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This article focuses on the feminist design, content and pedagogical impact of a multi-media research exhibition I curated entitled "Disobedient women: Defiance, resilience and creativity past and present." Through the conceptual frameworks of feminist adult education and feminist exhibtionary praxis, I discuss the development and design of the exhibition and then share findings from a study that aimed to unearth the learning made possible for visitors by viewing the exhibition's stories and images. Findings show that as "Disobedient Women" instructed intentionally about gender injustice past and present, it made possible new interpretations, meaning making and cross-cultural connections; as the exhibition illustrated a deeply problematic gendered world its playfulness and beauty challenged assumptions about activism and feminism and encouraged hope and aesthetic agency. While important challenges and critiques were raised, I argue that intentional, participatory feminist exhibitions such as "Disobedient Women" are valuable processes of feminist adult education because they open up possibilities of seeing and thus knowing things differently and acting in the interests of gender justice and change.

In this article, I share the story of "The Positive Energy Quilts," a collective environmental adult education art project on Vancouver Island, British Columbia that challenged the building of a power plant. I illustrate how this project creatively, poignantly, and stealthily drew out knowledge, and visual-counter narratives, challenged mainstream messages, and attracted media attention. This project provided an imaginative, intentional forum where power was both contested and exercised on the neo-liberal ecological landscape.

Public art galleries and museums have been mandated to become more relevant and useful to the lived experiences of the broad communities they claim to serve. Adult education has long been part of the work of these institutions, although historically the relationship has been uneasy, and they seldom feature in the adult education literature. To fill this knowledge gap, we developed a cross-national comparative study that employed individual interviews, focus groups and observations to explore the adult education perspectives and activities of adult educators in art galleries and museums in Canada, England and Scotland. Findings show inconsistencies in understandings around education and learning, disconnections between internal and external activities and lack of institutional support. However, a plethora of socially responsive activities to tackle racial and religious intolerance, or explore power and identity, illustrate that despite tradition and other constraints, these adult educators are making valuable contributions to social justice and change.

Although burdened by legacies of elitism, exclusion and paternalism, some public museums are attempting to respond to the socio-environmental problems currently facing our planet by developing critical non-formal educational activities to foster consciousness and change. This article explores one such response; a six-week non-formal course entitled Art and Slow Violence hosted at Tate Modern and Tate Britain galleries in London. The course was centred around a variety of artworks and multimedia representations aimed to stimulate dialogue, reflections and meaning making about the social and ecological impacts of the aftermaths of climate change, war and conflict. As a participant researcher, I gathered data through observations, journaling, and interviews. Findings show tensions between learning and education, expert-teacher and novice-learner, audience wants and knowledge assumptions, instructor and organisations expectations and challenges vis-à-vis self-direction around the artworks. Yet the course was powerful, particularly the informal gatherings following each class and the stories the artworks told and represented. Together, these served as means to question critically, reflect, debate and comprehend differently, the complex, contentious, but often 'invisible' socio-environmental challenges of our time.

This chapter explores how museums, as educational and cultural institutions, can become agents of socioecological transformation. The ideas of critical museum studies and environmental adult education are reviewed, and three examples of environmental adult education in museums are discussed.

This chapter explores the potential of feminist leadership to encourage more participatory ways of engaging and learning in this deeply troubled world. Feminist leadership includes but is not limited to collaborative leadership. Adult learning is inherent to feminist leadership insofar as leaders must strategize according to the contexts in which they find themselves.

This chapter explores participatory visual practices in museums.

Arguing gender inequity remains one of the biggest challenges of our time, and framed within the concept of "pedagogic contact zones", our article shares findings from a five-year feminist, cross-national study of women adult educators and community practitioners in public museums and art galleries in Canada and the United Kingdom. Findings show a general lack of feminist consciousness and pedagogical skills amongst these women, problematic essentialist depictions of women educators that contrast portrayals of curators, and an equation of feminism with "bias". Yet there is a growing number of women who identify as feminists and take up women's issues in a variety of ways. Museums have the ability to be sites of feminist adult education and make contributions to gender struggle.

Public libraries have long been considered important spaces of adult education and learning. However, major social changes over the past few decades, and the impact these have had on libraries' work, have received little attention. Our three-year cross-national study of libraries in Canada and Britain explored how librarians navigate the discourse of adult education and learning and understand its place and value in the institution and society. Findings show that technology, both positively and negatively, drives the pedagogical directions, particularly in Britain, and there is a schism between the values and identities of younger and seasoned librarians. However, we also found that despite age and political and technological pressures, librarians still predominantly view themselves as educators and position the library as a critical cultural space for aesthetic, social, and collective learning and engagement.

