Editorial

Citation

Olesen HS & Nicoll K (2012) Editorial. RELA: European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults, 3 (1), pp. 7-10. https://doi.org/10.3384/rela.2000-7426.201231

Abstract
First paragraph: The present ‘Open issue' consists of five articles submitted to the European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults (RELA) under the ‘open paper' category. These focus quite disparately on adult education in different contexts. The first article, drawing on Gramsci, explores the relation of adult education with the State in neoliberalism and social and economic conditions for transformative adult education. The second, concerning autobiographical research in Brazil is a research project into teachers' memories of education development in Rio Grande do Sul. Here the life stories of highly regarded teachers are seen to allow for the emergence of knowledge that may be useful for teachers' work as reflexive-transformational professionals today. The third, fourth and fifth articles are similar in their focus on higher education contexts across Europe. However, they differ in the work that they do - towards pedagogies for the nursing profession that are less technical and performative than is often the case, or in supporting the success of university students, either of student nurses or more generally those from non-traditional backgrounds. This collection of quite unconnected articles is however marked by in a tendency to towards life history and auto/biographical approaches to research, and, in one way or another, socially transformative interests in adult education. The third thus uses autobiographical methods to investigate UK university-based nursing students' lives and identities, to consider the forms of pedagogy and support implicated. The fourth, from a Scottish context and again focussing on university-based nursing education, uses an autobiographical and narrative approach to explore supports for student success in study. The fifth article engages directly with questions of methodology for life history approaches at the same time identifying and exploring factors supporting the access and retention of non-traditional students across a range of European university contexts. That these approaches and ‘transformational' interests dominate the most recent open submissions to RELA may be coincidental. But, certainly the articles illustrate that life history and /or auto/biographical approaches are being used quite widely in different contexts and locations.

Journal
RELA: European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults: Volume 3, Issue 1