The purpose of this study was to explore the life and work of LaFayette, nonviolence and conflict reconciliation from an adult education perspective. This study explores LaFayette's life from an early age through his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, his contributions to adult education, and his current views on social change. The…

Anna Eliot Ticknor (1823-1896) founded the first correspondence school in the United States, the Society to Encourage Studies at Home. In the fall of 1873 an educational movement was quietly initiated from her home in Boston, Massachusetts. A politically and socially sophisticated leader, she recognized the need that women felt for continuing…

For the last 40 years, Stephen Gaskin has been an adult educator on the fringe, working with tens of thousands of adults in the counterculture movement in pursuit of social change regarding marijuana legalization, women's rights, environmental justice issues and beyond. Gaskin has written 11 books about his experiences teaching and learning…

After 1880, the Upstate of South Carolina found itself in the midst of a textile boom. As families migrated from the mountains and failing farms to find employment in one of the many textile mills, relations re-established roots within the confines of the company-owned mill village. Paternalism, the absence of child labor laws, and the lack of…

A qualitative narrative inquiry that explores the meaning of teaching and the development of that meaning throughout the career of exemplary and experienced teachers in kindergarten-through-twelfth-grade (K-12) public schools was conducted. Exemplary teachers were operationalized in this study as any of the 12 teachers chosen each year by the…

This qualitative study used a post-structural feminist framework to examine how the literacy and mothering discourses women encountered in a family literacy program assisted or constrained them in enacting agency. Employing a narrative approach, combined with other methodological strategies (ethnographic observations, discourse analysis of program…

Frances Alice Kellor (1873 - 1952) is most famous for leading the Americanization movement that greeted immigrants from 1906 to 1921. The movement has been damned as coercive in the name of conformity in the historical literature. This dissertation argues that Kellor's Americanization movement promoted immigrants and immigration, Americanized…

There are two dimensions of positioning: self-identity (reflexive) and, events and interaction between people (discursive). Positioning may become socially restrictive when disruptive discursive episodes have a negative impact on individual self-identity. An interpretive biographical study of 11 participants in a transitional residency (temporary…