This article narrates the rise and fall of a notable adult education programme at Laval University in Quebec City, Canada. The Centre for Adult Education and Community Development was established in 1951, replacing the External Service for Social Education. In the 1950s, the Centre gained an international reputation for excellence in adult…

Adult education programs are often grounded in problematic assumptions about learners' inadequacies. The purpose of this article is to critique such assumptions through presenting a history of the manner in which representatives of Canadian governments conceptualized the education of Inuit adults from the 1940s through the 1980s. Using…

Adult education was an integral component of the colonisation of the Canadian Arctic. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, educational programmes were explicitly developed in order to shape Inuit adults in particular ways: from teaching them how to live in permanent houses, to teaching them how to work as administrators and tradespeople. Inuit did not…

Part-time students have accounted for a significant proportion of rising participation in higher education in many countries. The objectives of this paper are to enrich the empirical literature concerning the inclusion of part-time adult learners in higher education, and to assess the two competing theoretical frameworks that have emerged to…

This article presents a concise, historical overview of university extension and continuing education in western Canada. It argues that, over the course of the twentieth century, the major universities in western Canada made three basic claims regarding the purposes of their extension and continuing education units. Prior to 1940, universities…

There are two predominant interpretations of the history of Canadian university extension. The "liberal or institutional" perspective argues that extension has been a means for universities to disseminate resources, foster progress in society, and meet the learning needs of individuals. The "critical or nostalgic" perspective…