Adult Education Quarterly

Concurring with Cunningham’s assessment of the need for a counterhegemonic vision of critical pedagogy in adult education thought and practice, this article theorizes a coalition-engendered education as a specific type of emancipatory pedagogy common in North America. Examining the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s body education as an exemplar of coalitionengendered education, this article compares and contrasts coalition-engendered education with the more familiar Freirean critical pedagogy, drawing important implications for both the theory and practice of adult education.

Well-educated Korean women are returning to higher education in unprecedented numbers. The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand the motivations of these women for returning to higher education. In-depth interviews were conducted with 13 Korean full-time housewives aged 25 to 45 who already had a bachelor’s degree and who enrolled as students at a 4-year university, a graduate school, or a university-affiliated lifelong education center. The major finding of this study was that the reentry women returned to school to reclaim their identities as independent individuals. Respect for scholarship in Korean society made their return to school an acceptable escape from the boring and isolated life of full-time housewives.

Globalization and individualization have radically changed both the economic system and the personal life world in industrial or postindustrial nation-states. To survive hypercompetition and volatile consumer choice, learning organizations and a workforce engaged in lifelong learning are needed. Constructing “the good life” has become an individual responsibility demanding reflexivity and skills. The question pursued in this article is how current policies in the context of lifelong learning relate to the requirements of a competitive economy, on one hand, and the good life on the other hand. To be able to evaluate dominant and alternative answers thoroughly in terms of lifelong learning, the authors look at the consequences of globalization and individualization. After having analyzed lifelong learning policies in the Netherlands, the article examines an important alternative, the so-called biographicity approach. In conclusion, the authors outline their own “transitional learning” perspective as an integral approach to lifelong learning as life-wide learning.

Adult educators stress the importance of civic education, but few studies have theorized and measured the impact of such educational programs. This study presents a social cognitive model of political participation that posits connections among deliberative education, civic dispositions, and political conversations. The validity of this model was tested using two field studies of National Issues Forums participants, and the results provided partial support for the model. The first investigation indicated that deliberative civic education had a negative relationship with participants’ group efficacy and conversation dominance and positive associations with the ideological and demographic diversity of participants’ conversation networks. A second study demonstrated that civic dispositions and behaviors were positively associated with forum experiences that involved higher levels of reading, listening, observing, and enactment. These findings suggest the potential value of deliberative forums as a means of civic education, but they also demonstrate that forums vary considerably in their educational impact.