Making Space: Merging Theory and Practice in Adult Education

Representative of a wide range of adult education and lifelong learning frameworks and experiences, this book gives voice to emerging perspectives and offers thought-provoking critiques of established practices and accepted theories. Those in the adult education academy, as well as other voices often excluded from the discourse in adult education, offer critiques of the social, political, economic, and historical forms of hegemony in the discipline. They analyze the ways in which these hegemonic norms and practices have affected adult learning environments and the participation rates of varying groups and shed light on how adult education as a field of practice can marginalize individuals based on their ethnicity, race, gender, class, language, age, or sexual orientation. These critiques provide a powerful statement about silence, invisibility, and the marginalization of the other, and suggest that adult educators may complicitly, if not implicitly, marginalize adult learners.

This book will provide professors and students, adult literacy teachers, corporate trainers, community-based organizers, and others with alternative ways to think about adult education practice, adult learners, and the multiple, intersecting realities that influence the teaching/learning transaction. In so doing, this book provides practitioners and academicians with a forum to dialog about emerging theories and practices, and through the discourse they can begin to merge theories and practices through language that is accessible and inclusive.

VANESSA SHEARED is Associate Dean in the College of Education at San Francisco State University, where she has been actively involved in working with both public, community-based, and higher education programs./e She served on the Board of Directors of the American Association for Adult and Continuing Education Conference for five years.

PEGGY A. SISSEL was formerly Associate Professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock./e She was a former member of the Commission of Professors in Adult Education Board of Directors.