The Profession and Practice of Adult Education

An Introduction

Sharan B. Merriam, Ralph G. Brockett

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118045282
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

The Profession and Practice of Adult Education is a timely book and an excellent introduction to the field. Drawing from an extensive volume of literature, it provides comprehensive coverage and a clear guide. Graduate students will benefit from it and practitioners will be kept abreast of changes that are occurring.
--Peter Jarvis, professor of continuing education and senior research professor, University of Surrey, United Kingdom

Part I

Foundations of Adult Education

In the four chapters that constitute Part One of The Profession and Practice of Adult Education: An Introduction, we trace the development of adult education through its evolving purposes and definitions, its philosophical underpinnings, and its historical perspectives. We also explore several of the ongoing issues related to the field’s foundation and evolution.

In Chapter One, “What Counts as Adult Education?” we begin by pointing out that the context of adult education in North America has shaped the definitions, concepts, goals, and purposes of the field. What has “counted” as adult education has changed over the years; furthermore, where one stands in relation to the field—as practitioner, academician, policymaker, or interested spectator—leads to particular understandings of what constitutes adult education.

The values and beliefs held by individuals and society as a whole shape which goals and purposes are considered important in the practice of adult education. Hence, Chapter Two outlines a number of philosophical frameworks that have influenced how the practice of adult education is perceived. In particular, we discuss the various schools—liberal and progressive, behavioral and humanist, and critical philosophical—and their manifestations in adult education. We also present a rationale for engaging in philosophical inquiry and offer suggestions for taking responsibility for articulating a personal philosophy.

Every field has its history. Rather than attempt to cover the history of adult education in a single chapter, we have instead chosen in Chapter Three to examine how history has been presented by various writers. We address the questions of who and what has been studied, how history is a historian’s interpretation, and how we might benefit from studying our field’s past.

In the fourth and final chapter of Part One, we grapple with three key issues related to the foundations of the field. The perennial question of whether adult education should work toward unity or toward preserving the diversity of the field is explored first. The second issue—whether adult education should align itself more closely with the rest of education—is, of course, related to the notions of identity and professionalism inherent in the first issue. The third issue centers on what the primary focus of adult education should be. Finally, all three issues are linked together in a discussion of their implications for public policy in adult education.

1

What Counts as Adult Education?

What is adult education? What are the boundaries of the field that help distinguish it from other educational and social endeavors? What does it mean to be an adult? What “counts” as adult education, and what doesn’t? Who is or is not an adult educator? These are some of the questions that underlie this first chapter on the scope of the field. We begin by asking how you, the reader, connect with the field of adult education: how do you work with adults in an educational capacity? We then explore the concepts of “adult” and “education,” which leads us to defining “adult education” and related terms.

In the second section of the chapter, we review what people have written about the aims, goals, or purposes of adult education, and how the emphasis on various purposes has shifted over the years. Again, we ask that you consider the goals and purposes of what you do as an educator of adults. In the final section, we explore how this theme of what counts as adult education structures the field’s relationship to the larger world of education.

Defining Adult Education

Defining adult education is akin to the proverbial elephant being described by five blind men: it depends on where you are standing and how you experience the phenomenon. Perhaps you teach an aerobics class several mornings a week at your local YMCA or community center. Maybe your background is in nursing, and you plan continuing education programs for the hospital staff. You may have organized a group of citizens in your community to protest rent gouging or environmental pollution. You might administer a literacy or job-skills training program, or perhaps you work as a private consultant conducting management-training seminars for companies.

These are just a few examples of people’s experiences with adult education. You, and many others like you, have probably not considered how you might be a part of a field larger than the particular arena in which you work. Yet the field of adult education encompasses all of these components. What your individual experience in adult education has in common with others’ experiences is that you are working with adults in some organized, educational activity.

The Meaning of “Adult”

One key to defining adult education lies with the notion of “adult.” But who is an adult? In North America, adulthood as a stage of life is a relatively new concept. According to Jordan (1978), the psychological sense of adulthood, “as we ordinarily think of it today, is largely an artifact of twentieth-century American culture [that] emerged by a process of exclusion, as the final product resulting from prior definitions of other stages in the human life cycle” (p. 189). The concept “did not appear in America at all until after the Civil War and not really until the early twentieth century” (p. 192).

