Older adults' engagement with information communication technology (ICT) can enhance their wellbeing and quality of life. However, older adults continue to lag behind their younger cohorts' ICT use, and many remain unconnected. While policy and strategy has tended to focus on the need to equip older adults with technology skills and improve their…

This paper outlines adult learning in a rural campaign to prevent mining for coal seam gas in Victoria. In central Gippsland, largely known as the food bowl in the State of Victoria in Australia, a campaign against fracking for coal seam gas has managed to gain a permanent ban on fracking. This policy change would not have been possible without…

Adult literacy provision began in Australia during a radical education era in the 1970s, and yet in recent decades, social class as a construct has been largely absent in the academic literature on adult literacy. We argue however that social class is essential to understanding adult literacy provision and furthermore that working class people…

This article focusses on later life learning in Neighbourhood Houses in Victoria, Australia, amidst a backdrop of neoliberal education policies impacting on Adult Community Education (ACE) in Australia. This empirical research was conducted in the state of Victoria and charts the learning of older learners (referred to in this article as later…

Global migration is increasing to unprecedented levels, especially from non-OECD countries to OECD countries. One of the new challenges for lifelong learning is that migrants are expected to be responsible for ensuring that they have the capabilities and learning to adapt to new contexts but qualifications and experiences obtained in one national…

Drawing on in-depth empirical research, we explore a project called The Welcome Dinner (WDP). The WDP aims to bring together 'newly arrived' people and 'established Australians' to meet and 'share stories' over a potluck meal in 'the comfort of their own home'. The purpose is to create meaningful connections, new friendships and social…

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…

Among the many critiques of competency-based approaches to education and training (CBT) is a strain which draws on Foucault's analysis of "disciplinary" power and knowledge. Foucault offered an interpretation of modern institutions, such as prisons, armies and schools, which revealed subtle mechanisms of surveillance and systems of…

Universities traditionally construct ethical, as well as educational goals in their mission, which they attempt to promote not only through their graduates, but sometimes directly to the wider community. This study explores how targeting lifelong learners through the medium of educational tourism might be one such way in which universities can…

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…

Noting the ever-increasing encroachment of discourses and practices from the private sector on public education providers, this paper argues that such organizations exist within competing sets of differences that seek to define and fix the meaning of "education" and "business". We report on fieldwork conducted in an adult…

Can the current education programme of the Australian trade union movement contribute to reviving union growth and union culture, develop new activists and leaders, and encourage and facilitate the organisational change needed to re-orient unions to develop broader alliances? Twenty-five Australian trade union leaders were asked to describe the…

When individuals select a particular occupation, they, their families and the community invest significant resources in their preparing for, learning about, and effective participation in that occupation. Yet, given the high attrition rates during that preparation and high levels of early separation from occupations, selection of occupations is…

This paper considers the positioning of work in community learning spaces through insights drawn from a particular case of adult community education in Victoria, Australia. Despite the rhetorical location of adult community education in Victoria as a legitimate and important sector of post compulsory education and as part of the platform on which…

This paper reports on a qualitative case study that investigated how the professional identities of trainers in the adult sector in Australia are shaped by intersecting relations of social class, ethnicity, gender and the discourses of vocational adult education. Interviews with two trainers as well as observations of them at work are analysed and…