And second, within these multiple ontologies, adult education might seek to
explicitly foreground questions of purpose in workplace learning. To surface hidden
normativities, including our own, and to foster debates about purpose. This tacks away
from our normative tradition in adult education, which usually drives us to decide the
good and critique all else, or prescribe the educational forms and content that will create
it. Adult educators and researchers might better invest effort in truly appreciating the
multiplicity and undecidable ambivalences enacted in activities we variously call
‘workplace learning’. The starting point might be to consider carefully our own
purposes in studies and practices linked with workplace learning, as endeavours of
education: what we can best contribute, and what we do and don’t do well. What is
distinct about our world? How are we complicit and juxtaposed with the environments
we study? How can we appreciate the different other worlds that co-habit workplaces,
without either folding them into our own ontology or colonizing them with our own
purposes? By no means are such questions meant to advocate abandoning educational
purpose. Instead, they interrupt the construction of our purposes, and compel us to
closely interrogate the moral imperatives and anterior categories that we may be
imposing upon others.