Afterwords

Torres is widely respected for his scholarly expertise in popular education as it took off and developed in Latin America, with a focus on adult learning and community development. Moreover, in much of his writing he advocates critical pedagogy and social justice as means through which to challenge the relations between power and knowledge in education. Not less important, he was a longtime friend and continues to carry the legacy of late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, whose personal, political, and scholarly engagement clearly demonstrated how adult education is never neutral but inherently political, a theme that emerges clearly in this book. I have primarily researched adult education within the European context to understand its potentials and concrete contributions to the formation of democratic citizenship. In doing so, I also have been concerned with patterns of participation in adult education and learning opportunities and how these are interconnected with public policies that condition not only their availability, but also the pedagogical quality and significance of learning opportunities. In recent years I have turned my attention to the ways that adult and lifelong education policies, and related practices, are being framed and reshaped under the effects of globalization, in interaction among a plurality of political actors, including inter-state and international organizations, thus expanding my interest well beyond the European region. While our common interests laid the foundation for a productive discussion, our diverse data sources and foci of analysis proved rather complementary in enhancing our understandings of the challenges for adult education in the twenty first century. In this afterword, I intend to address some of the issues that the above debates have brought to light.