With the growing number of online course opportunities in higher education, it is necessary to gain an understanding of the benefits of fostering social presence in those courses for adult learners. Ensuring that adult learners are provided with an online learning community that fosters social presence and promotes students' autonomy, competence,…

This article aims to unravel a mature student's processes of social engagement at a university, based on nine years of biographical interview data. By framing itself within the realist social theory, this paper analytically distinguishes between precedent social conditioning factors, social engagement processes, and their consequences of learning…

Using positioning theory as a framework, this study examined two adult learners' participatory opportunities in small group interactions when they were learning English as a second language in an American university. The study finds that control over access to participatory opportunities mainly lies in how learners manage to position themselves…

This paper traces the evolution of discourses around the role of critical social theory in the field of lifelong education that have played out in the pages of the "International Journal of Lifelong Education" and elsewhere in the field, beginning with early critical theoretical discourses, a consideration of the impact of some key…

Worldwide, access to higher education is still a privilege. This unique volume recounts the experiences of students from two rural provinces -- one in Pakistan, one in the Republic of Ireland -- who have struggled to undertake graduate studies. Seeking to understand why some are able to persevere with studies against enormous odds, the authors…

This study was a quantitative, causal-explanatory online survey investigation of the relationship between career development, job satisfaction, and turnover intentions among the staff members of higher education institutions headquartered and teaching in the state of Florida. This study considered three theories to help understand the effect of…

Sessional teachers in universities are often marginalised by their part-time status, availability for training, and invisibility within the institution's infrastructure. Nevertheless, tutors as a subset of this group, regularly have access to some training and development. This paper presents a methodological approach for implementing the BLASST…

Peter Jarvis is a towering figure in the study of adult and lifelong education and a leading and original theorist of learning. This paper sets out his intellectual and professional biography, maps the main contours of his work and introduces fourteen papers by leading scholars devoted to his work. Five broad phases in Jarvis' life are identified:…

This paper examines ageism among older students in U.S. higher education. Ageism involves any uncalled-for reaction to any age and does not require racism and sexism to exist. Social closure theory is the research framework used in this analysis. The theory posits that specific parties (i.e., in-groups) gain benefits by closing off favorable…

This article argues that the chances of successful educational upward mobility are more clearly assessed when educational decisions are interpreted not as isolated individual or family decisions, but in relation to their societal and political context. In order to do this, the authors propose a combination of Bourdieu's conception of habitus with…

The author has been asked to discuss the relevance, or lack of relevance, for "The Creation of Settings and the Future Societies" (Sarason, 1972) for community psychology today. She appreciates this assignment, as one of the first books she read in graduate school was "The Creation of Settings and the Future Societies." After that, she was exposed…

Many traditional leadership education paradigms are challenged by the transformational nature of globalization and are limited in application in diverse and complex contexts. In order to address these issues, a new framework must be adopted within higher education leadership programs to educate the next generation of global leaders. This paper…

The current de-democratization process in which the world now apparently finds itself ". . .represents the longest continuous period of deterioration in the nearly 40-year history of Freedom House's annual assessment of the state of political and civil liberties in every country of the world". As Gilley (2010: 161) observes, ". . .the hottest…

Drawing from Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, this research analyzed the structural contradictions existing in the variety of educational activities and resistance among a group of alienated adult students in Korea National Open University (KNOU). Despite KNOU's quantitative development in student number, the students' resistance shed light on…

Teacher efficacy is a topic of significance in mainstream education and various instruments have been developed to measure this construct. The available instruments however, are general both in terms of their subject matter and context. To compensate for this generality, the present study aims to develop a new teacher efficacy instrument whose…