Teaching, Coaching and Mentoring Adult Learners : Lessons for Professionalism and Partnership

The challenge for those coaching, mentoring, supervising or teaching adults is to design and deliver high-quality programmes that encompass a blend of teaching and learning approaches and strategies, that are constructed for adult learners in multiple educational environments and that cater for the diversity of adult learners’ needs. Adult learners are complex individuals who come to the learning process with a multitude of different experiences. Teaching, Coaching and Mentoring Adult Learners helps practitioners step up to this challenge by developing the skills needed to share their expertise with adult learners and engage them in new transformative practices.

This book also forms a timely contribution to the current period of evolution in adult education, where extreme changes in the nature and scope of work and the globalisation of work and life are influencing learning. The shift in adult education addressed in this book includes:

• the globalisation of the workforce and the cultural impact on adult, tertiary and further education
• the relationship established between adult educators and adult learners
• provision of adult education and professional development by private and major multimedia and corporate interests
• occupations boundaries between professions and between skilled and unskilled work
• assessing adult learners’ needs and adapting strategies to meet the perceived needs of adult learners in medicine, education, psychology and industry
• designing learning experiences to maximise the processing of complex conceptual knowledge and then transforming the knowledge to fit new learning environments
• the role of new technologies of learning in adult and vocational learning.

This book provides research-based insight into the expectations and the value of the coach, mentor, tutor and supervisor roles and combines research with strategic guidance to support the implementation of innovative techniques through case studies, strategies and methodologies in teaching and learning in higher education and professional learning. Bringing together insights from an expert range of international contributors, this text will be invaluable to higher education professionals and those involved in supervising, coaching and mentoring in the workforce.

Heather Fehring is Professor in the School of Education at RMIT University, Australia.

Susan Rodrigues is Professor in Science Education at Liverpool Hope University, UK.