The concept of curriculum as a personal journey is now timely, yet timeless and pertinent as an explanatory basis for understanding learning and development across the lifespan. It addresses a current need to explain adults' learning across working life when achieving individual, occupational, community, and societal goals. Advancing this…

Anchored on Mondlane's biological mother's advice that he ought to 'go to school in order to understand the witchcraft of the white man, thus being able to fight against him' and on the argument that what he learned as a child informed his learning as an adolescent and as an adult, this study developed a profile of Eduardo Mondlane as a lifelong…

The role of competencies in lifelong education is of great interest across helping professions. However, no known empirical research has focused on exploring the relationship between competencies and job tasks within the context of helping professions. This study sought to establish the competencies (i.e. knowledge, skills, and abilities) that the…

In the novel 'Pride and Prejudice', Austen (1813) wanted to show the marginal or subaltern standing of a woman in the 18th century England by saying that a woman was always subservient to a man, and the sole identity of a woman was being a wife to a male at that time. In present-day Bangladesh, a similar view is evident, where women are raised…

This qualitative study focuses on the professional development aspects of adult educators who teach languages to older learners by using one-to-one counselling. Open-ended questionnaires were used to explore participating adult educators' reflective practice during and after the professional development programme. We used a grounded theory…

The idea of one shared past, can develop identity-building potential. Nevertheless, there are diverse memory practices in plural societies and they are an expression of shared, divided, and conflicting memories. The negotiations of (diverse) past(s) and memories and, consequently, related belonging(s) to so-called 'remembrance communities' take…

Continuing professional development (CPD) is a substantial, but hitherto largely unappreciated component of lifelong learning and education (LLL/LLE). CPD encourages analysis of the LLL/LLE of those with high education in early years. It draws attention to the influence of particular organisations, professional associations and regulatory bodies,…

Based on research completed between 2018 and 2022 in the Republic of Ireland, this article examines how the distinctive ethos and relational pedagogy of adult literacy education have been impacted by broader changes in the field and wider society, with significant impact on its capacity to support learners. The learner-centred ethos, ways of…

Activism and engagement with real-world climate crises, within particular contexts, are prerequisites for learning about climate justice. I draw on my experience as an imbedded activist researcher living and learning through two recent 'crises' in Cape Town, to deepen my understandings of 'climate justice'. I followed a case study approach to…

Lifelong education is comprised of four broad categories of activity: early childhood education, primary and secondary schooling, tertiary studies, and adult education. Patterns of people's engagement with each category of lifelong education differ substantially between countries and are influenced by widely varying public policies and…

Research in disparate fields of education, psychology and neuroscience suggests that emotions play a central role in learning. We critically examine research at the intersection of emotions, adult learning and neuroscience. First, we review studies in the "IJLE" related to emotions and adult learning. In particular, we focus on the…

The question of what the research of lifelong education is all about needs to be revisited from time to time. Not only is this line of research approached from a multitude of academic disciplines -- such as sociology, psychology or philosophy -- the very concepts that are used to denote the field also undergo important changes over time, e.g. from…

It is argued here that ethical practice and being in adult lifelong learning are best understood as a feature of competing adult lifelong learning epistemologies informing practice and engagement in the field at all levels. The conceptions of ethics immanent to the epistemologies are not directly identifiable with any of the normative theories of…

This article examines the purposes UNESCO, OECD and EU historically have attributed to adult education and learning. The aim is to explore changes in international adult education and learning policies from the 1970s until the present day and outline how different international organisations have pushed for specific conceptualisations of what…

This paper traces the evolution of discourses around the role of critical social theory in the field of lifelong education that have played out in the pages of the "International Journal of Lifelong Education" and elsewhere in the field, beginning with early critical theoretical discourses, a consideration of the impact of some key…