Chad Hoggan, Associate Professor of Adult & Lifelong Education, North Carolina State University

Tetyana Hoggan-Kloubert, Associate Professor of Adult & Continuing Education, University of Augsburg

This presentation provides a framework for ethics for transformative education. Taking as a starting point ethical perspectives by which educators of adults are justified in imposing upon, coercing, and manipulating adult learners in the name of social justice, it highlights the necessary connection between pedagogies and learning outcomes. It positions democracy, with its concomitant respect for human dignity, as the raison d’être of the field of adult education. Therefore, adult education practice should support democratic capabilities, respect learner autonomy, and allow for plurality. From both consequentialist and deontological ethical perspectives, we explain why methods of instruction that undermine democracy cannot also be claimed to support democracy.