The pedagogy of language has since time immemorial majored in the use of pens and other printed materials. However, there occurred a separation of the teaching culture into two major categories; the "big C" and "little c", meaning high and popular culture. Over the years, advancements in various pedagogical techniques have made…

This paper outlines adult learning in a rural campaign to prevent mining for coal seam gas in Victoria. In central Gippsland, largely known as the food bowl in the State of Victoria in Australia, a campaign against fracking for coal seam gas has managed to gain a permanent ban on fracking. This policy change would not have been possible without…

The "alone together" paradox is a phenomenon that occurs when adults make meaning of their learning in the online environment. By way of being "alone together," the online environment manifests a context for incidental and informal learning.

Research on advanced L2 adult learners and viable classroom instruction for them has become increasingly important along with increasing global connections. This study investigated the effects of different kinds of spoken input modification on listening comprehension and incidental vocabulary learning by 106 advanced Chinese speakers of Japanese…

This article focusses on later life learning in Neighbourhood Houses in Victoria, Australia, amidst a backdrop of neoliberal education policies impacting on Adult Community Education (ACE) in Australia. This empirical research was conducted in the state of Victoria and charts the learning of older learners (referred to in this article as later…

This article focuses on the intersection of three areas of Peter Jarvis's work that have profoundly influenced the field of adult education generally and the authors own research trajectories, in particular: (a) learning from everyday life and in social context, (b) incidental and tacit learning in consumer societies in a globalised world (i.e.…

Language development is frequently characterized as a process where learning proceeds implicitly, that is, incidentally and in absence of awareness of what was learned. This article reports the results of two experiments that investigated whether second language acquisition can also result in implicit knowledge. Adult learners were trained on an…

Ghana has been identified as an important example of democracy in Africa, yet the story of this democratic success overlooks the crucial role social movement activism and learning have played in locally reconfiguring and deepening what democracy means. A key dimension of this overlooked-story is ongoing efforts to contest both local and global…

Arts-based adult education has been embraced by a growing number of adult educators. These educators have explored its potential in the workplace, in the community and in academia. This article contributes to this work by exploring the Spoken Word, an art form located within the genre of poetry, and its potential as a tool of arts-based adult…

In the last few decades, the workplace has been increasingly recognised as a legitimate environment for learning new skills and knowledge, which in turn enables workers to participate more effectively in ever-changing work environments. Within the workplace, there is the potential for continuous learning to occur not only through formal learning…

This article discusses shopping, especially critical shopping, as a process of informal and incidental adult learning about the intersecting politics of globalization and consumption. The author uses academic skills and disciplines as a metaphor to respond to an emerging conceptual question: To what extent can formality, informality, and…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to determine how docents developed expertise within the context of their work with history museums. Twelve expert docents from four history-themed museums were interviewed to discover how expertise is developed by volunteers working in nonformal settings. Interpretation of the data revealed two primary…

Opportunities for incidental vocabulary acquisition were explored in a 121,000-word corpus of teacher talk addressed to advanced adult learners of English as a second language (ESL) in a communicatively-oriented conversation class. In contrast to previous studies that relied on short excerpts, the corpus contained all of the teacher speech the…

This study examined effects of synonym generation on second language (L2) vocabulary learning during reading in both incidental and intentional vocabulary learning contexts. Spanish-speaking adult learners of L2 English (N = 114) at low- and high-intermediate proficiency levels read an English passage containing 10 target words translated in the…