Adult Education Curriculum

The Scope of Adult Education Curriculum

In general terms, adult education can be considered as a set of deliberately designed educational activities aimed at people over the age of compulsory schooling. This includes adult literacy and numeracy education, English as a second language, and some professional development and continuing education activities, though it has historically excluded formal settings such as colleges. There is a great deal of diversity of purpose, methods, audience, and curricular approach within those activities. One reason for this diversity is the lack of legislation framing adult education with any degree of consistency. Different organizations and jurisdictions take a different view of what education should be available to adults, where it should be provided, and how that provision should be funded. For example, adult literacy education, which one might expect to be relatively uniform, can be delivered by community organizations, community colleges, national nongovernmental bodies, or municipal organizations, and be taught by volunteers, part-time tutors, or K12 accredited teachers. The diversity of adult education is a key feature of the field.

Adult education has a strong tradition of radical, social justiceoriented education. Adult educators claim the work of Jane Addams's Hull House in the 1920s and 1930s, Myles Horton's Highlander Folk School of the 1930s, Moses Coady and the Antigonish movement in Canada in the 1930s, a variety of workers' education programs, and the work of Paulo Freire. Despite these radical examples, adult educators have often embraced a progressive, humanist view of curriculum in practice.

Since the late 20th century, there has been increasing use of the term lifelong learning to indicate education beyond schooling, a term that includes higher education and community colleges as well as more traditional nonformal sites of adult education. The lifelong learning agenda has created opportunity for adult educators by aligning their work with a broad set of policy priorities, but at the cost of accepting a marketized view of education. The idea of education as an instrument of human capital development is often an uncomfortable one for adult educators. These tensions and expectations profoundly affect the approaches to knowledge that manifest in adult education theory and practice.

Curriculum Approaches in Adult Education

Adult education has a long history of “classical” technical curriculum development, to some extent reflecting the pragmatic bias of the field. Ralph Tyler's Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction is currently used in many graduate adult education courses on program planning to illustrate early approaches to curriculum that were adopted and practiced within adult education. Tyler's rationale was adopted by adult educators and has been the basis of most theories of program planning in adult education since the 1950s; many adult educators argue that the Tylerian model has become the “classical” approach to adult education program planning. Although Tyler's approach is critiqued in current graduate courses and by adult education scholars in general as being too linear and for not capturing the politics of the planning process and the complexities of how planners actually operate (see Ronald Cervero and Arthur Wilson's work on the politics of program planning), Tylerian perspectives to planning can still be found in current adult education practice. For example, recent funding within the lifelong learning sector is often tied to specific instructional objectives and demonstrations of learner progress, and these are used as a basic element of program accountability.

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