RELA_2025_1_Formenti_et_al_Ageing_and_complexity

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Formenti, Laura; Cino, Davide; Loberto, Francesca

Ageing and complexity. Reframing older adults' learning through

interdisciplinary lenses

European journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults 16 (2025) 1, S. 75-96

Quellenangabe/ Reference:

Formenti, Laura; Cino, Davide; Loberto, Francesca: Ageing and complexity. Reframing older adults'

learning through interdisciplinary lenses - In: European journal for Research on the Education and

Learning of Adults 16 (2025) 1, S. 75-96 - URN: urn:nbn:de:0111-pedocs-327370 - DOI:

10.25656/01:32737; 10.3384/rela.2000-7426.5193

https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0111-pedocs-327370

https://doi.org/10.25656/01:32737

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University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy (laura.formenti@unimib.it)

University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy (davide.cino@unimib.it)

University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy (f.loberto@campus.unimib.it)

This paper presents a critical literature review on the systemic interconnections between

ageing, learning, and care. Using the lenses of complexity and interdisciplinarity, we

analysed a sample of 62 papers published between 2003 and 2022, examining their

reference to micro, meso and/or macro levels, theoretical depth, and use of complexity as

a sensitizing concept to understand implications for learning and transformation as

structural features of an ageing society. Our analysis highlighted the role of different

settings of care (formal, informal, and technology-mediated) in shaping, enhancing, or

hindering meaning, well-being, and social justice for older learners and their caregivers,

and the implications for society at large. Findings suggest a gap in the examined

literature regarding the use of complexity theories to highlight self-organisation,

interdependence, and co-evolution of individual and systemic learning. A theoretical

interdisciplinary framework, we contend, would better mirror the multiple factors and

levels entailed in the process of ageing.

ageing, complexity theory, healthcare, caregivers, technology-mediated

care

The transition towards a society where longevity is ‘the new normal’ requires a change

of paradigm that entails, besides individual learning, the consideration of multiple

transformations in relationships, professional practices and attitudes, services’

organisation, and policies. From the individual perspective, learning to become an older

person and adapt to new life conditions is a non-linear process emerging from daily

interactions with oneself, others, and the environment, coping with new events, accidents,

and dilemmas, taking and sharing decisions, and implementing new routines. Older

adults’ learning also entails letting go, finding new balances, and dealing with the Big

Questions of life (Formenti & West, 2018). The establishment of new relational balances,

identities, and good or bad outcomes in terms of health, well-being, and meaning, does

not just depend on individual strategies of adaptation (microlevel), but on systemic and

entangled factors at the meso and macrolevel.

Age-It is a national multidisciplinary research program devoted to mainstreaming

ageing in Italian society, among the oldest in the world. It created a scientific hub for new

ideas, practices, and policies, involving over 600 scholars from the biomedical, social,

and technological sciences, to address ten challenges related to health, social justice, care,

economy, work, ethics, technology, and education. Within this program, we formed an

interdisciplinary group representing education, sociology, economy, technology, and

gerontology to build a study devoted to understanding how ageing is constructed by

different actors and answered to by the local communities. We will conduct interviews

and cooperative inquiry sessions with older adults, informal and formal caregivers, and

decision makers, to map emerging needs, problems, and resources, to signal challenges,

and to suggest improvements. Fieldwork will connect qualitative and quantitative data

within a participatory framework to highlight the experience, meaning, and agency of

older people in co-evolution with their environment. We represent them as a diverse

intersectional group, not only ‘patients’ or ‘vulnerable’ citizens, but lifelong learners,

women and men whose backgrounds, social situations, biographies, interests, and

relationships matter in the way they evolve. We use a comprehensive critical theory of

learning in later life (Formosa, 2012; Withnall, 2009, 2011) to identify the effects of

marginalisation and disempowerment on older adults, due to structural and discursive

features within the system of care, and the informal learning processes involving family

carers, professionals, decision makers, and other relevant actors in the system.

This literature review investigates the epistemic power of complexity as a sensitising

theoretical concept that illuminates the interplay of many factors and levels, beyond the

dominant focus on individuals, their health, and the measurement of isolated variables.

We are dissatisfied with the hegemonic paradigm that neglects the heterogeneity of older

adults’ experiences and the role of intersectionality (gender, class, religion, education,

place of living, etc.) in the transition to new life conditions. Linear practices and policies

trivialise ageing and dispossess older adults from their rights to freedom, well-being, and

meaning. A new paradigm is needed to (re)frame the meaning of learning in later life,

that may be lost in transition with heavy effects on individuals, families, and

communities.

By referring to complexity in adult education and learning (Formenti, 2018), we

invoke a radical change of paradigm, based on co-evolution, circularity, self-organisation,

and entanglement. Our review explores whether and how complexity theories are used by

researchers to inspire new narratives, actions, and policies, and to cope with longevity as

an opportunity.

