These are tough times for adult and community learning, with many providers struggling to sustain a broad curriculum offer that includes a wide-ranging adult learning programme. South Devon College is determined to keep its flourishing adult offer alive but realises that, with funding increasingly scarce, it has to find innovative ways of ensuring…

Mentoring is a highly recognized and accepted strategy for attracting, developing, and sustaining leaders across the education sector and beyond. It helps accelerate learning, reduce isolation, and increase the confidence and skill of newly appointed school leaders. It can also be a powerful learning and growth opportunity for the experienced…

Based on recent findings showing electrophysiological changes in adult language learners after relatively short periods of training, we hypothesized that adult Dutch learners of German would show responses to German gender and adjective declension violations after brief instruction. Adjective declension in German differs from previously studied…

In recent years, educators have noted the critical role district leadership plays in school improvement efforts. While district leadership is a critical factor in all areas of schooling, it is particularly important in adult learning. Simply put, student learning is positively affected by the quality of adult professional learning, and the quality…

Cleary it is no longer possible to think about learning without context. Although context cannot be ignored anymore, educators often struggle to explain how people learn in "and" with various contexts. Situated cognition and cultural--historical activity theory (CHAT) hold promise for understanding how adult learners are cultural and historical…

While there may be similarities between adults and children in how they learn (such as language, interaction and communication), many writers argue that adult learners are different from child learners in a number of ways. This article aims to review how adults learn through examining one particular theory of adult learning. Two conflicting…

The methodological approaches that were used in this research were ethnographic, quantitative and analysis of post-compulsory education policy documents 1945-2007. The article aims to explore the issues of ethics in lifelong learning, and an alternative approach to the analysis of the impact of lifelong learning policy, by focusing research…

In this chapter, two women doctoral candidates examine the nature and function of support systems in graduate adult education. Recommendations and strategies for building social capital in the academy are also discussed.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to determine how docents developed expertise within the context of their work with history museums. Twelve expert docents from four history-themed museums were interviewed to discover how expertise is developed by volunteers working in nonformal settings. Interpretation of the data revealed two primary…

It is now generally agreed that some form of focus on the target code is necessary in adult L2 instruction. One question that remains to be answered is whether all aspects of L2 grammar are equally amenable to pedagogic intervention. A number of researchers have examined the effectiveness of instruction with regard to simple vs. difficult grammar…

Reading "Learning for the Future," 15 years since it was first published, it is instructive to see what has changed and what has remained more or less the same. The years following the Rio Earth Summit saw the proliferation of a great deal of local debate and community-level activity to promote sustainable development, often under the…

The study and practice of adult education takes place in many forms and contexts, so much so that it is sometimes asked, "What isn't adult education?" For the purposes of this chapter, informal and nonformal adult education include just about any endeavor adults undertake to learn and work together outside formal classroom, workplace, or…

This study examines a group of approximately 1,100 English as a foreign language students who attended a tutoring program dedicated to training learners in study skills and language learning strategies. The study covers a five-year period of time during which the tutoring program remained consistent in its focus and organization. Students…

This applied dissertation was a program evaluation study, which was conducted to assess the educational outcomes of the adult learners compared to the traditional learners, as well as the satisfaction with learning while enrolled in the program. The level of satisfaction of all graduates was assessed for comparison between the traditional learners…

Growth in distance education programs has required academic institutions to seek and train additional adjunct faculty. Training program content and delivery methods vary among institutions: however, there is an absence of research on whether incorporating learning strategies that consider assumptions about an adult learner increases satisfaction…