Resources

Adult and continuing education continues to evolve as both a strong discipline and a professional field of practice throughout the global community. Both adult educators and adult learners require a common and informed conceptual and theoretical framework to assist them in developing meaningful curricula for adult learners. This book, in a collective and unified manner, describes innovative strategies for developing curricula for adult learners in diverse social, cultural, and economic contexts. (From the Publisher)

Adult and continuing education continues to evolve as both a strong discipline and a professional field of practice throughout the global community. Both adult educators and adult learners require a common and informed conceptual and theoretical framework to assist them in developing meaningful curricula for adult learners. This book, in a collective and unified manner, describes innovative strategies for developing curricula for adult learners in diverse social, cultural, and economic contexts. (From the Publisher)

From the Editor This volume of New Directions for Institutional Research moves beyond pervasive oversimplified and preconceived notions about Asian Americans in higher education and offers new directions in studying this population. The authors highlight the complexities inherent in the realities of Asian Americans in higher education. In addition to deconstructing common misconceptions that lead to the invisibility of Asian Americans in higher education research, they discuss methodological issues related to disaggregating data, assessing programmatic interventions, conducting campus climate research, engaging Asian American undergraduates in the research process, and using critical perspectives related to Asian Americans. They also discuss key challenges and future directions in research on this population.

This book is designed for lecturers on a wide range of professional courses. It directly addresses questions that come up again and again in seminar discussions; questions that are fundamental to the values and perspectives of academics across the disciplines: • What is meant by the scholarship of teaching and learning in higher education? • What is the purpose of higher education? • Are lecturers really 'students' on these courses? • How do you do 'reflective' writing? • What do we do with all this theory and jargon? • What does CPD in this area involve? • How do you do 'research' on teaching and learning? This book does not treat each element of the curriculum separately – course design, assessment, evaluation of teaching etc. – since that approach has been well handled by others. Instead, like other books in the series, it addresses elements of the curriculum in an integrated way, thereby educating the reader in how to approach a range of higher education related issues. This book provides a scholarly introduction to the literature on these questions. Like other books in the series, it offers a concise treatment of complex questions. It also provides directions for future study. (From the Publisher)

This book highlights the effects of power within the higher educational process, and argues that in order to understand the student experience we have to take seriously the institution as a context for learning. It considers key questions such as: • Why is the student experience of higher education sometimes negative or restricted? • How does power operate within the institution? • What are the forces that limit or enable student agency? • How can institutions of higher education create conditions which best support more enabling forces? Higher Education has its own particular culture, social relations and practices, governed by social and discursive norms. It is always implicated in relations of power through its function in society and its effects on individuals. This book considers how, for the student, these effects can be enabling and engaging, or limiting and diminishing. In exploring the effects of the institutionalization of learning and the workings of power implicated within this, it sets out to add to more cognitive and pedagogic ways of understanding student experience in higher education. Study, Power and the University provides key reading for educational researchers and developers, academics and higher education managers. Sarah J. Mann is Senior Lecturer in the Learning and Teaching Centre at the University of Glasgow. She is head of the Academic Development Unit and is responsible for the MEd in Academic Practice. (From the Publisher)

Higher education is a particularly complex site for enhancement initiatives. This book offers those involved in change a coherent conceptual overview of enhancement approaches, of the change context, and of the probable interactions between them. The book sets enhancement within a particular type of change dynamic which focuses on social practices. The aim is to base innovation and change on the probabilities of desired outcomes materializing, rather than on the romanticism of policies that underestimate the sheer difficulty of making a difference. Following a theoretical introduction to these ideas, there are case studies (from the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Norway) at the national, institutional, departmental and individual levels, illustrating the argument that enhancement is best achieved when it works with social practices in real institutional and organizational settings. In a final section, the authors link the case examples and theoretical frameworks, inviting readers to consider their own enhancement situations and apply the 'frameworks for action' offered in earlier sections of the book. The book doesn’t offer quick-fix solutions but aims to support change with practical examples, conceptual tools and reflexive questions for those involved in change at all levels. It is key reading for higher education lecturers, managers, educational developers and policy makers. (From the Publisher)

Transformative learning is a theory of adult education that focuses on the profound changes-or transformations-that can occur in the lives of adults. It is not as concerned with incremental advances in learners' knowledge as it is with their mental frameworks for making meaning from life experiences. This book explores the role of creative expression in this transformational process. It provides a practical and accessible approach to using creative expression with adult learners. The book provides various tools, methods and creative modalities that have been used to promote transformative learning, and discusses how adult educators themselves are transformative learners. (From the Publisher)

Written by the team at Bard College's Institute for Writing and Thinking, this book is designed to provide practical guidance regarding the challenges and potential of writing-based teaching, and suggestions for how to adapt the practices to particular classroom situations. The contributors share candid, first-hand accounts of what it is like to make writing central to teaching in secondary schools and colleges. As teachers of literature, composition, poetry, mathematics, anthropology, and education, they offer philosophical and theoretical reflections, practical guidance, and personal stories about how to help students become better, more-fluent writers, close readers, and reflective thinkers. This book will be of interest to writing center directors, for what it says about how to do collaborative learning and revision and seeing writing as a way to build community, and to writing teachers for how it demystifies freewriting, focused freewriting, and dialectical notebooks. Any individual, program, or institution seriously interested in understanding and practicing the writing process would benefit from using this text. One of the most important ideas in this collection is that we, as writing teachers, need to develop habits of action and habits of mind that students can take with them. (From the Publisher)