Today, adulthood is considered to be a sociocultural construction; that is, the answer to the question of who is an adult is constructed by a particular society and culture at a particular time. For example, in Colonial America the notion of adulthood was based on English common law wherein males reached the “age of discretion” at fourteen and females at twelve (Jordan, 1978). In a monograph on adult education in Colonial America, Long (1976) considered “the formal and informal learning activities of individuals above twelve [to] fourteen years of age in Colonial America as adult education” (p. 4).

If biologically defined, many cultures consider puberty to be the entry into adulthood. Legal definitions of adulthood are generally anchored in chronological age, which varies within the same culture. In the United States, for example, men and women can vote at age eighteen, drink at twenty-one, leave compulsory schooling at sixteen, and in some states be tried in court as an adult at fourteen.

Other definitions of adulthood hinge upon psychological maturity or social roles. Knowles (1980b) uses both of these criteria, stating that “individuals should be treated as adults educationally” if they behave as adults by performing adult roles and if their self-concept is that of an adult—that is, the extent that an “individual perceives herself or himself to be essentially responsible for her or his own life” (p. 24). Knowles’s definition of adult presents some problems. What about the teenage parent living on welfare? The married, full-time college student? The adults in prison or in a mental hospital?

In considering all of the ways in which the term can be defined, Paterson (1979) offers a way out of the quagmire. At the heart of the concept is the notion that adults are older than children, and as a result there is a set of expectations about their behavior: “Those people (in most societies, the large majority) to whom we ascribe the status of adults may and do evince the widest possible variety of intellectual gifts, physical powers, character traits, beliefs, tastes, and habits. But we correctly deem them to be adults because, by virtue of their age, we are justified in requiring them to evince the basic qualities of maturity. Adults are not necessarily mature. But they are supposed to be mature, and it is on this necessary supposition that their adulthood justifiably rests” (p. 13).

Education Versus Learning

Adult education can be distinguished from adult learning, and indeed it is important to do so when trying to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of adult education. Adult learning is a cognitive process internal to the learner; it is what the learner does in a teaching-learning transaction, as opposed to what the educator does. Learning also includes the unplanned, incidental learning that is part of everyday life. As Thomas (1991a) explains: “Clearly education must be concerned with specific learning outcomes and with the processes of learning needed for students to achieve those outcomes. Thus education cannot exist without learning. Learning, however, not only can exist outside the context of education but probably is most frequently found there” (p. 17).

Playing golf is thus differentiated from golf lessons, just as reading a mystery novel is different from participating in a Great Books Program. The golf lessons and the Great Books Program are designed to bring about learning and are examples of adult education. Still, playing golf and reading a book may involve learning, and herein lies a source of confusion for those trying to grasp the nature of adult education. Although one may have learned something while playing golf or reading a mystery novel, these activities would not be considered adult education, because they were not designed to bring about learning.

Using another example, a person who becomes ill may learn a lot about dealing with the illness through reading articles in magazines, talking with friends, or seeing a television show; this is adult learning embedded in life experience. If the same person were to participate in a patient-education program or a self-help group focusing on the illness, he or she would be involved in adult education. The difference is that the patient-education program and the self-help group are systematic, organized events intended to bring about learning.

So while learning can occur both incidentally and in planned educational activities, it is only the planned activities that we call adult education. And while we include references to adult learning as an integral part of the enterprise, our focus in this book is to describe the field of adult education.

Some Definitions of Adult Education

A definition of adult education, then, usually includes some referent (1) to the adult status of students, and (2) to the notion of the activity being purposeful or planned. An early, often-quoted definition by Bryson (1936) captures these elements. Bryson proposed that adult education consists of “all the activities with an educational purpose that are carried on by people, engaged in the ordinary business of life” (p. 3).

More than fifty years later, Courtney (1989) offers a definition—“for practitioners,... those preparing to enter the profession, and . . . curious others who have connections with the field”—that echoes Bryson’s: “Adult education is an intervention into the ordinary business of life—an intervention whose immediate goal is change, in knowledge or in competence” (p. 24). Darkenwald and Merriam (1982) are even more specific with regard to the two criteria cited above: “Adult education is a process whereby persons whose major social roles are characteristic of adult status undertake systematic and sustained learning activities for the purpose of bringing about changes in knowledge, attitudes, values, or skills” (p. 9).

Some definitions emphasize the learner, some the planning, and others the process. Long (1987) believes that adult education “includes all systematic and purposive efforts by the adult to become an educated person” (p. viii). Although critiqued for its emphasis on formal education that seems to exclude self-directed efforts, Verner’s often-cited definition (1964) focuses on planning: “Adult education is a relationship between an educational agent and a learner in which the agent selects, arranges, and continuously directs a sequence of progressive tasks that provide systematic experiences to achieve learning for people whose participation in such activities is subsidiary and supplemental to a primary productive role in society” (p. 32).

