Bildung and Radical Plurality: Towards a redefinition of Bildung with reference to J.‐F. Lyotard

From Self-Directed Learning to Self-Formation: Transforming the Self through Bildung?

“…The second change came later in the form of postmodernism (Lyotard) and the revival of French criticism (Bourdieu) from a psychological and a sociological point of view (Koller, 2003;Boutinet, 2004). At the turn of the 1980s (Lyotard's work The Postmodern Condition was published originally in French in 1979), this movement used the critique of communicational civilization to call into question the relationship to knowledge, to denounce the reproduction of social domination and to view the changes in adult life from a new angle, with all the alterations required in a world guided by flexibility, mobility and adaptability.…”

“…We are aware of Kegan's relationship to the post-Piagetians' developmental perspective and how he distanced himself from the postmodern approach in particular (Kegan, 1994(Kegan, , 2000. Despite that, these contributions influenced the classical, universalist vision of adult education and development, in Continental research at least in two ways: a) in its relationships to Bildung, questioned by the postmodern observation of a "radical plurality" imposed on adults in the contemporary world (Koller, 2003), and b) in the contributions of feminist research that favored a more "relationist" vision of autonomy (Mezirow, 2000;Boutinet, 2004;Jouan & Laugier 2009;Eneau, 2012b). It is this relationist vision, sometimes referred to as "constructionist", that is favored in research on educational reciprocity (Labelle, 1996).…”

“…Moving away from the classical vision of developmental psychology, postmodernism's critical contributions, and more generally, the revival of continental philosophy through to the contribution of the "linguistic turn" (Ricoeur, 1996) have made it possible to see the similarities in the axiological vision of self-formation in the French tradition and the questions that Koller (2003) raises concerning Bildung.…”

Forming the Professional Self: Bildung and the ontological perspective on professional education and development

“…The nature of the self that is formed, however, is neither unproblematic nor uncontested. From late-modern and postmodern perspectives that lead to dissolved, a-substantial or polysemic views of the self, the notion of a singular self-as is implicit in typical perspectives on selfformation espoused by Bildung-may not be sustainable (see Gubrium & Holstein, 1994;Koller, 2003;Peukert, 2002;Reichenbach, 1998;Seery, 2010).…”

How does Open Education Work?

“…Bildung is understood to engage the person in such processes of reflection and deliberation to modify or transform the person's frame of reference. This is why the theory is also called the Transformative Theory of Bildung (Koller, 2003). …”