This paper reflects on Freire's discourse on liberating education and adult educators' educational roles with community groups in transforming communities. Mineral-rich communities in Ghana are in danger of losing water bodies, rich arable lands, and forest vegetation cover through "galamsey," which refers to the gathering of rich…

The Critical Friend is a powerful concept partly due to the inherent tension between a challenging critic and a trusting friend. Originally utilized in the PreK-12 sector in both England and the United States, the application of Critical Friends has expanded across a range of contexts. This article further adds to the Critical Friend literature…

Teaching graduate students to conduct evaluations is typically relegated to evaluation methods courses. This approach misses an opportunity for students to collaboratively use evaluation skills to explore content. This article examines a graduate course, Issues in Adult Basic Education, in which students learned evaluation methods concurrently…

Whitney Zimmerman, writes about a dilemma she faced while coordinating and teaching an online undergraduate statistics course. The course included many short example videos, but students often requested video lectures. Such long videos contradict mainstream educational research that suggests videos be short in duration. Zimmerman, explains how the…

This article describes the experiences of two graduate faculty members from Indiana University who facilitated two workshops sponsored by Ball State University at Highlander Research and Education Center, one in May of 2013, and another in May of 2014. We describe the history of Participation Training, the program we used to plan and conduct…

Adult learners are taking advantage of the availability and convenience of online education. Mature learners in online higher education classrooms bring a wealth of experience filtered through cultural, generational, and socioeconomical differences. The purpose of this research was to explore community building in an online graduate course by…

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and traumatic brain injury (TBI) remain central topics in institutions' efforts to address student veteran needs. From the authors' experiences with student veterans, they present the five principles of effective instructional practice identified by the National Research Council (NRC) within the context of…

Ability to communicate using spoken language occurs naturally in children earlier than they learn how to use written language. Throughout persons' lives, their ability to use spoken language is being continuously maintained and further developed. As a result, spoken language has greater capacities to form and organize thoughts than those of…

Given the complex challenges organizations face and the importance of emotional intelligence to effective leadership, management education has begun to help adult learners develop emotional intelligence competencies. These include emotional self-control, conflict management, teamwork, cultural awareness, and inspirational leadership, among other…

During their master's degree work, cohorts of adult graduate students participated in a common learning task in which they listed their factors of good and bad learning experiences. The lead author collected these factors from students over the course of 3 years. The purpose of our inquiry was to examine and document what adult graduate students…

Educators are consciously or unconsciously guided by pedagogy and make critical decisions about praxis--content, strategy, structure--based on their pedagogical beliefs. The intentional use of pedagogy is often advanced as a key to being an effective educator. A wealth of literature is directed toward helping White educators develop a race…

This article investigates the effectiveness of a film-based assignment given to adult learners in a graduate-level group counseling class. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with four students; data analysis suggested film-based assignments may promote deep approaches to learning (DALs). Participants indicated the assignment helped them…

Dropout is a serious problem within education. This article reports on an intervention project, titled "New Roles for the Teacher--Increased Completion Rates Through Social Responsibility," which sought to reduce nonattendance and drop-out rates in the Danish adult educational system by improving teachers' competences. This goal was…

This journal issue about green jobs resulted from a preconference held at the 2011 American Association for Adult and Continuing Education Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. Interested in exploring the ways that green jobs training is being approached in the United States, this preconference seemed like an excellent way to introduce two new…

This article provides an overview of collaborative service learning activities as they are incorporated into university curricula designed for the nontraditional student. The basic tenets of the concept of "andragogy" are briefly reviewed to emphasize the special considerations that need to be addressed to ensure the successful inclusion of…