Making Space: Merging Theory and Practice in Adult Education

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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.

Reviews

"Making Space: Merging Theory to Practice in Adult Education is an essential and timely text for educators, students, and practitioners. The critical and reflective essays contained in this book challenge the field's current perspective and engages the existing literature in a debate that is sorely needed and long absent. Sheared and Sissel have edited a book that is a breath of fresh rigorous theoretical air with chapters that are diverse in approaches and with authors who represent inclusive viewpoints."-Juanita Johnson-Bailey Assistant Professor of Adult Education University of Georgia
"A pioneering, comprehensive, and ambitious attempt to construct a new adult education theory and practice."-Harold W. Stubblefield Professor Emeritus, Adult Learning & Human Development Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
"The importance of this book lies as much in its evolution as in its rich content...[A]n important reminder of the many voices and viewpoints which are too often ignored....In sum, this book offers the field a useful tool which can be used to foster reflection, reflexivity, critical thinking and a more informed dialogue."-Dr. Joyce Stalker School of Education University of Waikato, New Zealand
.,." aimed at scholars and practitioners in the field of adult education, presents a variety of critical adult education and lifelong learning frameworks that make "spaces" not only for established voices but also for voices from such marginalized others as Latinos, gays and lesbians, and feminists....will appeal to social activists and adult education practitioners, members of the general public who wish to understand their underrepresented views, and adult education practitioners who seek to expand programs that attract social activists."-Choice
... aimed at scholars and practitioners in the field of adult education, presents a variety of critical adult education and lifelong learning frameworks that make "spaces" not only for established voices but also for voices from such marginalized others as Latinos, gays and lesbians, and feminists....will appeal to social activists and adult education practitioners, members of the general public who wish to understand their underrepresented views, and adult education practitioners who seek to expand programs that attract social activists.-Choice
..." aimed at scholars and practitioners in the field of adult education, presents a variety of critical adult education and lifelong learning frameworks that make "spaces" not only for established voices but also for voices from such marginalized others as Latinos, gays and lesbians, and feminists....will appeal to social activists and adult education practitioners, members of the general public who wish to understand their underrepresented views, and adult education practitioners who seek to expand programs that attract social activists."-Choice

Author Bio

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.