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This article explores the emotional transformations of teachers since the pandemic, shifting from idealised passion for their profession to a more balanced, self-preserving approach to their work and mental well-being. Through four case studies of teachers from Hong Kong, Australia, and France, this paper examines how teachers navigate emotional wisdom in response to trauma and burnout and how such wisdom informs their ability to recognise when to prioritise their mental health over job prospects. The idea of disillusioned transformation will be explored: when teachers who are initially invested in a set of ideals in their roles become disillusioned and disengaged but through which find emotional balance and the resilience towards new sources of professional fulfilment. Central to transformative learning theory, this study highlights how trauma (moral injury, systemic trauma) and emotional wisdom contribute to teachers’ critical reflection and self-preservation. This article seeks to delineate the intersection between emotional wisdom, aesthetic emotions, and trauma recovery and to understand how teachers transform their professional identity in response to emotional distress, fostering a more sustainable and healthy approach to teaching.

Many workers, especially first responders, experience trauma at work. We gathered experiences of frontline workers in Berlin during COVID-19 and theorize those experiences within an education paradigm. Their experiences were written as part of their reflective writing on a hazard prevention course for emergency workers in 2022. The theorizing focuses on the struggle for meaning precipitated by the student’s experiences of trauma and makes a case for understanding how this may prompt significant learning—even transformative learning—for individuals and possibly the broader society. This theoretical analysis is informed by Carol Gilligan, Axel Honneth, Oskar Negt and Jack Mezirow who help reconnect professional with personal interests and thinking with the emotional dimensions of work. We propose a critical analysis of the ways in which the instrumental, procedural and professional imperatives are disconnected from the personal and emotional dimensions of trauma work. Their struggle for recognition also assists in understanding these connections. The thinking/emotional divide and professional/personal splits are themselves a trauma and the pedagogy of reconnection is transformative.

This paper explores experience that is both misconstrued and under theorized in adult education. Human experience is expressed in the public sphere as the motivation for social and political change. The connections among experience, the public sphere, and democracy are identified. The allies in exploring the role of experience in education are John Dewey and Jack Mezirow's transformation theory and their understanding is a basis for outlining a more critical theory-inspired understanding of education as the reconstruction of experience. The work of Oskar Negt on experience will be the starting point for engaging in re-thinking the role of experience in education. This will be the basis for exploring the transformation of experience as a way of better understanding aspects of Mezirow's theory of transformative learning. The author concludes with a brief presentation of sociological imagination as the key to developing a pedagogy of imagination and a pedagogy of the transformation of experience. Hannah Arendt's work provides a thread woven through the paper.

This article explores how key ideas from the critical theory of Oskar Negt can be utilized to address critiques and further enhance Mezirow's theory of transformative learning. The implications of Negt's work on the dialectical nature of experience are identified. So too are the connections he makes between experience, social structures, and social change. Both Dewey and Mezirow build on the importance of experience for learning and education and their work will be re-framed and so contribute to the development of a Negt-inspired critical theory of transformative learning. In addition, ideas such as exemplary learning and competences are taken from Negt in a project that makes transformation theory more cognisant of the perceived missing social dimension in Mezirow's work. Mezirow commenced the task of creating a critical theory of transformative learning, and this paper continues the project. Implications for biographical/narrative research are identified.

COVID-19 has done significant damage to individuals, families, workers and the economy. What is not known about the virus is part of the problem, and the knowledge gap drives an unprecedented and urgent search for knowledge. This article explores the challenges for lifelong learning and the relevance of transformative learning. Disorientation, disorienting dilemmas and critical reflection are the ingredients of such learning, since we can only learn our way out of this situation. The authors present American adult educator Jack Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning (TL) as an appropriate learning framework for lifelong learning. They draw on the work of American philosopher Richard Rorty and German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas to re-shape TL so that it supports the kind of learning that is sufficiently complex and nuanced to enable us to deal with contradictions, ambivalence and meaning-making in a world where not-knowing is the new normal. Les dimensions transformatrices de l’apprentissage tout au long de la vie : Mezirow, Rorty et la COVID-19 – La COVID-19 a causé des dommages considérables aux individus, aux familles, aux travailleurs et à l’économie. Ce que nous ignorons du virus fait partie du problème et cette absence de savoir impulse une quête de connaissances urgente et sans précédent. Cet article se penche sur les défis qui se posent à l’apprentissage tout au long de la vie et sur la pertinence de l’apprentissage transformateur. La désorientation, les dilemmes désorientants et la réflexion critique sont les ingrédients de cet apprentissage étant donné que nous ne pouvons sortir de cette situation qu’en apprenant. Les auteurs présentent la théorie de l’apprentissage transformateur du professeur américain en éducation des adultes Jack Mezirow comme un cadre didactique approprié pour l’apprentissage tout au long de la vie. Ils s’inspirent des travaux du philosophe américain Richard Rorty et du philosophe et sociologue allemand Jürgen Habermas pour refondre l’apprentissage transformateur de sorte qu’il accompagne un type d’apprentissage suffisamment complexe et nuancé qui nous permette de faire face aux contradictions, à l’ambivalence et la recherche de sens dans un monde où ne pas savoir est la nouvelle norme.

The sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas has had a wide-ranging and significant impact on understandings of social change and social conflict. However, there has been no concerted and focused attempt to introduce his ideas to the field of education broadly. This book rectifies this omission and delivers a definitive contribution to the understanding of Habermas's oeuvre as it applies to the field. The authors examine the contribution Habermas's theory has and can make to: pedagogy, learning and classroom interaction; the relation between education, civil society and the state; forms of democracy, reason and critical thinking; and performativity, audit cultures and accountability. Additionally, the book answers a range of more specific questions, including: what are the implications for pedagogy of a shift from a philosophy of consciousness to a philosophy of language?; What contribution can Habermas's re-shaping of speech act theory and communicative rationality make to theories of classroom interaction?; and how can his theories of reason and colonization be used to explore questions of governance and accountability in education? Section 1: Introduction 1. Communication, Deliberation, Reason: An Introduction to Habermas, Mark Murphy and Ted Fleming Section 2: Key Issues and Debates in Habermas and Education 2. Educational Implications of the Idea of Deliberative Democracy, Tomas Englund 3. Communicative Utopia and Political Re-Education, Marianna Papasthephanou 4. The Concept of Lifeworld and Education in Post-Modernity: A Critical Appraisal of Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action, Sigmund Ongstad 5. Habermas, Eurocentrism and Education: The Indigenous Knowledge Debate, Raymond A. Morrow 6. Forms of Rationality and Public Sector Reform: Habermas, Education and Social Policy, Mark Murphy Section 3: Habermas Applied: Critical Theory And Educational Provision 7. Developing Competence in Collegial Spaces: Exploring Critical Theory and Community Education, John Bamber 8. Condemned to Learn: Habermas, University and the Learning Society, Ted Fleming 9. Learning Democratic Reason: The Adult Education Project of Jürgen Habermas, Stephen Brookfield 10. Citizenship, Discourse Ethics and an Emancipatory Model of Lifelong Learning, Clarence W. Joldersma and Ruth Deakin Crick 11. Practice and Theory of Narrative Inquiry in Education, Carola Conle 12. Educating Social Workers for Lifeworld and System, Barry Cooper 13. Jürgen Habermas, Critical Social Theory and Nursing Education: Implications for Caring in Nursing, Jane Sumner Section 4: Conclusion 14. Taking Aim at the Heart of Education: Critical Theory and the Future of Learning, Ted Fleming and Mark Murphy Mark Murphy is a Senior Lecturer in Education and Programme Leader for Education Studies in the Faculty of Education and Children's Services, University of Chester. Previously he worked as a Lecturer and Programme Director of a Teacher Training Programme at the University of Stirling. Prior to that, Dr. Murphy worked at University College Dublin and the National University of Ireland Maynooth. He has published widely, with numerous articles in journals such as the Journal of Education Policy , Journal of European Public Policy , European Journal of Education and the International Journal of Lifelong Education . His current research interests include educational sociology, critical theory, accountability in higher education, and public sector reform. Ted Fleming is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Adult and Community Education at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, having previously been an Adult Education Organiser in County Louth Ireland. He is Director of the Centre for Research in Adult Learning and Education and coordinates the postgraduate research degrees in adult education at NUIM. His research interests include transformation theory, critical theory, mature students, access and higher education. Current research projects include an EU longitudinal study of dropout and retention issues for adult students in university, and a government sponsored study of the post-degree work experiences of mature students.

The legacy of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research has been a powerful force for critically understanding social reality. Erich Fromm was one of the early and best known members of the Institute. Fromm emphasised the centrality of culture and interpersonal relations in the contruction of the psyche. The unconscious was not only the location for buried repressed matter but also for the imaginative potential of the human person. He is a forgotten and neglected contributor to the story of the Institute having been written out of this history. This retrospective of his ideas explores his work in the light of the recent work of Jürgen Habermas who is also an active but less controversial engager with the psychoanalytic tradition. The implications for adult education will be addressed. The paper outlines Fromm’s radical reinterpretation of psychoanalysis emphasising the importance of social existence as distinct from the impact of instincts; key concepts of the market, commodity fetishism and automaton conformity; The implications for adult education in the tradition of radical (Freire) and transformative learning theory (Mezirow) and addressed and make connections between Habermas and Fromm that further the project of critical theory. Both attempted in different times to identify and realise the potential of (though neither used the term) of lifelong learning as part of the process of bringing about a more just and caring society and a shared attention to the importance of having free conversations about how the emancipated life might be created and sustained.

In Western Europe and in North America the predominant approach to civic education has been rooted in a liberal conception of citizenship focused on the rights and responsibilities of individual citizens within a nation-state. Historically, this has largely been aimed at young people who are presumed to lack experience and knowledge (Nicoll et al., 2013). Furthermore, it is also frequently assumed that the legal and social structures that define who has the right to citizenship within a given territory are already, more or less, adequate and that current political arrangements are sufficient to lead to progress in the future. Civic

Universities worldwide are facing demands to change. Quality assurance, performance appraisal and the reform of governance are underway. In Ireland, state funding is reduced and alternative funding is sought from research, links with industry, the reintroduction of tuition fees and recruitment of students from abroad, especially China. It is opportune to ask: how might universities articulate a vision that includes responding to the demands of the economy and state for well-educated workers and for accountability, while also responding to the learning needs of citizens?