Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to identify how practitioners in specific adult education institution perceive adult learners —as vulnerable individuals, potential actors, and/or aspirational individuals. This involves understanding how practitioners envision adult learners and how the concrete opportunity structure either supports or hinders this vision.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution investigates what representations of the adult learner underpin the regional second-chance education system in the French-speaking part of Belgium.

Historically, in European societies, adult education has addressed societal challenges, emphasizing skill development and citizen socialization (Milana, 2012). But the objectives of adult education have evolved over time. Initially they mostly focused on improving societal outcomes and fostering individual emancipation (Biesta, 2005, 2006). Since the 1980s, under the influence of structural unemployment and dominant neoliberal perspectives, employability has been increasingly prioritized over civic and democratic goals (Bussi, 2016; Milana, 2012; Vargas, 2017). This shift has been analyzed by several researchers looking at the European (e.g. Barros, 2012; Bélanger, 2005; Biesta, 2005; Bussi, 2022; Jarvis, 2004; Mikulec, 2018; Milana & Tarozzi, 2021), national (for instance Belzer and Kim 2018, Glanton 2023), and macro-regional level adult education policy initiatives and programs (for instance in the Nordic countries, Nilsson and Nyström, 2013).

The emphasis shift from emancipation to employability does not prevent both objectives from remaining interconnected and relevant, especially for vulnerable groups facing limited skills or unstable work histories (Peters & Ensink, 2015). This coexistence is present in most education systems, yet to a different degree, and it translates into specific opportunity structures—defined as all the possibilities of individual choice influenced by the structural and institutional characteristics specific to a society (Hefler, 2013) – underpinned by specific ideas of the adult learner.

This research contributes to the extant literature by investigating what representations of the adult learner dominate among practitioners in the second-chance adult educational system in French-speaking Belgium, known as Enseignement de promotion sociale.

We use the Capability Approach (CA; Sen, 1985, 2009; Nussbaum & Sen, 1993), combined with Bonvin and Laruffa’s (2018) CA-based anthropological conception of individuals as analytical framework. This framework allows grasping the emancipatory potential the opportunity structure and evaluating the adult learner representation against the theoretical conceptions of “receivers” (vulnerable beings), “doers” (capable of contributing to society), and “judges” (capable of making decisions and expressing needs).

Hence, this paper aims to identify how practitioners in specific adult education institution perceive adult learners —as vulnerable individuals, potential actors, and/or aspirational individuals. This involves understanding how practitioners envision adult learners and how the concrete opportunity structure either supports or hinders this vision.

The Enseignement de promotion sociale (EPS), the largest adult education institution in French-speaking Belgium, is a particularly relevant as it exemplifies the double objective of adult education: the promotion of both emancipation and employability. EPS offers general and vocational education that enables low skill adults who dropped out from compulsory school to enroll in a program leading to a secondary school diploma (Vanderavero, 2024).

To understand how practitioners envision adult learners in EPS and the opportunity structure available to them, we conducted 37 semi-structured interviews between November 2023 and January 2024 with a variety of professionals (e.g. principals, secretaries, teachers, educators, etc.) from four EPS schools selected on the basis of their membership to one of the school networks ( An educational network is a result of the historical evolution of the Belgian education system, and brings together several schools based on similar characteristics. In French-speaking Belgium, three main networks are present: schools dependent on a central body representing the public authorities, schools linked to decentralized public authorities, and subsidized free schools, generally linked to the Catholic Church) and provinces (the 4 provinces in French-speaking Belgium with the highest student’s enrollment). Interviews were analyzed with a computer-assisted program (NVivo).

Initial findings show that the “receiver” conception of adult learners is particularly present in professionals’ discourses. EPS practitioners endeavor to address most of the students' vulnerabilities by implementing pedagogical and organizational strategies. However, some vulnerabilities are not taken into account (e.g. the prohibition on veils in schools). Practitioners also conceive the adult learners as a “doer”, i.e. an active agent in the context of the training., even though most professionals consider adult learners as merely students. Finally professionals interviewed seem less inclined to conceive adult learners as “judges”, i.e. as political beings with aspirations, values and desires (Bonvin and Laruffa, 2018: 506). Only in one school this judge conception of the adult learner seems to be reflected in the organizational arrangements, where its organization seems to revolve around student participation in their training environment. Elements of the judge's conception can be more easily observed in the pedagogical methods employed by most teachers. For example, in their curriculum, teachers encourage students to think critically and express their own ideas and values, which are associated with the capability for voice. However, many teachers tend to solely link students' aspirations to employment which restricts the capability to aspire, limiting it to the emancipation as autonomization.

The added value of this contribution lies on the empirical application of Bonvin and Laruffa’s, the focus on the understudied field of Enseignement of Promotion Sociale and the qualitative analysis of adult learner representations.