2016 Annual Conference

This session focuses on an exploration of the various forces interacting with the adult education environment. Forces are addressed through the metaphoric lens of tectonic plates, and strategic methods for negotiated responses and programmatic agility in the dynamic environment are presented.

The target audience includes educators, human resource development practitioners, program designers, administrators in community and higher education, and anyone with interest in the future challenges of adult education.

The significance of this session is that it centers on the various forces in the contemporary adult education environment. The presentation will begin by exploring the convergent, divergent, and transforming interactions of these forces using geological tectonic forces as an innovative metaphoric framework for understanding the pressures and their impact on program delivery or practice in a technologically oriented learning society. This will be followed by discussion of predictions, possibilities, and adjustments that will be needed in curriculum and philosophical approaches. Requirements for change-readiness, phenotypic plasticity and flexibility in delivery methodologies and practice will be discussed. Finally, proposed methods for responding to the dynamic environment will be presented and further explored with participants. The topic focus is vital because the contemporary environment of adult education is rife with competing interests of adult learners, challenging requirements of the workplace, changing needs in the community. These environmental forces are continuously reshaping the adult learning environment, therefore, addressing these forces is both timely and expedient, and will be a perpetual requirement well into the future.