Fundamentals of Adult Education: Foundations, Practice, Issues. Deo H. Poonwassie and Anne Poonwassie (Eds.).(2001). Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, Inc., 312 pages.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I read Fundamentals of Adult Education with the deliberate purpose of assessing whether it would be suitable as a class text for introducing Canadian practitioners to the adult education literature.As I read, my answer became a firm "yes."It is pleasantly readable, covers many of the diverse topics one might expect, discusses both practice and theory, and invites further discussion and investigation.The editors intend the book to be of particular interest for beginning students at universities and colleges, and I believe it will be.The book has three sections and twenty chapters, each by a different author.The first section, not surprisingly, explores "Foundations."The reader encounters a little history, philosophy, social theory, and learning theory as it relates to adult education.The second section, "The Practice of Adult Education," presents some current views on needs assessment, program planning, and adult teaching as well as an overview of events in familiar institutions.Here, the reader finds accounts of both the "technical" and "contextual" elements of adult education practice.The third section, "Issues," presents a variety of new and continuing concerns ranging from access to the social role of lifelong learning in civil society.Although the topics and authors are diverse and do not follow a unifying theme, the writing styles are complementary and I moved easily from one selection to the next.References are generally up-to-date and appropriate, conveniently placed at the end of each chapter.Because Fundamentals casts its net wide it cannot, of course, explore any particular issue or area of practice with much depth.Readers who are already familiar with the literature of the field will find much that is left unsaid and few new insights.Similarly, not all important issues can be included.Fundamentals has chapters discussing union, First Nations and feminist education, but lacks chapters on such current and important topics as health, the environment, anti-poverty, or anti-racism.Because the authors present short introductions to topics and issues, many of them tend to describe rather than analyze.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".