This article provides an overview of adult learning theory, focusing on the theories covered in this issue of New Directions in Adult and Continuing Education. In offering a brief synopsis of each article and reflecting on the ways adult learning theories have evolved since the first update was published in 1993, this article explains several…

The purpose of this study is to provide an insight view about the challenges to female government college principals and vice principals in Chitral, Pakistan. The study uses in-depth interviews for data collection and on the basis of predetermined criteria, the study participants were selected. The findings of the study explain that in district…

Being a professional teacher involves developing professional agency. Among the important standards of professional agency is the ability to justify classroom practices in light of conceptual knowledge and transformative reflection and clarify personal commitments and intentions in decision-making processes. This study explored how 12 student…

This article argues for a reconceptualisation of early childhood education, where learning and development are not only valued by outcome, and aims to investigate how aesthetic processes are organised in ways for the children to be inspired, to compare, explore, and play. Inspired by a Vygotsky perspective and his theories of play, imagination,…

Team-based leadership is increasingly recognized as valid for raising workplace quality. Developing effective teams of leaders, though, is barely understood, scantly researched and not simple or straightforward. Mentoring has been recognized as valuable within teams and with the support of critical reflection can assist in augmenting team-based…

It is well recognised that culture plays an important role in how people experience the world. However, there is limited knowledge on the impact of socio-cultural norms and values on the lives of autistic women. This qualitative study used individual semi-structured interviews to explore how eight cis-gendered autistic women, without co-occurring…

Music remains a fundamental aspect of sociocultural traditions and environments. In this article, I explore a sierreño band of translingual youth artists and their appropriation of norteño music in their designing of new forms of expression. Employing the concept of communities of practice, I examine three youth musicians' experiences as members…

Around the globe, young students are expected to learn about time, yet how is it that they themselves make sense of this topic? From a sociocultural perspective, sense-making about time emerges in relation to properties of available tools and representations, such as analog clocks or digital notation. Such interactions with the symbols and…

This article calls for a focus on well-being and mental/emotional health in teacher education programs--driven by two important, accelerating societal and educational trends: an influx of digitally-networked technologies, and a rising crisis in mental health and emotional well-being. Internet technologies have significant learning affordances to…

Contextual factors such as cultural values and traditions impact on implementation processes of healthcare interventions. It is one of the reasons why local stakeholders may decide to role out a programme differently from how it has originally been developed or described in scientific literature. This can result in different but most likely more…

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the appropriation of the sociocultural perspective by the physics education research community has represented a linguistic turn in the field, pointing out a promising path to overcome the dominance of the "individual paradigm," both in terms of student learning and initial and continuing teacher…

Despite a growing emphasis in education policy on 'what works for whom and in what circumstances', there is still considerable attention to decontextualised 'best practices' that emerge from cross-country comparisons of student achievement. Also, while operational and even political aspects of context are increasingly incorporated into policy…

This study investigated teachers' perceptions of sociocultural factors affecting students' academic achievement in Zone Five North Pentecost, Vanuatu. A qualitative study, it sees its forty-five participants as 'a culture-sharing group', documenting their attitudes, perceptions, beliefs and their shared approaches towards sociocultural and…

The current study compared American, Korean, and Indonesian middle and high school students' CS attitudes. Concurrently, this study also examined whether the items in the CS attitudes scale exhibit country and gender measurement biases. We gathered data on CS attitudes from middle and high school students in the US, Korea, and Indonesia. The…

This qualitative study explored the possibility of implementing the happy school model (HSM) in the context of Vietnamese higher education, with a focus on the socio-cultural perspectives of nine tertiary English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers at different career stages. Through semi-structured interviews, thematic analysis, and theoretical…