This article will explore lifelong learning and community participation for older women. In doing so, it will draw on empirical work undertaken with the National Federation of Women's Institutes in England and Wales in the UK; and the Sydney Older Women's Network in Australia. The article will briefly outline something of the policies and…

This paper explores learner progression for participants in community-based adult learning (CBAL) provision in Scotland. It focuses on learners' perceptions of progression drawn from analysis of life history interviews carried out with ten adults who had participated in community-based adult learning. The analysis of data was undertaken in three…

Our feminist cross-national comparative study explored the informal and nonformal education and learning of women politicians in Canada and India. Using individual interviews, focus groups, surveys and observations of training sessions we compared and contrasted socio-cultural contexts, challenges, education and learning philosophies, and diverse…

How individuals position themselves as "students" within the university landscape can provide insight into the personal experience of entering this environment. This article will explore how one group of female students narrated their identity work as they moved through the first year of study in an Australian university. These students were all…

The aim is to investigate female and male managers' learning environments with particular focus on their opportunities for and barriers to learning and career development in the managerial work of a male-dominated industrial company. In the case study 42 managers, 15 women and 27 men in the company were interviewed. The findings demonstrate that…

Both lifelong learning and community are central to the mission of the National Federation of Women's Institutes (WI). Their website, for example, states that the WI aims to educate women to enable them to provide an effective role in the community, to expand their horizons and to develop and pass on important skills--key elements of lifelong…

This is an ethnographic study of the literacy practices of a group of rural Northeastern Thai women participating in a community-based literacy programme. Field research for the study examined the women's literacy practices and domains of literacy use in daily life, and the strategies they used to negotiate day-to-day life tasks in the context of…

Experimental narrative forms of writing research can offer empowering representations for adult education and feminist researchers. This article presents a selection of academic storytelling in the form of scanned transcript poems or "Learning stories," produced through interviews with women who participated in a special access program in rural…

A study of 13 female educators working aborad found their status as professionals superceded female status in host countries; trigger events emanated from personal relationships; and trigger events had four stages: communicating with family about departure, culture "shocks" in the first 3 months, cultural adjustments, and reentry into the home…

A discursive study of Canadian women who had started businesses identified five themes about women and entrepreneurship: (1) business plans as the "right" way; (2) profit/growth as success measures; (3) women as misplaced in the masculine business frontier; (4) success in business as liberation; and (5) effect on women's "other" work of…

Women experience exclusion from citizenship in significant ways. The New Right's education agenda promotes lifelong learning and citizenship within the context of the free market. But lifelong learning can promote a more inclusive view of citizenship by challenging social and cultural reproduction processes, taking a liberatory perspective, and…

Three personal stories illustrate how dominant narratives deny women's voices: (1) women silenced the literacies of the changing workplace; (2) writing workshops in which older women describe age stereotypes; and (3) a courtroom in which a rape victim is silenced. Ways to intervene in prevailing literacy practices must stem from policy as well as…

The author reviews selected research and literature related to women in Zambia. Topics include (1) socialization of girls in schools, (2) training needs of women in rural areas, (3) involvement of women in the informal sector in urban areas, and (4) status of women as shown through a study of government structure. (Author/CH)

As illustrated by the educational strategies of women's groups in the Dutch Liberal Party and Leiden University, social movements contribute to adult education. The question remains whether separate programs for women or encouragement of women's participation in existing program is more conducive to emancipation. (SK)

Several case studies examine the issue of whether Trades Union Congress educational programs are inordinately influenced by the state. Continued intervention of the Conservative state and the disorganized condition of labor education leave the latter open to narrow vocationalism. (SK)