Gender mainstreaming emerged in the 1990s to challenge normative social and political structures and practices by integrating gender into all levels of thinking and decision making. Training is central to processes of gender mainstreaming because it aims to provide the knowledge, awareness, resources, and skills needed to transform hegemonic discourses and empower women to participate more fully in leadership and governance roles. In this article I apply discourses of gender mainstreaming and training to a study of the non-formal education and informal learning of women politicians and aspiring politicians in British Columbia. Findings show current nonpartisan, integrative training processes have value for women as good, liberal adult education and training. However, learning and training both frequently consciously and unconsciously essentialize and re-enforce the status quo, which makes them inadequate to reach the transformative aspirations of gender mainstreaming. Required are practices based in the principles of feminist adult education that challenge the limitations of discourses of equality and meritocracy, render visible biases and stereotyping, destabilize normative political insider identities, and tap into the radical activism so many women bring to the political table.

Historically, pubic art galleries and museums have a well-deserved reputation for elitism, colonialism and exclusion and they are, therefore, frequently omitted from the discourse of adult education. However, the escalating social, cultural and ecological problems of this new century have placed pressure on these public institutions to change and respond. Using selective examples, this article attempts to illustrate public arts and cultural institutions as contested, problematic, challenging, yet equally progressive, critical and creative pedagogical spaces that play an important role in the struggle for social and environmental change. Through exhibitions, artworks, objects, workshops and seminars, these institutions trouble identity, decolonize, mock, revisualize, tell alternative stories, reorient authoritative practice, interrogate intolerance and privilege and stimulate critical literacies. We must continue to expose and critique traditions that perpetuate inequalities and maintain the status quo but in a world starved of hope, these sites provide new pedagogical possibilities.

The Human Library (HL) is an educational activity that brings together living 'Books' and 'Readers' in one-to-one dialogue to begin to bridge differences, challenge stereotypes and build new understandings. Using a survey, observations and individual interviews our case study explored a HL project organized in collaboration with a portraiture exhibition at a public art gallery in British Columbia as a critical, dialogic space of engagement. Findings showed the majority of Readers and Books as Caucasian, female, and well educated. Some participants were perplexed by the paradox of this activity, and its disconnection from traditional understandings of 'art' and arts institutions. Further, as the HL activity and portraiture exhibition were in different parts of the building, few were able to make the 'identity' connection between the two. Yet the majority of participants saw the HL as an extremely valuable opportunity to call into question problematic notions of the 'other', and to explore gender as well as the role and place of the arts and artists. The majority believed it was a highly appropriate activity for an art gallery and saw real value in this "risky" dialogic approach.

Does it matter where the academic home of the study of adult education is? In this paper we share our reflections on the implications of the institutional location of the discipline of adult education within universities in Canada and elsewhere. We speak of the historic tensions between the less structured and often transformational vision of adult education and the highly regulated learning contexts of schooling, and we suggest adult education theory and practice can be found in many other disciplinary clusters in all our universities. Wherever the formal study for adult education is located, its purpose is always to strengthen capacity for resistance and transformation.

The environment is now a common theme in adult education. However, conversations that swirled around the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in June 2012 suggested major environmental challenges persist, demanding that education, learning, advocacy and activism be augmented to ensure the survival of the planet. In adult education, Walter (2009) argues that despite years of environmental movements and activity at local, regional, and international levels, educators are still not particularly green in terms of "research and scholarship". This chapter explores such concerns from the context of Theme 6 of the "Hamburg Declaration" (UNESCO, 1997). Although it focuses particularly on the environment, it also addresses its intersections with the related concerns of population and health.

Educators call for more creative means to combat the moribund narratives of contemporary environmentalism. Using visual methodology and environmental adult education theory, this article discusses how a documentary film titled "You've Got the Power" works to pose questions about complex environmental issues and develop critical thinking and cultural understandings. By juxtaposing narratives and images the film artfully, critically, and emotively exposes diverse ways of knowing and viewing the world, problematises concepts of citizenship and ecological justice and illuminates the complex contemporary politics of environmentalism. Perhaps most importantly, it challenges stereotypic notions of aboriginal peoples in Canada, by highlighting their critical environmental roles and actions and thereby provides a much needed source of inspiration and hope for change.

