Facing a teacher shortage in math, science, and language arts secondary courses, a suburban, unified, K-12 district partnered with a university in the southwest to create a program for alternatively certified teachers. This specialized program permitted candidates to teach with an intern certificate while completing university coursework leading…

"Threshold concepts" are concepts that, among other things, transform the way a student looks at a discipline. Although the term "threshold" might suggest that the transformation occurs at a specific point in time, an "aha" moment, it seems more common (at least in computing) that a longer time period is required.…

This qualitative research study examined the lived experiences and stories of dynamic women over 80 years of age. Their contribution to transformational and lifelong learning may offer a blueprint for baby boomers to age successfully. The exploration disclosed common patterns of the individual lives. The interviews revealed that the women were…

"Learning Reconsidered" (Keeling, 2004) and "Learning Reconsidered 2" (Keeling, 2006) called upon institutions of higher education to measure learning outcomes, and to facilitate transformative learning in college students. "Learning Reconsidered 2" defined transformative learning with Mezirow's description of the…

This book assembles over 50 papers from the 7th Triennial European Research Conference of the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA), which was held from the 4th to the 7th of September 2013 at Humboldt-University in Berlin. The title of the conference was "Changing Configurations of Adult Education in Transitional…

This paper is based on phenomenological interviews with teachers who worked with underachieving students in South Africa, Russia, and the United States. It focuses on the analysis of meanings that teachers constructed while describing their relationship with underachieving students and how metaphors worked to construct such meanings. The…

This paper documents the impact of a study visit to south India in 2007 on students following courses in initial teacher education at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK. The research was conducted by the two course leaders and employed a varied methodology, involving open-ended questionnaires, self-reporting of emotions, video diaries,…

Since the early 1980s, policy makers and educational leaders have pinned high hopes on mentoring as a vehicle for reforming teaching and teacher education (Feiman-Nemser, 1996). A review of literature written throughout the evolution of mentoring illustrated that researchers focused most of their attention on a relatively narrow aspect of…

Philosophical inquiry (Lipman, Sharp & Oscanyan, 1980) has the capacity to push boundaries in teaching and learning interactions with students and improve teacher's pedagogical experiences (Scholl, Nichols, Burgh, 2008). This paper focuses on the potential for Philosophy to foster pedagogical transformation. Two groups of primary school…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of popular culture, especially prime-time television, on women viewers' identity development. More specifically, this study explores one television show, the 1962-1964 Cathy Gale episodes of "The Avengers," as a portal to adult learning. We explored how television, as a form of public…

This article explores the informal learning processes and the changes in the values of a group of 200 Latin American immigrants to Canada. Results show that the majority of the respondents underwent at least one political or civic learning process, like increasing tolerance or environmental responsibility. The findings also suggest a number of…

The purpose of this study was to identify and explain factors that motivate and assist adult, online chemistry students to both enroll and persist in successfully completing general chemistry. Secondarily, the study sought to identify aspects of the online education process that are most challenging for adult, online chemistry students. Using a…

"Palpable Pedagogy: Expressive Arts, Leadership, and Change in Social Justice Teacher Education" is an arts-informed ethnographic study of the pedagogy and culture engendered when the expressive arts are employed in social justice teacher education. "Palpable Pedagogy" is a qualitative study that examines the power of the expressive arts to…

The purpose of this qualitative research study is to explore and describe the experiences of transformative learning in seminary students and clergy who have participated in a Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) residency program while providing pastoral care to patients in an acute care hospital setting. This research focuses on the affective…

This research study examined the long-term effects of a professional development study tour to Southeast Asia that took place in 2001. Participants included ten public school teachers from Western Massachusetts, which has a significant population of people of Vietnamese and Cambodian descent. Funded by a Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad grant,…