This essay will discuss two educational programs to improve the living conditions of students from low income families that Pedro T. Orata conducted during the middle years of the twentieth century. The question this paper will investigate is whether Orata considered the people he was trying to help as being trapped by the conditions of poverty to…

In recent years, the concept of public pedagogy has increasingly influenced the study of continuing education, drawing attention to ways in which adults access resources from popular culture and learn without the involvement of educational institutions. Reading relationship self-help books has become a prominent component of popular culture. There…

Self-help literature has become an important domain of adult learning in North America. Self-help books offer readers advice on how to take charge of their lives and achieve goals such as prosperity, love, happiness, wellness, and self-actualization. Despite the popularity of self-help books, there has been little research about them from scholars…

Australia is a country of ongoing migration that embraces diversity, creative expression and cultural activity. Membership of community music groups by older people can enhance life quality, and may provide a space through which cultural and linguistic identity may be shared and celebrated. This qualitative phenomenological case study explores…

While women have made many advances, their inferior status to men continues to be a global phenomenon. At a time of unprecedented economic growth, India is experiencing a dramatic intensification of violence against women and the majority of girls are still not getting equal educational opportunity. In one of the most important steps for the…

Through presenting empirical research exploring the connections between popular culture and informal learning, we argue that, as predicted by concepts such as self-directed learning and transformational learning, the experience of transition has a meaningful impact on adult learning. Specifically, transitions encourage adults to engage in learning…

Objective: To compare and contrast 5 sets of expert recommendations about the treatment of childhood and adolescent obesity. Method: We reviewed 5 sets of recent expert recommendations: 2007 health care organizations' four stage model, 2007 Canadian clinical practice guidelines, 2008 Endocrine Society recommendations, 2009 seven step model, and…

The purpose of this study is to explore the use of self-help books with therapeutic aims; and to propose suggestions by discussing the present situation of self-help books in Turkish cultural context. Taking these aims into account, the existing literature on self-help books is initially reviewed, and a picture of the self-help books in Turkey is…

This article examines the role networking has played, at local and national levels, in facilitating communication between key actors involved in challenging the marginalisation of disabled people from education and from wider Bangladeshi society. Efforts to promote awareness of the importance of including disabled children in their local schools…

Proponents and opponents of euthanasia have argued passionately about whether it should be legalized. In Australia in the mid-1990s, following the world's first legal euthanasia deaths, Dr. Philip Nitschke initiated a different approach: a search for do-it-yourself technological means of dying with dignity. The Australian government has opposed…

Parents in the Western world today are often said to feel unsure and inadequate and as a consequence there are a plethora of self-help products on the market as well as parent education programmes. This article explores the kinds of research questions that are raised by this state of affairs. The discussion is mainly based on existing studies of…

Objective: Between September 2002 and February 2003, the authors assessed the effectiveness of a new, age-tailored, self-help smoking-cessation program for college students. Participants: College student smokers (N = 216) from 6 Ontario universities participated. Methods: The researchers used a randomized controlled trial with a 3-month telephone…

The self-help University of the Third Age (U3A) is an adult education approach for older people in which all the teaching and administration is carried out by unpaid volunteers. The purpose of this study was to reveal some of the successful ageing characteristics of the 205 independent U3As in Australia and the 60 independent U3As in New Zealand…

This study analyzes narratives of cyber-porn users and defines major patterns of distress as self-reported by contributors to a self-help group in the Internet. It applies narrative analysis methodology to 2000 messages sent by 302 members of an Italian self-help Internet community for cyber-porn dependents ("noallapornodipendenza").…

The paper reports on a field experiment conducted among poor women organized in self-help groups in the north-east of India. The experiment tests in a simple game whether overly optimistic expectations with respect to the benefits of exercising agency reduces one's appreciation of remaining with agency in the future. If so, unrealistic…