ABSTRACT
Existing approaches to understanding adult learning generally fall within one of three broad types. The first type seeks to provide a balanced overview of psychological, sociological and philosophical theory and research together with an assessment of its relevance to adult education (e.g. Cross, 1981; Long, 1983; Candy, 1991; Jarvis, 2004; Merriam and Caffarella, 1999; Rogers, 2003). The emphasis is generally pragmatic; a description of various aspects of psychology is developed into an eclectic understanding of how adults best learn, this may be followed by a tentative list of principles to be adopted or procedures to be employed when teaching adults. There will usually be some comments about the conceptual ambiguities of a theory or the difficulties in verifying a particular research finding, but these are often parenthetical comments, set aside from the thrust of the text. A second type of approach to understanding adult learning is one which has a clearly articulated thesis and which uses the literature to support the thesis being proposed (e.g. Knowles, 1978, 1984; Tough, 1979, 1982; Mezirow, 2000; Illeris, 2002). Typically there is an attempt to identify and draw upon a selected set of psychological, sociological and philosophical concepts and principles and thereby develop a programmatic (and sometimes prescriptive) statement about adult teaching and learning.
