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…

This article presents findings from an inquiry at the nexus of three areas of adult education scholarship: critical pedagogy, university-based professional education, and popular culture. I am investigating how the incorporation of popular culture into professional education can foster students' engagement with theory and thorny issues. Such…

This article supports the thesis that popular art can be a source of learning for adults. Questions are framed in the context of the trend for public pedagogy and the andragogical concepts of learning put forward by Jack Mezirow and Knud Illeris. To illustrate the problem, selected popular culture texts from the field of movies, street art, and TV…

The aim of this study was to taxonomically analyze the Spring and Summer 2022 Lifeway Bible Studies for Life curriculum for adults. The focus of the study was to determine whether the curriculum successfully engages learners across various learning dimensions, fostering a more holistic and impactful experience, the inquiry is significant not only…

Adults learn simply through life experience and possibly by pursuing an education. Pursuing an education would depend on the setting of the experience. This project aimed to explore the theories and frameworks that inform the field of adult learning today. A course project was constructed of seven individual projects, each exploring different…

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…

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 article reports a case study of older adults learning English in China. It indicates how, founded on consequentialist ethics, risk analysis, and safeguarding, it was decided to use covert research, drawing on the confluence of risk analysis, risk evaluation, risk management, safeguarding, research ethics, and important contextual and cultural…

Self-directed learning is a core theoretical construct of adult learning. Importantly, self-directed learning represents a fundamental meta-competence for living and working in our increasingly complex and unpredictable world. Nonetheless, the construct of self-directed learning has become obfuscated. In order to redress this concern, this…

The purpose of this qualitative, phenomenological study was to explore adult immigrant learners' perspectives and motivations for participating in an ESL program through the lens of McClusky's Theory of Margin. Nine adult immigrant ESL students were interviewed about their learning experiences. Creswell's (1994) systematic process informed the…

This article presents part of a larger study on potential relations between democracy and numeracy and mathematics teaching for adults. This study is motivated by the many challenges to democratic institutions and democratic values at local, national and international levels that I have observed in recent years. In this article. I go back to the…

This is an exploratory Delphi study investigating profound learning, the profound learner, and profound living. The strength of the Delphi technique is leveraging expertise to understand an amorphous problem,such as the concept of profundity explored in this study. The authors could find no evidence of a comprehensive research agenda being…

Purpose: Given the growing popularity of virtual human resources development (VHRD) in organizations and among human resource development (HRD) professionals, it is highly essential to deeply examine the nature and scope of the affective dimensions of the VHRD approach. Over the past decade, VHRD has become an important part of the HRD process.…

This paper discusses the development of music lessons for adults in a non-professional choir. Based on the Kodály Concept, the lessons took place from April 2019 until March 2020. The singers and conductor engaged in shared research practices, tracking teaching and learning experiences through journaling and sharing our writings. Through this…

Using the Compassionate Music Teaching (CMT) framework as a lens, in this study I explored the ways that teachers of adults learning recreationally in music lessons may align their teaching approaches to learners' adult-specific needs. Adult education scholars have accentuated the need for facilitators of adult learning to consider adult learners'…