Resources

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Briton challenges the dominant depoliticized vision of adult education, calling into question the modernist tenets and moral integrity of contemporary adult education practice. By examining his own struggle to escape the confines of modernist thought, the author delivers a succinct yet decisive critique of modern educational practice and challenges educators to reconceptualize their field of endeavor as a postmodern pedagogy of engagement. In refusing to deny its conjectural foundations, to mask its tenuous structure, or to defend its precarious integrity, the book assumes a form that distinguishes it markedly from its modernist counterparts. In favoring commentary over empirical evidence, a multiplicity of voices over a prescriptive narrative, the development of an ethical attitude toward practice over formulaic prescriptions for practice, and inter- over intra-disciplinary sources to substantiate its claims, this work calls into question a whole range of modernist predilections. By repeatedly breaching the narrowly prescribed parameters of adult education's orthodoxy and constantly promoting reflective inquiry, this book reveals how different, yet equally valid, forms of evidence can be drawn upon to develop an ethical postmodern perspective that calls the modern instrumental practice of adult education into question. (From the Publisher)

Journal Issue.

Faculty and students alike have become so accustomed to meeting in spaces that are sterile in appearance, unable to accommodate different instructional approaches, and uncomfortable in supporting adult bodies that most have taken these conditions as a fact of college life. The lack of extensive dialogue on the importance of learning spaces in higher education environments prompted the essays in this volume. The chapter authors look at the topic of learning spaces from a variety of perspectives, elaborating on the relationship between physical space and learning, arguing for an expanded notion of the concept of learning spaces and furnishings, talking about the context within which decision making for learning spaces takes place, and discussing promising approaches to the renovation of old learning spaces and the construction of new ones. This volume is also augmented with a Web site that contains diagrams, virtual tours, additional documents pertaining to learning space design, and links to other relevant sites. (From the Publisher)

Journal Issue.