Overview

Temporarily Out of Print

Lifelong Learning and the Democratic Imagination is a collection of essays from Adult and Community Educators in Australia, New Zealand, England, Scotland, Canada, America and South Africa. There is a general belief here that democracy is about people consciously sharing power and that such deliberate choices to share power, draw on ideals and values of sharing with and including others.

In modern life this generous and equitable stance has to be learned and re-learned against competing cultures of individualism and competition. Such learning needs more than logical argument. It occurs when powerful evocations of human equality and dignity capture the human imagination and move the heart. The work of this book is to pursue what needs to be done to generate suitable pre-dispositions for this unselfish sociable spirit to take root and grow.

The book has five sections. The first concerns visions of democratic imagining: the second looks at predispositions for democratic imagining. The last three explore the educational work of imagining democracy in three learning arenas: community and work locations, higher and work-related education and schools.

Proudly published by Post Pressed

Table of Contents

Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I - Visions of Democratic Imagining

• Pedagogies of hope: Education, utopian imagination and the corporatising university
  Peter Bishop
• The old world doesn't want to leave, the new hesitates to come: Lifelong learning in shadowy time
  Michael Welton
• Thinking dialectically about Lifelong learning and democracy
  Donovan Plumb
• Dissolving the boundaries of the city: Eco-imagination and the ecology of compassion democracy
  Aidan Davison and Martin Mulligan
• Compassionate listening and reporting in the democratic imagination
  Peter Willis
• Imagining the real, and the work of education in democracy
  Timothy Leonard
• Teaching and learning to choose
  Michael Newman
  
  

Part II - Predisposing for Democratic Imaging

• Prelude: Together
  Diana Neutze
• Re-Imagining lifelong learning: A reading of TS Eliot's Four Quartets
  Jane Dawson
  No future with out spirituality?
  William West
• The emotional life of liturgy
  Catherine Madsen
• Thinking stereoscopically about self and social transformation
  Robert Hattam
• Songs for learning, songs for yearning
  Ian Martin and Mae Shaw
  
  

Part III - Democratic Imaging in Community Activities

• Life would be a fair alternative: engaging the democratic imagination
  Astrid Von Kotze
• Drug users, democracy and voices from the summit
  Kirsty Hammet
• Activating democracy through community cultural development
  Celina McEwen
• Culture and democracy
  Jon Hawkes
• Contested funerals: 'Dead' and the democratic imagination
  Pam Carden
  
  

Part IV - Democratic Imaging in Higher Education

• All mapped out? The dynamic relationship between worldviews, democratic imaginations and education practices
  Delia Bradshaw
• Compassion and democratic imagining
  Alex Nelson
• 'We have gills for dream-life': Democratic collaborative innovations
  Jan Coker
• Inflaming the passion for democracy: Sparing democratic imagination in the university classroom
  Kath Fisher and Lyn Carson
• Writing and Re-writing our lives: Revisioning education, justice and inclusivity
  Christine Fox
  
  

Part V - Democratic Imaging in Schooling

• Democracy and the official curriculum
  Alan Reid and Pat Thomson
• 'The eyes/ayes have it': Reconciliation through Scaffolded Original Performance (ScOPe)
  Janet Kajic Jackson
• Imaging a community of practice
  Tom Stehlik
• Basketball and the democratic imagination
  Bill Bradshaw

References
Notes on contributors
Subject index

Reviews

Life Long Learning and the Democratic Imagination seeks to reclaim for lifelong learning its original radical transformative impulse, which appears to have been submerged under instrumental economic aims.

Alison Mackinnon
Hawke Research Institute