This paper investigates optimal practices for teaching Chinese as a foreign language, situated within the context of adult learning theories, with a specific focus on adopting Vygotsky's sociocultural perspective. The examination delves into the theory of genre and its role in constructing meaning within cultural and social contexts, exploring its…

Critical educational approaches challenge practices and structures that perpetuate inequalities. The goal is to surpass knowledge acquisition, emphasizing the interconnections of community and context. Twenty-first-century adult education environments must attend to digital literacy and aim to help close the digital divide. One way to address this…

In this article, we direct our focus on some of the recent activities undertaken by popular education institutions in Sweden in relation to the refugee challenge in 2015. The aim is to analyse how these popular education activities are shaped as specific communities of practice, through the ways they are described by those who organised these, and…

In this chapter, we discuss changes in the age structure of the labor force, the need for continued skill upgrading over the life course to remain employable, patterns of participation in adult learning and development activities, and the role community colleges play in providing education and training to middle-aged and older adults. In an…

Drawing on theories from transcultural theory, I examined Chinese immigrant mothers' transcultural perspectives on mothering and learning. Recent adult educational studies contain limited research on the effects of cultural influence on mothering and learning by immigrant mothers from their perspective. Based on 30 semi-structured interviews among…

Adult basic education's role, from the beginning, has been about serving people with foundational skill needs. The author, Judy Mortrude, agrees with the argument that adult literacy education needs to be repositioned within a new framework of lifelong and life-wide learning, a framework in which new policies are formulated, programs are designed…

Despite the robust literature about teaching intercultural competence, little has been written on exploring culture in community-based English as a second language (ESL) settings, such as classes for adults with immigrant and refugee backgrounds. Educational materials about culture designed for these contexts tend to be prescriptive and…

This chapter explores the United Kingdom's (UK) response to the Youth Guarantee (YG) in the two largest of its four constituent countries -- England and Scotland. The chapter examines the forms, systems and funding which underpin the YG and the conditions currently affecting young people socially, economically and geographically in England and…

This chapter focuses on the implementation of Youth Guarantee (YG) in Flanders and Brussels. Because of the Belgian federal government structure, the Belgian Youth Guarantee implementation plan consists of four different implementation plans: one for each language community and one for the bilingual Brussels-Capital Region. As both regions…

This uniquely formatted split-page autoethnography tells my story of learning to live with disability for more than 40 years. It presents the results of my personal narrative inquiry in the form of a layered account of embodied learning. This account offers an evocative autoethnography and analyzes disability in the context of an ableist society.…

As of fall 2024, enrollment across Washington's community and technical colleges has increased for eight consecutive quarters. This brief explores how the enrollment recovery has affected select programs and demographic groups across the system.

This book examines dominant discourses in multiculturalism and cultural identity globally. It critiques dominant discourses and debates pertaining to multiculturalism and cultural identity, set against the current backdrop of growing social stratification and unequal access to quality education. It addresses current discourses concerning…

The COVID-19 pandemic abruptly shifted the delivery of teaching and learning, particularly for adult English learners (ELs) and international students enrolled in US institutions. This study investigates EL perspectives of their English instructors during the COVID-19 pandemic and the shift to remote learning in the spring of 2020 through a…

While pedagogical translanguaging has been shown to have substantive positive impact on student learning outcomes internationally, adult education has not yet widely embraced the concept. This paper introduces the idea of translanguaging, the concept of encouraging students to rely on their existing linguistic knowledge when learning a new…

This study examines the adaptation of an ESOL course for older Chinese migrant learners to Emergency Response Teaching mode as a result of the government-imposed restrictions to contain the spread of COVID-19. Through interviews and the analysis of learner diaries, we consider the experience of the school manager and teachers, and the strategies…