Quality Learning for Positive Ageing: Voices of Older Learners

Quality Learning for Positive Ageing explores the views of older adult learners to understand the factors that contribute to ‘quality’ in later-life learning and how these relate to wellbeing, positive ageing, and gaining protection against cognitive decline.

Through capturing and considering the viewpoints of learners, facilitators and learning organisations, the author outlines the specific characteristics of quality that they associate with informal learning and how it can be enhanced through the adoption of simple strategies. Key topics covered include the implications of an increasing ageing population and barriers to older people learning as well as the cognitive, mental wellbeing, health, and social benefits of learning in later life. Illustrated throughout with vignettes of real later-life learners, this thought-provoking text unpicks how learners can maximise the benefits of learning in later life for themselves, how tutors can create learning opportunities that embody the characteristics of quality for them, and how providers can offer an environment that simply allows quality learning to flourish.

This accessible and comprehensive text will be of great interest to researchers of gerontology and ageing, educational gerontology, adult education, and lifelong learning as well as those engaged in dementia research.

Dr Alan Potter is a former teacher, adviser and Director of Education. His passion for learning, and research into understanding quality learning in later life, has led to him become a Later Life Learning specialist at Long Life Learning Ltd. (www.longlifelearning.co.uk) based in the United Kingdom.