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 book traces the motivational dynamics embedded within lifelong foreign language learning trajectories, examining the factors which generate and sustain motivation throughout a learner's life. Embracing a complexity approach, it views motivation as a long-term individual process that evolves along a narrative continuum, developing over the…

As the population ages, more older adults seek learning opportunities in various educational settings. This article highlights the understanding of older adult learners and the greater heterogeneity within this demographic. I explore why and how older adults learn, including their learning needs, the challenges of aging that may affect their…

Teaching in secondary education is mostly grounded in the practical wisdom of teachers. In general, teachers have limited knowledge of, access to, and interest in insights from scholarly work. Teacher research might be a way to move beyond practical wisdom as the only basis for good teaching. This study aimed to explore whether teacher research…

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'…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of computer-assisted language learning on cultural adaptation and language learning in non-traditional classroom settings. Design/methodology/approach: The data of this study came from extended periods of observation, multiple rounds of semi-structured interviews and home visits. Using…

A challenging aspect of foreign language acquisition is learning new vocabulary. Research has demonstrated the benefits of motor action to vocabulary learning, though these findings are rarely translated into teaching and learning practices. In this work, we present a novel paradigm for vocabulary learning in a virtual reality environment,…

The aim of this article is to explore how drama activities can provide an opportunity for adult migrants to develop their competence in the language of the host community, in this case Italian, in a protected and anxiety-free space. Language anxiety has been classified as a specific feeling of apprehension due to the risks language learners may be…

Preparing employees to become stewards of Marianist values has become a priority at Marianist institutions because employees impact the institutions' environment, and faculty and staff directly impact student learning. To date, there is a lack of research conducted among employees of Marianist institutions on how new understandings of the…

This study aims to address how practitioners successfully implement action learning in organizations with different cultural values. To effectively adopt action learning, Japanese learners need to learn questioning skills, as they have been brought up in an atmosphere that negates questioning. Using Kolb's learning model, this study aims to…

For over 25 years, my lecture driven teaching strategies that included passive learning outcomes has prevailed in my K12 and higher education teaching. The requirement to help doctoral students identify and understand their epistemology, ontology and worldview within a research methods class created a dilemma regarding the appropriateness of…

Although the use of technology for pragmatics instruction has attracted significant attention from scholars, the number of studies regarding the impact of self-access materials to this end is limited. Nearpod is a useful cloud-based application to support self-paced learning. This paper aims to probe the effect of learning through Nearpod on EFL…

As the number of adults seeking to learn the piano increases, so too does the need for piano teachers to understand how to better facilitate their learning. Self-direction is an oft-cited requirement of adult learning, but one that is often absent from piano studios. This practitioner-based research investigates the role of the teacher in…

Clothing is an integral part of our lives, yet modes of producing, using, and disposing of apparel have significant impacts on the environment. Our research explored the role transformative learning plays in the transition to more sustainable thinking and actions about clothing to illuminate instrumental learning processes and examine the…

This article focuses on the intersection of three areas of Peter Jarvis's work that have profoundly influenced the field of adult education generally and the authors own research trajectories, in particular: (a) learning from everyday life and in social context, (b) incidental and tacit learning in consumer societies in a globalised world (i.e.…