In what ways can a community music education project based on historical re-enactment be a vehicle for transformational learning, empowerment and reconnection with community? In 2018, Serenading Adela was performed to celebrate and remember the 100th anniversary of a moment in history when women sang under the prison cell window of Adela…

The purpose of this article is to enhance understanding of how Black female working class adult scholars cultivated support and advancement in the academy with the goal of entering the professoriate. In this critical ethnography, the authors elaborate on the concept of empowerment agent to detail how professionals within the academy created…

Learning through life experiences as distinct from learning through the academy and courses have become increasingly important themes in later life adult education research and practice. Whilst the dominant discourse for most younger people is still about education and training for students in standardised and accredited courses, there is…

This paper describes an ethnographic case study of eleven First Nations adult learners in a Northern Ontario community attempting to earn secondary school equivalency through the General Education Development (GED) program. The paper maintains a focus on the power differentials at work in both the learners' prior educational endeavours and their…

This paper is based on a long-term ethnography of an adult creative writing class situated in a major urban art gallery in the United Kingdom. It takes the claims of one group of older adults--that creative writing made them "feel younger"--as the starting point for exploring this connection further. It places these claims broadly within…

In the UK, further education (FE) colleges play a key role in providing literacy programmes. This article draws upon our research in FE, with a focus on literacy, learning and identity, to explore how different learners are positioned differently depending on the value of the literacy practices they bring with them from home. Indeed, it is…

This paper draws on ethnographic vignettes in an Indian rights-based approach to adult education programmes in order to examine the contestations and negotiations of facilitators in interface situations involving programme capacity building, monitoring and evaluation practice. The paper proposes that making visible the hegemonic nature of…

Adult English as a second language (ESL) educators have struggled to move beyond skills-based instruction to implement more student-centered, contextualized pedagogy that prepares students to become active citizens and to solve real-world problems, even as the growing number of immigrants make adult education increasingly important for determining…

These "Proceedings" derived from the Commission for International Adult Education's (CIAE) 2018 International Pre-Conference. They contain 23 papers from 32 authors. Eight of the lead authors are graduate students -- four are rounding up their Master's degrees while four are on their doctoral programs. The rest are a mix of seasoned and…

This study examined a Korean immigrant adult learning program, the Reading Facilitator Training program, at a Korean immigrant church in Los Angeles, CA, in 2008. The purpose of this research was to discover how Korean immigrant adults learn in a way that has meaning and brings about change and how the local church can function as a safe learning…

Background/Context: In contrast to cultural constructs that equate education with cognitive development and formal schooling, the Latin American cultural model of educacion encompasses academic knowledge and social competence. Prior scholarship has mainly investigated parental notions of educacion vis-a-vis childrearing and schooling, primarily…

This paper explores the results of applying a diagnostic questionnaire for measuring the dimensions of a learning organization in a resource squeezed service organization. The questionnaire was conducted as the first stage of an ethnographic study of workplace learning in an aged care organization. It was distributed to the 600 employees in nine…