Projectification—an elephant in the rooms of popular education? An action research study of an adult educator’s developmental practices

The aim of this study is to examine projectification in Finnish popular<br/>education from an adult educator’s perspective. The research question is:<br/>How do the projectified ways of working enable and constrain an adult<br/>educator’s developmental practices in different phases of a project? The<br/>research is conducted as a case study based on first-person action<br/>research. The research data consists of the researcher’s notes, meeting<br/>memos, observations, communication material, and group interviews<br/>collected when the first author worked as a coordinator in a popular<br/>education project. The empirical data are analysed using the theory of<br/>practice architectures. The results show that projectified ways of working<br/>enable experimental ways of carrying out adult education interventions,<br/>but at the same time, projects constrain how developmental practices can<br/>take place. In projects, adult educators need to develop rhetorical means<br/>of persuasion rather than reflect on their educational practices. Even<br/>though projects allow for new encounters, they call for goal orientation<br/>rather than open-ended dialogue. The challenges of projects are widely<br/>recognised, but they are kept silent out of fear of risking future funding<br/>opportunities. If popular education wants to contribute to important local<br/>and global debates, further critical self-reflection on projectified practices<br/>is needed.