It has been five years since Mike DeWine was first sworn in to serve as Ohio's 70th governor, joined by Jon Husted as lieutenant governor. From the very beginning, Governor DeWine requested that his Cabinet listen carefully to the people of the state and then proceed to act with a sense of urgency to strengthen and improve the great state of Ohio.…

High school instructional leaders describe how they reframed professional learning around autonomy with structured support. The new system, guided by trust and teacher inquiry, sparked innovation that proved critical during the pandemic.

As educators, we seek to answer the following question: "What magic can happen when you believe that people are whole and resourceful and you hold the space for generative, collective wisdom?" This chapter explores collaborative leadership and learning with adult learners. We focus on creative ways to optimize learning and enhance…

In this presentation and conference proceedings paper, we discuss a pilot program for international education and examine the development and preliminary assessment of an international education hub between Texas State University (TXST), USA and the Università degli Studi di Padova (UNIPD), Italy. Launched in 2024, the TXST-UNIPD hub (henceforth…

Adult learners preparing for university level study have varying degrees of prior experience, confidence, ability, motivation and need when it comes to mathematical tasks. The development of numeracy skills is a core aspect of university preparation, with many university courses requiring a certain level of mathematical literacy. The standard…

Online courses are now a significant part of the higher education landscape. Faculty awareness of the needs of the changing population served, the inherent challenges in learning online, and the importance of enhancing student engagement are of paramount importance to successful online course design. Knowledge of theory and research in adult…

Mezirow relies on the critical theory of Habermas to give his theory of transformative learning rigor. Yet critiques persist and focus on whether the theory has an adequate understanding of the social dimension of learning and whether it is overly rational. This article addresses these issues and explores relevant ideas from Habermas and Honneth.…

At a time when the number of younger students entering our colleges and universities is stagnant, and the number of older people in our society continues to grow by the millions, schools of social work have an opportunity to broaden their student base by intentionally including people past midlife. This article argues that we must recruit and…

No undergraduate or postgraduate programmes currently exist for the professional education of informal educators. The authors outline the development of previous programmes and consider the emergence of informal education as a discrete concept. The article then highlights some key failings in the professional education of informal educators and…

In 2020, the City Colleges of Chicago (CCC) began working with the Urban Institute to develop a picture of adult learners in Chicago. We developed a comprehensive definition of adult learners that guided specific data inquiries from publicly available American Community Survey data. In this data profile, we define an adult learner as: anyone who…

Opportunities for self-determined online professional development (OPD) are emerging, but their potential for increasing adult learners' agency is not yet fully realised. Faced with the problem of successfully designing a self-determined comprehensive evidence-based online numeracy resource for educators who are often time poor and do not engage…

"Generative Knowing" explores the mystery of learning from the unknown in ways that reveal that learning is a dynamic phenomenon, encompassing both personal and societal contexts. Dewey defines learning in terms of experience, reflection, continuity, and interactivity. When learning happens, it eventually solidifies into reliable truths…

This briefing note provides insights from a pan-European opinion survey conducted by Cedefop. This survey explores what adults living in the European Union (EU), Iceland and Norway think about adult learning and continuing vocational education and training (CVET), given that image and perceptions influence action. The survey defines adult learning…

A large and growing number of people worldwide are excluded from participating in the economy and society, which poses a problem not only in achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 on education, but also in making progress on the other goals of the 2030 Agenda, spanning issues from climate change to poverty reduction. The fourth…

In this paper, we will describe, justify and critique a participatory approach that we have developed in order to evaluate the success of a participatory research project that was exploring ways of making museum learning experiences more inclusive for adults who have a diverse range of access preferences. Because we were researching in a unique…