The University of St. Francis's College of Business and Health Administration operates a campus business incubator for student and community entrepreneurs. The business incubator is an innovative use of space that supports the economic development of the region and entrepreneurial education that includes for-credit and non-credit programming.…

Participation has become so central to adult education for community development that even the World Bank supports participatory programming. This article analyses how participation is conceptualised in "Training for Transformation" (TfT), a Freirean-inspired curriculum used in international community development settings. TfT seeks to…

This article presents a case study on the role of spirituality in adult education at a suburban senior center located in the southeast region of the country. The purpose of the case study was to understand the deeply personal role of spirituality in adult education as seen through teaching seniors and examine the personal manifestation of…

The education of African American adults evolved in response to the changing social, economic, and political needs of the Black community. To address these needs, Black Greek-Letter Organizations (BGLOs) created and implemented initiatives at the local, national, and international levels using education as a catalyst to change aspects of African…

The importance of alternative forms of information is undeniable in a democratic society. Yet mass media often ignore important issues as well as grassroots struggles and victories. Over the past two decades, citizens of one small Canadian town have initiated a documentary film festival as a means to learn about diverse problems and/or share…

This compilation offers global examples of innovative and promising literacy and numeracy programmes that link the teaching and learning of literacy to sustainable development challenges such as health, social equality, economic empowerment and environmental sustainability. This publication is a timely contribution to the 2030 Agenda for…

The research described in this report is a companion piece of research to one conducted by AONTAS from 2009-2010 about the outcomes and impact of Department of Education and Skills (DES) funded community education. It answers a call in that research to isolate and investigate the outcomes of community education not wholly funded through DES. This…

This dissertation examines the phenomenon of how communities can effect change in policy and practice to support greater ecological and cultural sustainability. The general purpose of this research is to examine selected local initiatives for ecological and cultural sustainability to better understand the role of adult education in those efforts.…

The study is situated within a national youth organisation called the Australian Air League Inc (Air League). We examine the recent progress of the Air League in South Australia, starting as a loose network of volunteers engaged in a sporadic array of activities, to become a learning community that worked collaboratively and then developed further…

This article focuses on the potential of free tools, particularly inquiry tools for influencing participation in twenty-first-century learning in science, as well as influencing the development of communities around tools. Two examples are presented: one on the development of an open source tool for structured inquiry learning that can bridge the…

This book assembles over 50 papers from the 7th Triennial European Research Conference of the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA), which was held from the 4th to the 7th of September 2013 at Humboldt-University in Berlin. The title of the conference was "Changing Configurations of Adult Education in Transitional…

Since its establishment in 2003, the Japan Council on the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD-J) has paid close attention to informal learning processes in community-based efforts to promote local sustainable development. ESD-J carried out two projects to collect information on and visualise community-based ESD practice: the…

Purpose: This paper aims to: extend the concept of "The learning organization" to "The learning community," especially disadvantaged communities; demonstrate how leaders in a migrant community can achieve positive change at the personal, professional, team and community learning levels through participatory action learning and…

In 2009 AONTAS commissioned a piece of research to examine the outcomes and impact of community education in relation to the three aims that the Government has defined for it: enhancing learning; fostering empowerment, and contributing to civic society. In part, the research also responds to a need to measure the wider benefits of learning (such…

This paper examines the quality and development of relations between organisations and the ways in which these are informed by incidental learning experiences in two projects. The paper conceptualizes instances of inter-organisational learning (IOL) applying theories such as principal-agent, prisoners' dilemma and women's place in community…