Adult Education Quarterly

A growing national focus on prison reform has led to a resurgence of interest in carceral education. However, and although college education prison is different from college education in the community, relatively little scholarship has explored why or how these variations exist, what they mean, or how they have changed over time. The present paper aims to help fill this gap, exploring the significance of this context for adult learning. I ask: how does the context of a prison shape classroom dynamics and student learning? In answering the question, I employ qualitative and ethnographic methods that focus on giving voice to the perspective of the student-inmates themselves. I find that the isolated and oppressive characteristics of the prison can, paradoxically, offer unique opportunities for learning and scholarly achievement among incarcerated students. The paper’s findings invite reflection about the types of educational strategies often employed in prisons, and provide baseline data on some important social dynamics within prison classrooms.

Social-ecological systems face increasing disruptions and challenges, many deriving from human actions, and learning is frequently touted as “the way out” for addressing them. Using a systematic review of 26 studies that span about 20 years and cover four continents, this article interrogates the link between learning, action, and societal transformation toward sustainability. Transformative learning theory provides the analytical framework. Studies indicated abundant instrumental learning outcomes, and substantial communicative learning, while personal transformation was less common. Individual, interpersonal, and collective sustainability action resulted from various kinds of learning, underscoring the important role that learning can play in shaping individual sustainability behavior. Instrumental learning, in particular, provided the skills and knowledge necessary for action. While study findings confirm the fundamental importance of learning, actions were largely individual and had lesser impact at the societal level.

This study aims to analyze the effect of lifelong, notably adult and informal, learning experiences on the business capability and productivity of poor women entrepreneurs in rural Indonesia. The measures of entrepreneurial ability of the research subjects were in terms of their engagement, as microcredit receivers, in adult learning processes through daily production and selling activities; this includes the relative earnings gained from their income generating activities. The data collected are those from 400 respondents randomly selected from microcredit receivers of Bina Artha microfinance institutes in Cianjur, West Java, Indonesia. The data analysis focused on examining the effect of adult learning variables in comparison to school attendance on the women entrepreneurs’ business capability. The findings showed that some forms of adult and informal learning experiences had stronger effect on the entrepreneurs’ business capability than the school attendance. In light of the findings, it is to suggest that microcredit providers arguably should provide relevant skills training to improve lifelong learning experiences of microcredit receivers. This recommends that microcredit providers should take into account the benefits of lifelong learning experiences of microcredit receivers as one of the most important criteria for granting loan extension.

Immigrant mothers, who are socially constructed as an isolated group of people, are often excluded from the studies of adult learners. In adult education, few studies focus on immigrant mothers’ ways of learning, mothering, and knowing. Based on a critical ethnographical study, this article sheds lights on immigrant mothers’ learning in a foreign land. It unveils how immigrant mothers learn mothering skills and how their lifelong learning practice interacts with the ideology of mothering in contemporary neoliberal contexts. The data come from a 2-year critical ethnographic study that included 30 in-depth interviews with Chinese immigrant mothers in a Vancouver-based immigration settlement organization in Canada. The following five types of immigrant mothers’ lifelong learning practices are examined and analyzed: (a) learning parenting skills, (b) learning to find a job, (c) learning language, (d) learning to drive, and (e) learning to live a healthy lifestyle. This article argues that immigrant mothers’ lifelong learning practice constitutes a mechanism, one in which the ideology of mothering and immigrant mothers’ everyday learning and mothering deeply interact to reproduce race, gender, and class relations. This article concludes that there is a need to study immigrant mothers, as adult learners, and to reexamine knowledge systems, ideologies, and people’s different ways of knowing and learning in adult education.