As change agents in the community, community health advisors (CHAs) are a viable solution to bridge the gap between health service delivery systems and the community. With many CHAs members of the underserved and minority populations they serve, change and empowerment experienced by CHAs should be documented. This phenomenological study describes…

Storyville, the legalized red-light district of New Orleans (1897-1917), was a designated space containing informal opportunities for learning in which its residents practiced the sex trade. Although Storyville was created to regulate prostitution, prostitutes and madams learned the city's legal system, politics, and economics to survive in a…

This article explores the learning pathways of 15 Canadian and American female crime fiction authors. Using a critical feminist perspective, it argues that despite the neoliberal rhetoric of individual choice, as in most careers, there are social-structural factors that create opportunities and barriers for women mystery writers. The article…

This article traces the development of the "second" and arguably more well-known "genre" of participatory action research (PAR). The article argues that the origins of PAR are highly distributed and cannot really be traced back to the ideas of a single person or even a single group of researchers. Instead, the development of…

Self-help literature has become an important domain of adult learning in North America. Self-help books offer readers advice on how to take charge of their lives and achieve goals such as prosperity, love, happiness, wellness, and self-actualization. Despite the popularity of self-help books, there has been little research about them from scholars…

Using feminist extensions of Marxist theory, this article argues that a Marxist-feminist theory of adult learning offers a significant contribution to feminist pedagogical debates concerning the nature of experience and learning. From this theoretical perspective, the individual and the social are understood to exist in a mutually determining…

This article reports on interpretive research, influenced by a feminist theoretical framework, with 8 women, in their 20s to 60s, who work or volunteer in feminist nonprofit organizations. Particular emphasis is placed on their experience of transformative learning in these organizations; the linkages with the theory of transformative learning;…

Traditionally, research in both adult education and social work fields have focused on cognitive ways of knowing. Although both disciplines have acknowledged other ways of knowing, there has been minimal focus on noncognitive ways of knowing, including embodied knowing. The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand how social workers…

There has been little exploration of emotional labor in researching the learning of adults, and emotional labor on the part of research contractors has scarcely featured in published debates. The article explores the role of emotion in this context from a critical feminist perspective, drawing on life history data from a study of the learning…

Feminist nonprofit organizations are sites of informal and nonformal learning where citizens learn advocacy, literacy, and the practices of social democracy. With the growing use of information and communication technologies in the nonprofit sector, there are questions as to how well organizations are able to make use of this technology to further…

The purpose of this article is to discuss feminist-program-planning issues, drawing from a critical ethnographic study of a Latin American feminist community-based organization. The research findings discuss the centrality of feminist identity to understanding and analyzing day-to-day program-planning process issues within a feminist…

Informed by the Afrocentric learning paradigm, this conceptual piece argues that Mezirow's version of the theory of transformative learning is useful, but it would be more so if applied to be culturally sensitive. Using Botswana cultural learning values as an example, the article demonstrates how the theory can be made culturally sensitive to an…

This case study analyzes the introduction of democracy and human rights into the educational program of Tostan, a nongovernmental organization working in Africa. The authors show how Tostan's original educational approach created a meaningful context for integrating democracy and human rights into its curriculum, a process that took place from…

This feminist content analysis of selective adult education journals and conference proceedings draws on feminist aesthetic theory to develop a deeper understanding of women adult education scholars' work with/in the arts. Four major categories identified were community cultural development, aesthetic civic engagement and knowledge mobilization,…

As the number of nontraditional-age students grows on college campuses, it is essential for higher education practitioners to understand if and how older students, especially women, become and remain engaged in their education. A review of the educational engagement literature reveals images of disengaged adult learners whose work and family…