On the incommensurability of adult education researchers’ worlds

The article consists of two parts. The first part shows how the idea of lifelong learning turns away from an earlier understanding of adult education, replacing it with a new vision of learning activities as natural processes of participation in culture. For adult education as a research field this means a paradigmatic shift that is radical, thus difficult and costly. A transition from teaching to learning lays the foundations for a discourse that implicates a reconceptualisation of the most basic theoretical categories and methodological competences of research practices. This change of leading research paradigm creates a situation that each discipline finds difficult. Analysis presented in the second part of the paper describes the situation among Polish researchers in the field of the education of adults. Describing the divided research community, the author emphasizes the difficult position of young researchers and proposes a typology of their attitudes towards their professional roles and academic career.