Probably the best-known definition emphasizing the process of adult education is that of Houle (1972). He argues that it is a process involving planning by individuals or agencies by which adults “alone, in groups, or in institutional settings ... improve themselves or their society” (p. 32). Finally, Knowles (1980b) also identifies adult education “in its broadest sense” as “the process of adults learning.” In its more technical sense, adult education is “a set of organized activities carried on by a wide variety of institutions for the accomplishment of specific educational objectives” (p. 25). Knowles also proposes a third meaning that “combines all these processes and activities into the idea of a movement or field of social practice” (p. 25).

Defining adult education, then, depends to some extent upon where one stands or, in keeping with the theme of this chapter, what counts. Experiences as an adult learner, and experiences with planning, organizing, and perhaps teaching in an adult educational setting lead to varying understandings of the field. What is common to all notions of adult education is that some concept of adult undergirds the definition, and that the activity is intentional. Likewise, the adult educator is one who has “an educational role in working with adults” (Usher and Bryant, 1989, p. 2). Therefore, we define adult education as activities intentionally designed for the purpose of bringing about learning among those whose age, social roles, or self-perception define them as adults.

Clearly, our definition and several of the others included above reflect a broad-based perspective on what counts as adult education: it is virtually any activity for adults designed to bring about learning. Thus, all of the examples at the beginning of this section would be considered adult education. Furthermore, we would consider the aerobics instructor, nurse, private consultant, literacy worker, and community activist all to be engaged in adult education.

Historically, the term adult education was preceded by several other terms designed to capture what was seen as a new educational phenomenon (Stubblefield and Rachal, 1992). In the nineteenth century, the term university extension was imported from England, but its meaning was too narrow to capture what was evolving in North America. “Popular education” was promoted by some in the late 1800s not only to include university extension but also to reflect a concern with appealing to the masses. The term home education was promoted by Melvil Dewey, inventor of the book-cataloguing system, to reflect general self-improvement for adults.

Sporadic use of the term adult education began to appear in the last decade or two of the nineteenth century, becoming more popular by about 1900. Stubblefield and Rachal (1992) write that “the period from 1891 to 1916 can be regarded as the gestational period in the evolution of the phrase that would both encompass and to a significant degree displace most of its competitors” (p. 114).

Three events occurred after World War I that served to cement the usage of adult education as the preferred term: a British publication reviewing the status of adult education was published, the World Association for Adult Education was formed, and the Carnegie Corporation became actively involved in establishing the field of adult education (Stubblefield and Rachal, 1992).

The scope of activities that the term adult education covers has evolved over the years. Knowles (1977), who documented the broad history of the field, observed that adult education has typically emerged in response to specific needs, and that its growth has been episodic rather than steady. In the Colonial period, for example, adult education had a moral and religious imperative, whereas after the colonies became a nation, adult education was more focused on developing leaders and good citizens.

The modern era of adult education has been concerned with educating and retraining adults to keep the United States competitive in a global economic market. In addition, population trends such as growing ethnic diversity and the “graying” of North America; the shift from an industrial to a service- and information-based economy, which is displacing workers and creating a need for retraining and new careers; and technological advances are forces shaping adult education today.

Various responses to these challenges have contributed to defining the meaning and scope of adult education. For example, the term human resource development (HRD) has sprung into use in North America in reference to the training, education, and development of employees in the workplace. Likewise, distance education reflects many of the technological advances that allow instruction to take place between geographically separated teachers and adult students.

Currently, there are multiple and sometimes competing conceptions of what adult education encompasses. Rubenson (1989), for example, points out that North American adult education is most often defined in terms of learners and learning, thus giving it a particularly psychological orientation in which “the context of education is largely ignored” (p. 59). Others see the context mainly in terms of technical and economic imperatives and thus are most comfortable with a human resource development orientation. Still others, such as Cunningham (1989), want a social action and community focus to have more prominence.

How we position ourselves to view the field is crucial to what is included in a...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Preface to the Updated Edition
• The Authors
• Part I - Foundations of Adult Education
• Part II - The Organization and Delivery of Adult Education
• Part III - Developing a Professional Field of Practice
• Epilogue: A Decade in Review and Trends for the Future
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index