The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the components of a profound moment. We provisionally defined a profound moment as an experience that intentionally or unintentionally continues to surface in consciousness, has transformed an individual's fundamental perspectives, and been integrated into an individual's life. Participants who…

This article, a conceptual and theoretical piece, opens a window on "playful learning" as a philosophy of education and a suite of diverse pedagogical approaches, methods, and techniques. The paper criticizes the serious ambience of adult education with its high levels of instrumentalism and performativity. It argues for playful learning…

The purpose of this article is to introduce a design-based research (DBR) approach developed in the field of vocational and continuing education, which is grounded in a pragmatic and phenomenologically inspired enactivist approach to activity. As a design-based methodology, our activity-centered and enactive DBR approach aims to generate knowledge…

Self-derivation through integration is the process of integrating novel facts and producing new knowledge never directly taught. Knowledge integration has been studied with the presentation of two novel facts. However, in educational settings, individuals are required to integrate new information with prior knowledge learned days, months, or years…

The field of online professional development is in ongoing growth, and motivation has been identified as a critical factor in online courses. Somewhat different from the common courses delivered through MOOCs, this study investigates learning processes in compulsory courses. The study aims to understand the motivational factors influential on the…

Purpose: This study aims to increase the understanding of the starting points and presuppositions of organizational learning (OL) processes in a hospital's surgical department based on the existing theory of OL and to make visible the practical possibilities of the theory in this context. Design/methodology/approach: The study was conducted as a…

This study is the first to explore microdevelopment in sociolinguistic evaluative judgments of standard German and Austro-Bavarian dialect by adult second language learners of German by using dense time serial measurements. Intensive longitudinal data (10 observations per participant) were collected from four learners at approximately weekly…

This study examined how informal Conversations in English (CIE) groups helped migrants gain cultural knowledge about communicating in the United States and how the CIE groups facilitated the process of language socialization. The Ethnography of Communication (EC) and Cultural Discourse Analysis (CuDA) were used to understand the connection between…

Most research on virtual reality (VR) for learning has focused on young populations in formal learning contexts. Little research has been conducted on how adults engage in informal learning using VR. This study examined adults' informal learning experiences in high-immersion VR, focusing on the aspects of VR they enjoyed and the challenges they…

This paper investigated teacher wellbeing in a rapidly expanding educational context of Universities of the Third Age in China. Based on the analysis of 48 metaphors innovatively elicited from 27 teacher participants, important cognitive, affective and social aspects of teaching and learning that configure teacher wellbeing have been outlined. It…

This article explores the idea that learning can be best understood as a life project. This entails recognition that socio-experiential (being), cognitive (knowing) and behavioural (doing) dimension are crucial, and that the future is of central importance -- more than the past -- in teaching and learning processes. Based on the concepts of…

Artistic Literacies (AL) can be a catalyst to creative, imaginative, and potentially, transformative learning (Blackburn Miller, 2020). Artistic literacy texts include storytelling, creative writing, popular theatre, music, dance, poetry, fiction, or memoir, and visual art. Creative possibilities for diverse adult literacy learners can open when…

The Human-focused Facilitation (HFF) program was evaluated to provide evidence of the effectiveness of the processes used to build facilitator knowledge, skills, and dispositions. This study used an explanatory sequential, mixed-methods design to analyze data from Human-focused Facilitation participants and a focus group that did not participate…

Within the broad, interdisciplinary field of adult education, affective aspects of experience and the roles they play in learning have, thus far, not been properly theorized or researched. This dissertation first explores how John Heron's whole person theory (WPT) conceptualizes feeling as an expansive affective capacity at the root of all human…

This research investigated the role of continuing professional development (CPD) in further education (FE) through a small-scale study involving two general FE colleges and two independent training providers (ITP) in England. Teachers' experiences of their continuing development were collected through focus groups. These encouraged the teachers to…