ABSTRACT
I have suggested that there are significant shifts in the discourses within and around the terrain of those concerned with lifelong learning and the education and training of adults. Those shifts signify changes in the construction of lifelong learning and the practices necessary to support it. They are reflected in the shifting and dedifferentiation of boundaries discussed in chapter 3 and developments outlined in chapter 4. What, then, does this mean for workers in this terrain, the heterogeneous group working with adults in diverse ways in diverse settings who support and enable lifelong learning? If change, uncertainty and ambivalence are part of a general contemporary condition, what impact does this have on workers? Are the shifts towards neo-and post-fordist forms of work organisation to be found also in providers of learning opportunities? If the field has become a moorland, then the range of practitioners who may consider themselves as workers with adults will have expanded and diversified, raising questions about who considers themselves to be an ‘adult educator’ and whether the identity is, in fact, becoming many identities, or is even redundant. What forms of education, training and development, therefore, become necessary for this heterogeneous group of workers? In what ways are workers able to be a part of change as well as subject to it? These are the sorts of questions to be addressed in this chapter. These are interesting times for those working with adults, but in what ways they are interesting is not always clear, as we respond to the pressures of the intensification of work also experienced elsewhere in the social formation.
