New research shows that adults with the lowest literacy and numeracy skills are likely to have experienced substantial disadvantage from early childhood. As the journeys of many adult learners attest, education can transform opportunity. What is more likely to motivate them to take up an educational offer is a life course transition or a new…

This article explores the importance of developing strong adult education programs within a broader collaborative effort between museum staff and K-12 teachers. Focusing on history museums, the first section discusses the importance of museum visits for K-12 history learning and how we need to reconsider some of the primary purposes for these…

Increments in educational budgets have been devoted to professional development for teachers to help them accommodate their practices to the realities of their classrooms. Previous research has suggested that despite this significant investment, there has been little, if any, positive change. This begs the question of what else might be done to…

The online educational environment is increasingly being used by adults and should be designed based on the needs of adult learners. This article discusses andragogy, an important adult learning theory, and reviews three other adult learning theories: self-directed learning, experiential learning, and transformational learning. During this…

The purposes of this article are to describe the adult learners' emotional experiences as a result of engaging with issues of cultural diversity and discrimination, and to interrogate the ways in which critical emotional reflexivity emerges in the online format. The analysis is done in the context of an online course on diversity, inequality, and…

The American Association of Community Colleges' (AACC) Plus 50 Initiative is a three-year initiative launched in June 2008 and funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies. It was created to support a pilot group of two-year institutions to develop or expand campus programs that engage plus 50 learners. The initiative focuses on three types of…

This paper considers noncredit instruction in the California Community College System. It identifies three related concepts: a state need for increased levels of education that noncredit instruction is well placed to supply, several changes that begin to facilitate that response, and additional changes that are needed to ensure success. The…

The purpose of this mixed-method descriptive case study is to investigate the role technical assistance providers within the context of one state's large-scale literacy grant program. This study provides an in-depth examination of one state's technical assistance providers known as Reading First Facilitators (RFF) through the study of a group of…

Although many private Christian liberal arts programs exist today that seek to foster servant-leader (SL) development within their students, there is a void of both literature and data that details how servant-leadership development occurs and what contexts may be appropriate or necessary for this development. The purpose of this study was to…

Drawing on an exploratory qualitative study, this article considers the link between business school teaching at graduate level and subsequent work behaviour and experiences of former students. It evaluates the student experience some time "after" graduation. The findings of the retrospective evaluation point to the value of classroom…

Two perspectives are used to reflect on the learning design of a postgraduate online course--that of the designer/facilitator and that of the learner. While the course focus is on online pedagogical approaches, the main aim is to connect learners with each other and with the facilitator so that together they may investigate, trial, challenge and…

This reports synthesizes the research literature on the challenges facing adult learners in higher education today and emerging strategies for increasing the number of adults over 24 who earn college credentials and degrees. This synthesis is meant to provide perspectives on key issues facing adults as more and more of them see the need for higher…

The present report presents an annotated bibliography of peer-reviewed articles that employed theories of self-regulation to understand how adults learn in various contexts. Seven scholarly articles, published between 2000 and 2006, were reviewed and summarized. Articles reviewed include (1) Self-regulation in a Web-based Course: A Case Study (J.…

Can adult educational research on learning and identity counter the individualising of neoliberal government policy that seeks to constrain educational "choices" to those that contribute to government economic agendas? This article notes the recent move within post-compulsory education research towards an engagement with Bourdieu because…

In this article, the author sets out something of the vision in the Government consultation paper, "Delivering World Class Skills in a Demand-led System," and looks at how this is likely to play out for adult learners. The contention of Leitch is that there is a supply-led system in education and training. The Government has planned…