Educating the Vulnerable: Toward an Emotionally Responsive Phenomenology in Adult Education

Modern phenomenology has gone far beyond a conceptually primitive understanding of nature or an emotionally deprived and fully calculative sense of rationality. In contrast to the dominant theories of constructivism, cognitivism and behaviorism, a phenomenologically driven proposal for adult education appeals to the world of the people’s involved inner experiences including their emotions. Addressing vulnerability within adult education procures immense problems which are tackled with great difficulty in spite of all the progress that has been made on the institutional and educational fronts. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the decisive role of emotions in adult learning and educational programs that refer to the needs of social vulnerable people as it emerged from the outcomes of a pilot educational intervention in homeless people of Greece.