Learning for Life: Canadian Readings in Adult Education. Sue M. Scott, Bruce Spencer, and Alan M. Thomas (Eds.) (1998). Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This volume presents a broad overview of the field of adult education from a uniquely Canadian perspective, from its historical beginnings as a social movement to the current direction of educational provisions as market-driven consumer goods.Some of the major influences examined are theories (such as transformation) and trends of practices (such as self-directed learning, competency-based education, and prior learning assessment and recognition).This is a welcome addition to the field.It portrays adult education as a field that is continually re-inventing itself; however, the book is limited in that the portrayal it gives has some disturbing exclusions-exclusions that speak to the distance this field has yet to go if it is to ever capture the full meaning of this field's impact in Canada.The text is organized into three main sections that are further divided into two or three parts.In total there are 29 chapters with contributions by 24 researchers and practitioners in adult education.In the first section "Context and Aims," the six chapters trace the vitality, vision, and contribution to democracy of earlier adult education organizations, practitioners, and philosophies as well as the current challenges of professionalization, capitalist restructuring, social justice issues, and postmodern ideas.The second section, "Purposes," is the largest with 14 chapters covering a wide range of concerns such as learning organizations, workplace and labour education, transformation theory, prison education, education for older adults, spiritual dimensions of adult education, and English as a second language.The final section "Challenges and Future Visions" with two parts and six chapters charts developments and concepts such as self-directed and competence-based learning, prior learning assessment, and distance education; it concludes with arguments for what is needed for the future of adult education.Threaded throughout the chapters is a concern with adult learners: what, how, where, and why they learn.These concerns are examined within their historical perspective and also from the perspective of current and future needs.Authors such as Selman and Morin draw attention to paradigm shifts that have had major influence on learners.The traditional emphasis on connections between individuals and their society are abandoned in favour of a market-driven field of practice which has resulted in a focus on meeting the needs of individuals.This shift supports a move away from perceiving learners as producers of information and knowledge to learners as consumers of education.Evidence of this shift is found to a greater extent in formal learning sites and less so in community learning sites-for example with NGOs, where the social action purpose of adult education is seen to be upheld.Attention is drawn to the
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.003 |
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".