. The overwhelming majority of US adult education scholars work within the positivist and/or the interpretive paradigms.