In the last decades, interest in complexity has grown fast in organisational sciences

(Axelrod & Cohen, 2000) and health policies (Braithwaite et al., 2017; Greenhalgh &

Papoutsi, 2018). Its development in adult education research is slower and marginal

(Alhadeff-Jones, 2009, Fenwick, 2003, 2016; Formenti, 2018), so we hope to fuel it by

using the lens of complex systems theory (von Foerster, 1973/1984, 1982; Morin, 2008)

to focus on learning, that is adaptation, interdependence, self-organization, and co-

evolution, as cross-cutting features of individual lives, as well as relationships, groups,

organisations, and networks. All systems, at all levels, ‘learn’ by interacting with a

transforming social and material environment. This interaction is circular and produces

unpredictability. The traditional approaches to ageing, however, seek predictability and

enforce top-down strategies on individuals, groups, and communities to keep the situation

under control and to solve emerging problems by linear answers. Research on policies

has shown that the enforcement of increased regulations, guidelines, standard procedures,

performance indicators in the healthcare system fails in guaranteeing to citizens quality

of living, social justice, and even the consistent adoption of the prescribed behaviours

(Braithwaite et al., 2017). Micro transitions and adaptations that work locally happen

notwithstanding or beyond the given rules. Control fails.

Complex systems, in fact, are self-organised, layered, and entangled (Nowak &

Hubbard, 2009). At the microlevel, individual identity evolves and (new) meaning is built

whenever it is necessary to adapt and calibrate individual action to (new) emerging

conditions. Brackets are here used to stress that learning is not always about the new:

learning also is keeping a form, a habit, one’s previous identity/ies, and this is especially

important in later life. In complex systems theory, learning and living are different names

for the same ongoing process. Hence, learning is biographically rooted: memories of the

past combine with present interactions and the imagination of the future, to make and

remake the individual (Formenti & West, 2018). Learners, at all ages, interpret events and

information, interact with oneself, the others, and the environment (objects, spaces,

procedures), coherently with their previous life and structure, constructing meaning and

identity (Fenwick, 2003; Formenti, 2018).

At the meso-level, however, individuals are interdependent, especially within their

proximal systems of relationships: family, workplace, friends, community/ies.

Connectedness, circularity, repetition, and a constant flux of information are the main

features of meso-systems, where every action is embedded in circuits of inter-actions.

The meso-system enforces and reinforces expected behaviours, identities, and meanings

through shared scripts, rituals, and narratives, objects and spaces, shaping lives and

identities within organised activities (regularities, rules) and normative expectations.

Complex organisations are dynamic and transform in relation to a changing environment.

Structures and patterns emerge (Braithwaite et al., 2017) from a process of self-

organisation where every part acts on the basis of tacit rules established in time by co-

existence.

Complexity, then, brings our attention beyond individual paths, to comprise the

context, which is not simply a backdrop or inactive container for human behaviour

(Formenti, 2019), but the composition of ‘many “moving parts” in complex interventions’

(May et al., 2016, p. 3). When we look at education and learning, any action is connected

to a context sustaining, reinforcing, or hindering it: their entanglement is another feature

of complex systems (Hynes et al., 2020). ‘Contexts are dynamic: contextual factors that

might constitute barriers to implementation in one place may facilitate it in others’ (May

et al., 2016, p. 2).

These ideas pushed us to interrogate the literature on ageing, looking for clues of

complexity, and the presence of different levels in interpreting the role of adaptive

systems in the ageing society. By this, we intend to fuel a discussion on complexity in the

field of older adult education.

Inspired by Grant and Booth (2009) in their classification of literature review

methodologies, we opted for a ‘critical review’, whose aim, compared to standard

literature reviews, is to move beyond a solely descriptive account, to offer a reflexive and

critical interpretation concerning key areas (better outlined in the paragraph below).

Critical analysis is here used to sustain the construction of a conceptual model based on

mapping the literature, enriching our theoretical framing of ageing and developing new

ideas, hypotheses, and research questions around learning.

We operated our query on Scopus using the following keywords: ageing or aging, or

elderly, or older adult, complexity, health or care, communication, critic* or narrative,

system*, caregiver. These words define a semantic field that interconnects ageing, care,

and complexity with other relevant concepts. Following several attempts, we decided not

to include ‘education’ or ‘learning’ to keep a larger interdisciplinary focus. In this paper,

education is not our main focus per se; we are interested in everyday life and informal

learning (Golding et al. 2009), that is always present, even if tacit. We contend that older

adults learn about ageing by experiencing systemic interactions with people, things,

spaces, and organizations, that invite (or push) them to re-think their relationship with a

changing body, to make choices in relation to work, family, mobility, household, social

life, to understand relevant information about their health, to navigate new contexts, and

to calibrate their actions in relation to these manifold experiences and challenges, not least

by negotiating identity and social roles.

Figure 1 reports on the process following the PRISMA flow diagram (Moher et al.,

2009). A total of 255 items were retrieved, then double checked to remove duplicates and

papers that were not specifically addressing ageing. We further filtered our sample to

consider papers concerning people who can decide for themselves (not institutionalised,

no dementia). This led to a final sample of 62 records that were analysed guided by the

following research question:

RQ: To what extent, if at all, does this corpus of publications contribute to

conceptualising ageing as a complex learning phenomenon?

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Formenti,Laura;Cino,Davide;Loberto,FrancescaAgeingandcomplexity.Reframingolderadults'learningthroughinterdisciplinarylensesEuropeanjournalforResearchontheEducationandLearningofAdults16(2025)1,S.75-96Quellenangabe/Reference:Formenti,Laura;Cino,Davide;Loberto,Francesca:Ageingandcomplexity.Reframingold...

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