Academic second-chance education (SCE) provides young adults with the opportunity for upward mobility. However, many young people in academic SCE have unfavourable prerequisites, which make it difficult for them to meet academic requirements. In this article, we explore how teachers respond to this challenge in their practice and the extent to…

This article describes a posthuman study that used Deleuze's rhizoanalysis to explore the journeys of adult learners who returned to an adult high school to pursue their high school diplomas after having prematurely left high school. Five graduated adult students participated in individual recorded intra-views, and two of them also participated in…

The purpose of this action research was to determine if motivation and perception of adult learners enrolled in a GED program at the Small Town Adult Education Center in South Carolina were affected by the use of communicative technologies and improved student-teacher relationships. This study focused on three overarching research questions. The…

In 1979, when the author began as an academic instructor at the Central Coast Adult School, located inside the California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, California, he saw his teaching role in the traditional sense of imparting knowledge through the school's curriculum. Over time, however, his viewpoint changed as he came to recognize that the…

In much research, learners' perspectives tend to be considered in light of a program's expectations or U.S. society's definitions of learner needs, rather than considering how learners would define and make sense of their own experiences, hopes, and needs. In contrast, this study considers learners' meanings as the fundamental starting point for…

The authors carefully followed for a year or more the inner experiences of learning and change of 41 ABE/ESOL (Adult Basic Education/English for Speakers of Other Languages) learners from all over the world. They were enrolled in three distinct U.S. programs (a community college, a family literacy site, and a workplace site), each oriented to…

How do ABE/ESOL (Adult Basic Education/English for Speakers of Other Languages) programs shape adult learners, and how do adult learners, in turn, shape their programs? Beyond the acquisition of important skills (such as greater fluency in the English language) what are the bigger internal meanings for adults of participating in ABE/ESOL…