ADULT EDUCATIONuniversities now educate almost as many adults as
youth; in the United States almost half of all col-
lege students are adults above twenty-five years of
age. With increasing frequency, these students
study in divisions of colleges and universities spe-
cifically dedicated to adults.
The functional and organizational diversity of
adult education is mirrored in its professions and
occupations. Those working in the field include
the administrators, researchers, and professors in
university graduate programs that train adult edu-
cators and maintain adult education as an academ-
ic discipline. Teachers and student-service person-
nel in university, governmental, and proprietary
organizations deliver graduate, undergraduate, and
continuing education to adults. Managers, train-
ers, and associated marketing and support person-
nel staff the employee, technical, and professional
training industry. Adult literacy and basic educa-
tion practitioners form a specialization of their
own. Professional activists, organizers, and volun-
teers consciously include adult education in the
portfolio of skills that they apply to pursuits rang-
ing across the full spectrum of ideologies and
interests. Policy analysts, planners, researchers,
and administrators staff the adult education divi-
sions of international organizations, national and
regional governments, and independent founda-
tions and development agencies.
While those who occupy these professional
statuses and roles are clearly doing adult educa-
tion, not all identify themselves as adult educators
or, even when sharing this identity, see themselves
as engaged in similar practice. The field is concep-
tually, theoretically, and pedagogically heteroge-
neous both within and among its many sectors.
Role identity and performance differences based
in organizational setting and population served
are compounded by differences in fundamental
aims and methods. One of the sharpest divides is
between many in the ‘‘training and development’’
industry and those in academia and elsewhere who
identify with ‘‘adult education’’ as a discipline, as a
profession and, sometimes, as a social movement.
Training and development specialists tend to
define their task as cultivating human resources
and capital that can be used productively for the
purposes of businesses, armed forces, government
agencies, and other formal organizations. For train-
ing line employees, and all employees in technical
areas, they tend to emphasize teaching and learn-
ing methodologies that maximize the efficiency
and effectiveness of individual acquisition of skill
sets that can be easily and usefully applied to well-
established performance objectives. For executive
and managerial development, they tend to empha-
size leadership, team, problem-solving, strategy,
and change management competencies in the con-
text of developing general organizational learn-
ing, effectiveness, and continuous quality improve-
ment (Craig 1996).Those who identify themselves as adult educa-
tors, on the other hand, tend to emphasize theo-
ries and methods designed to ‘‘facilitate’’ individu-
al transformation and development. Variants of
the facilitation model advocated by the adult edu-
cation profession include the following: one per-
spective focuses on the special characteristics of
learning in adulthood, and on ‘‘andragogy’’ as a
new type of specifically adult teaching and learn-
ing distinct from pedagogy, as critical to successful
adult education (Knowles 1980); another empha-
sizes adult life circumstances and experiences as
key variables (Knox 1986); a third sees facilitating
new critical and alternative thinking as the key to
successful adult transformation (Brookfield 1987);
and yet another sees adult education as active,
consciousness-transforming engagement with so-
cial conditions to produce individual liberation
and progressive social change (Coben, Kincheloe,
and Cohen 1998). Common to all of the facilita-
tion approaches is the ideal of adult education as a
democratic, participatory process wherein adult
educators facilitate active learning and critical re-
flection for which adult learners themselves as-
sume a large measure of responsibility and direction.Theoretical and ideological differences among
adult education practitioners draw sharper lines
than does their actual practice. Active learning
techniques through which concepts, information,
and skills are acquired in the course of real or
simulated practical problem solving, strongly ad-
vocated by professional adult educators, have been
embraced by the corporate training and develop-
ment industry. Educational technology tools such
as interactive, computer-based learning modules
and Web-based tutorials, tools most robustly de-
veloped by the training industry, enable precisely
the kind of independent, self-directed learning
celebrated by the adult education profession. In