ESREA Network on Cross-cultural Influences in the History of European Adult Education

Since 1991 this network has brought together historians of adult education with active research interests in the history of the role of social movements in the cross-cultural dissemination and reception of innovations in adult education and adult learning throughout Europe. The major focus of the network’s research activities has been upon the historical period 1880-1930, which was an important formative period throughout Europe in establishing the organised responses by the working-class and women’s movements to challenge the provision of adult education by bourgeois and philanthropic organisations in the public sphere. Recurring themes have included: university extension, folk high schools, workers’ education, women’s education, labour camps, Christian Socialism, Social Catholicism, Free Masonry, Anarcho-syndicalism and the Third International, etc. The network is primarily organised in the form of research seminars which enable a maximum of 25 researchers and PhD students to intensively and critically discuss the results of their ongoing historical research. The publication of a series of volumes of selected and edited papers has been a continuing priority for this network.

http://www.esrea.org/