This paper seeks to advance our understanding of the credit transfer phenomenon in the UK, specifically how students draw on a credit as a form of institutional cultural capital. Drawing on interviews with 26 part-time mature learners, this paper examines the progressive and retrospective orientations to study that surfaced in students' accounts…

This paper discusses the ways in which mature students orientate themselves towards the future in making decisions to access higher education (HE). Their narratives connect their past, often difficult, educational and personal lives to their future aspirations and to their current experiences in further education (FE) and HE. The research was part…

The qualification of adult educators is a central aspect of the quality of adult education. However, within current policy discourses and adult education research on the professional development of prospective adult educators, little attention is paid to teacher qualification when compared to other fields of education and training. In this study,…

This article investigates the innovation concept in two key welfare areas where the demands for innovation are substantial, namely vocational education and elder care. On the basis of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews on the collaboration between an educational institution and elder care services, the article develops a tripartite empirical…

The study described here is based on the work of creative writing students engaged in life writing for a piece of assessment in a distance-learning course. Using the finished assignment pieces themselves, the students' reflective commentaries on their completed task, and a follow-up questionnaire, the analysis was designed to explore the…

According to the increasing rates of unemployment and poverty a significant share of the European population can be considered at-risk-of-social exclusion. In order to combat social exclusion adult education seemed to be a possible tool, which can increase social inclusion among adult learners. This study explores factors relating to training…

In a previous study it has been suggested that there are six stages that adults move through before they feel ready to participate in higher education, and proposed a chain-of-response (COR) model to describe the process. In this study we examine the reported experiences of nine adult entrants during the second year of a work-related degree…

This article explores videoconferencing in the context of local learning centres in Sweden. The practice is described as a "learning space" in which adult learners construct socio-spatial relations. The study goes beyond a sociological apprehension of actors and opposes the idea of the material as neutral, passive and conformed by practice. On the…

When adult students write their life story, they gather selected life experiences and transform these onto the written page. In the course of this literary process they revisit sites of the past and reflect on the meaning of past events; many reconstruct these events from the point of view of the present, and most close their narrative by…

This paper examines the results of research into the learning experiences of a group of adult learners in a university preparation programme in a college of Technical and Further Education in Sydney, NSW, Australia. The research was conducted over a three year period by the author as a teacher-researcher and is grounded in the phenomenological…

The contemporary political and economic context has ensured that adults continually return to education in order to avoid both social and economic marginalization. Adults make and remake themselves through a process of self-authoring a reflexive process through which they make contextual decisions about their life. This article examines the…

Many students in New Zealand are now of mature age, female, and mothers of dependent children (Allister et al. 2006). These students typically experience the challenge of sharing themselves between their children, partners, extended families and their fellow students, lecturers and studying. This research explored how a group of student-teachers…

This paper discusses three technologies used in an adult continuing education Masters programme: blogging, learning objects and e-portfolios. My reflections on their use and on the literature underpinning their use form the basis of the discussion. All three of these technologies were used to promote self-directed learning, reflection and learner…

The purpose of this study was to explore patterns of learning among adult learners in a Web-based learning environment over the study period of one year in the Open University in Tampere and Lohja in Finland. The learning environment varied from face-to-face small group sessions to Web-based online discussion sessions. During this study contextual…

Students in part-time courses were interviewed about their perceptions of good teaching and tutoring. The perceptions differed markedly between those with reproductive conceptions of learning and students holding self-determining ones. The former preferred didactic teaching but disliked interaction, whereas the latter had almost diametrically…