ADULT LEARNING AND THE GENERATION OF NEW KNOWLEDGE AND MEANING: CREATING LIBERATING SPACES FOR FOSTERING ADULT LEARNING THROUGH PRACTITIONER-BASED COLLABORATIVE ACTION INQUIRY

Practitioner research is a topic of growing interest and scholarly writing in the field of education in general and adult education in particular. This article describes a particular form of practitioner research that rests on a participatory worldview and draws heavily from theory and practice in adult learning and action research. Practitionerbased collaborative action inquiry strives to create social space in organizations and other social institutions for generative learning. It is argued that this form of adult education practice is critical in the implementation of emergent forms of knowledge creation and meaning making that have been described as Mode 2 knowledge creation. A robust example of this form of inquiry and the role of adult-learning theory and practice in facilitating it is described in detail as a practice-based example. The focus of this article is an area of adult education practice that can be broadly conceptualized as practitioner-based collaborative action inquiry and the role of adult education learning practices within it. Specifically, this article focuses on how adult education practices can meaningfully contribute to creating the kind of social space necessary for producing actionable knowledge in organizations and other social institutions. This is demonstrated through an example of the creation of this kind of space in a robust practitioner-based collaborative action inquiry project. Practitioner-based collaborative action inquiry is used here as an umbrella concept for characterizing a process for facilitating the creation of new knowledge and meaning that address pressing social and organizational problems. This form of practitioner research is strongly influenced by the norms of a participatory worldview articulated by Heron (1992, 1996), Reason (1994, 1996), and Torbert (1991) that brings research strategies and concerns into