Empowerment and adult education

Empowerment, as a goal of adult education, seeks to support people to critically reflect on structural settings and to take constructive action towards social equality and social change. This article analyses empowerment and adult education from a micro-, meso-, and macro-level perspective. The key assumption is that these levels cannot be considered in isolation. Drawing on Freire (2014) and Sen (1993), the article outlines how empowerment can be fostered through adult education at each level, while also analysing the interdependencies between them. We propose a heuristic model that identifies seven characteristics for assessing the promotion of empowerment through adult education, providing a foundation for empirical research: (1) knowledge and abilities, (2) active agency, (3) cultural realities, (4) pedagogical self-conception, (5) dialogic spaces, (6) representation of interests, and (7) educational mandate.