This qualitative case study focused on career commitment in two types of professional adult educators, extension agents and missionaries. Past research studying extension agents and missionaries had documented decades of early career attrition. Research documented the issues, explored causes, and proposed solutions. Yet, the problem persists. Much…

The importance of providing institutional assistance to adult learners with visual impairment throughout the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be overemphasised. This paper examined the experiences of adult learners with visual impairment, whose studies were significantly affected by the implementation of lockdown and social distancing that led to their…

Because addiction is a socially isolating disease, social support for recovery is an important element of treatment planning. This study examines the relationship between social isolation, giving and receiving social support in Alcoholics Anonymous during treatment, and post-treatment outcomes among juvenile offenders court-referred to addiction…

Many immigrants and refugees in the United States must confront different linguistic and cultural contexts in their everyday life. As part of a larger ethnographic study related to refugee families and literacy, this qualitative study explores how adult English as a second language (ESL) students help their classmate Htoo Eh find ways to deal with…

This chapter focuses on the use of coaching for adult learners, the specific characteristics adults bring to the learning environment, and strategies for dealing with the obstacles adult learners may face.

Student veterans have been attending college in greater numbers since the passing of the Post/9-11 GI Bill. Although similar to other nontraditional students, student veterans face unique transition challenges that can affect their pursuit of higher education. Many student veterans could benefit from dedicated programs to help them succeed in…

Background: Consistent with evidence from high-income countries (HICs), we previously showed that, in an informal peri-urban settlement in a low-middle income country, training parents in book sharing with their infants benefitted infant language and attention (Vally, Murray, Tomlinson, & Cooper, [Vally, Z., 2015]). Here, we investigated…

Everyone observes rituals. There are birthdays, anniversaries, and special holiday activities where families gather together. There are also the private or personal rituals that were accidentally established but now have become constant markers in one's lives. Often, some chance encounter can lead to lasting change. This is true of mentors and the…

This article addresses professional learning as intrinsic to social practices. It takes its point of departure in a sociocultural notion of mediation and communication in human activity and addresses the constitutive nature of language and artefacts as material-semiotic tools in the social coordination of perspectives and action, meaning-making…

This study describes the social support network of older adults enrolled in the Open University for Senior Citizens at the School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities, University of Sao Paulo. A cross-sectional study was conducted with a sample of 117 elderly or older adults, mostly female (78%), married (53%), retired (82%), and aged on average…

The objectives were to describe the stated motives of participants who enrolled in a program at the Open University for the Elderly (UnATI, in Portuguese), identify correlations between the stated motives and sociodemographic data, and find a set of predictors related to the listed motives. A total of 306 middle-aged and elderly adults aged 50 or…

Many people experience hardship and need help. This help is provided by a network of agencies and organizations, both public and private. Staffed by human service workers, this network, and the kinds of help it offers, is as varied as the clients it serves. Human service workers help clients become more self-sufficient. The first section of this…

In 1837, Margaret Prior became the first female missionary for the American Female Moral Reform Society. She traveled throughout the poorest neighborhoods in New York City--entering barrooms, brothels, and sickrooms. Based on an analysis of Prior's missionary reports, published in the society's periodical and included in her memoir, this essay…

Most learning in the workplace occurs while pursuing working rather than learning goals. The studies at hand aimed to identify task characteristics that foster learning in the workplace. Task characteristics are supposed to exert a major effect on the learning potential. However, the fact that learning is more often than not a rather unconscious…

Purpose: This paper aims to focus on the communications skills training given to transnational call center workers in India whose jobs involve providing customer service to Western customers. Emotion work is a key component of customer service jobs, and this work is constructed as an important soft skill. Design/methodology/approach: Between 2002…