Our feminist cross-national comparative study explored the informal and nonformal education and learning of women politicians in Canada and India. Using individual interviews, focus groups, surveys and observations of training sessions we compared and contrasted socio-cultural contexts, challenges, education and learning philosophies, and diverse practices. The findings show that training programmes and the women themselves placed an emphasis on practical skill and knowledge, although this often did little to prevent tactical uses of power by men. In India, where literacy training is provided there exists a practical, tactical and emancipatory emphasis. In both countries, issues of identity as politicians are complex and hetero and other culturally normative practices pervade the educational process. Although the Indian educators apply a feminist lens, much of the training in Canada is non-gender-specific or tends towards "nonpartisanship", thereby de-politicising the process. Important differences also exist in terms of how the educational programmes understand and make the links between women politicians and the community.

Women's Campaign School (WCS) is a non-partisan, non-formal three-day educational programme held annually in Vancouver, to empower and inspire women to enter politics and as a means towards socio-political change. Our findings show the WCS provides excellent practical and tactical skills and an experiential learning opportunity that is highly valued by women. However, few felt the lens was feminist and it did little to challenge ingrained gendered social conditioning. We trace dominant discourses of neutrality, anti-feminism, and heteronormativity and discuss the impact these have on creating an emancipatory feminist educational practice for women's and the culture of politics. (Contains 4 figures.)

This feminist content analysis of selective adult education journals and conference proceedings draws on feminist aesthetic theory to develop a deeper understanding of women adult education scholars' work with/in the arts. Four major categories identified were community cultural development, aesthetic civic engagement and knowledge mobilization, arts-based research, and art education. Within these were multidimensional and at times contesting themes of cultural justice, identity and agency, elitism and postmodernism in museums, artistic quality and collective process, personal and social transformation, and pleasure and subversion. Women's diverse cultural practices contribute not only to liberatory or emancipatory struggles in feminist adult education but also to discourses of feminist aesthetic theory that all but ignore the educational potential of the arts.

Using a content analysis approach, this article shares the results of scholarly adult education study on museum and library adult education and learning as represented in peer-reviewed publications over the past 60 years. Findings show a paucity of studies in general, but particularly around libraries. The majority of publications on libraries were "non-research-oriented", and published in the 1950s and 1960s; museums were all but ignored until studies began to appear in the 1990s. Early concerns focused on elitism and the educational role, while later studies began to debate social and interpretive issues. Although museum and libraries theorists call for critical discourses and studies, with few exceptions adult education research is dominated by liberal discourses. We conclude the article with a number of recommendations for future study in this important yet underresearched and undertheorized area.

Due to a moratorium on the cod fishery in 1992, small, isolated coastal villages in Newfoundland suffer increasing unemployment, health problems and threats of re-location by the government. In the hopes of addressing some of these problems, the Burgeo Broadcasting System (BBS) placed video-conferencing and broad-band internet into five small communities on the southwest coast. The purpose of our feminist participatory research process was to engage women in these communities in individual and collective discussions around the problems and potentials of these Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) in terms of learning, health, well-being and economic resilience. We discovered the major problems are technical capacity and training, the top-down implementation of the ICT process, indifference and a belief in the neutrality of technology. But we also uncovered a healthy resistance when and where it mattered, profound alacrity to using and learning the equipment if it meant a benefit to the community, a holistic pedagogical view and a strong sense of collective agency and responsibility. These have important implications for strengthening community-based ICT education and research.

Contemporary neo-conservative and globalisation practices and policies have a powerful impact on every aspect of human life. Policies enacted by the governments to accumulate wealth have destroyed natural environments like nothing before. As the negative impact of neo-conservatism and globalisation grew on people's lives and environment, the International Council for Adult Education (ICAE) rose to the challenge. From 1995 to 2000, the Learning for Environmental Action Programme (LEAP) was one of the major programme areas of the ICAE until funding and other practical and policy changes re-shaped ICAE's trajectory. LEAP members from Philippines, Canada, Mexico, Sudan, South Pacific and Jamaica, in collaboration with countless others in their regions, worked in three main development areas. This article describes these three main areas: (1) Policy and partnership development; (2) Theory and practice; and (3) Ideas for ways forward.

Increasingly, practices of collective arts-based learning are being used by adult educators and community organizations as creative and participatory ways to respond to contemporary social or environmental issues. Investigating the potential contributions of arts-based learning to cross-cultural and antiracisms adult education was the aim of this qualitative comparative study in Ontario and British Columbia. Through the lens of antiracisms theories and from data obtained through open-ended interviews with project participants and artist-educators in three diverse arts projects, this article highlights some of the characteristics that make arts-based learning a culturally appropriate and effective, imaginative tool. But it also draws attention to the risks involved in creating public art and tackling difficult issues such as racism in contemporary Canadian society.

Key themes of this environmental education issue are summarized: critical, spiritual, and experiential frameworks of learning; globalization and environmental oppressions; ecological language and literacy; and environmental activism. Annotations of six additional readings are provided. (SK)