2003 Conference (Columbus, Ohio : Ohio State University)
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Item Working With Interdisciplinary Teams Of Boundary Spanners: The Challenges And Potential For Adult Education(Midwest Research-to-Practice Conference in Adult, Continuing, and Community Education, 2003) Wise, Meg; Glowacki-Dudka, MichelleInnovative research and development for holistic adult on-line health education (eHealth) is increasingly conducted by interdisciplinary teams of boundary spanners in grant-funded academic institutes. Typically, these teams include fields that represent the whole person with an illness in their social and technological context: medicine, nursing, social and counseling psychology, social work, systems engineering, and the communications and information sciences. However, adult education does not typically sit at these collaborative research tables. This paper uses a case example of a sole adult educator working in such a setting to explore how adult education fits into this new boundary-spanning field of practice and scholarship.Item Institutional Ethnography: A Tool For Merging Research And Practice(Midwest Research-to-Practice Conference in Adult, Continuing, and Community Education, 2003) Wright, Ursula T.Institutional ethnography draws from ethnomethodology focusing on how everyday experience is socially organized. Power is critically important as an analytic focus which crosses boundaries providing researchers a view of social organization that illuminates practices that marginalize.Item Multigenerational Adult Development Research Project In An Online Graduate Course In Adult Learning(Midwest Research-to-Practice Conference in Adult, Continuing, and Community Education, 2003) Merrill, Henry S.This paper describes research in two arenas. First is a research project using the life course dynamics perspective as a lens to investigate the patterns and timing of life events in multiple generations within extended family. Second is an experiment in the scholarship of teaching to pilot test this research project in an online graduate course in adult development and learning. The course is D505 Adult Learning through the Lifespan. The course description reads: Review of selected adult education literature describing the adult lifespan as it relates to participation in learning projects and adult education programming. Identify how social and cultural forces influence the engagement of adults in the learning process.Item Vaillant’s Contribution To Research And Theory Of Adult Development(Midwest Research-to-Practice Conference in Adult, Continuing, and Community Education, 2003) Nolan, Robert E.; Kadavil, NidhinVaillant’s recent synthesis of the findings of three longitudinal studies on aging adds new insights to our theories of adult development. These insights provide us with new sets of variables for quasi-experimental and even descriptive studies of successful aging. His frame of reference is fundamentally Erikson’s to which he adds two stages, Career Consolidation and Keeper of the Meaning. He arrived at his model inductively over years of qualitative and quantitative longitudinal observations.Item Professionalism, Ethics, And Welfare Reform: The Importance Of Ethical Competence(Midwest Research-to-Practice Conference in Adult, Continuing, and Community Education, 2003) Ianinska, SilvanaThis paper examines the professional ethics of welfare reform providers to determine its role in the achievement of welfare reform goals and to suggest an alternative context, based on professional ethics, for discussing the success or failure of welfare reform. Four themes emerged from the analysis of literature. First, patriarch authority keeps welfare women at the bottom of society. Second, different political interests weaken partnerships and services at the expense of welfare recipients. Third, welfare recipients are unjustly stereotyped and perceived as deficit-driven and as the single cause for their economic situation. Fourth, teachers’ beliefs, relationships, and learning environments hold a key to sustained and successful engagement and participation in welfare-to-work programs.Item Calculating, Interpreting, And Reporting Cronbach’s Alpha Reliability Coefficient For Likert-Type Scales(Midwest Research-to-Practice Conference in Adult, Continuing, and Community Education, 2003) Gliem, Joseph A.; Gliem, Rosemary R.The purpose of this paper is to show why single-item questions pertaining to a construct are not reliable and should not be used in drawing conclusions. By comparing the reliability of a summated, multi-item scale versus a single-item question, the authors show how unreliable a single item is; and therefore it is not appropriate to make inferences based upon the analysis of single-item questions which are used in measuring a construct.Item Adult Development Matters In Adult Education(Midwest Research-to-Practice Conference in Adult, Continuing, and Community Education, 2003) Scheer, Scott D.All to often in adult education settings, the learning strategies and methods that we use are tailored as one size fits all. A key component of effective adult learning that can be easily overlooked is the role of adult development with adult learning. This oversight is possible among adult educators because our knowledge base is grounded in education as compared to human development or developmental psychology. The point being made that the developmental characteristics of the adult learners should influence the teaching-learning strategies that are implemented. In other words, developmental differences between a 22 and 77 year-old should be accounted for in a community-learning setting.Item Challenging The Lure Of The Protean Career(Midwest Research-to-Practice Conference in Adult, Continuing, and Community Education, 2003) Truty, DanielaIn this paper I call attention to unique perspectives among workers and reassert that “worker” does not denote a categorical monolith, but rather a unique human being who perceives the same phenomena differently from everyone else. I position my assertion within the context of the seemingly unquestioned notion of the protean career. Referring to stories by people who participated in a qualitative study I conducted in 2001, I caution that the “emancipatory” qualities of the protean career might not be universally accepted; rather, for personal reasons of one’s own, these same characteristics could be perceived as disruptive of the order that one has constructed. Conclusions suggest that there may be workers like the people in the study I conducted, who find themselves engaged in the protean environment against their will. Even though on the surface they could be said to be taking their place among the residents of “free agent nation”, they might have preferred uninterrupted citizenship in the company wherein they were employed. Implications point to the importance of problematizing the blind acceptance and generalizability of the protean career.Item Non-Ethnic Minority Acceptance In Adult Education: Practice, Praxis, Or Still Just Theory(Midwest Research-to-Practice Conference in Adult, Continuing, and Community Education, 2003) Kvak, JamesThis paper offers the reader an opportunity to better understand the dynamics that occur in adult education classrooms and workshops when sexual orientation is integrated into the subject matter. This issue relates to how learning about sexual orientation can create new knowledge about ourselves, about our differences, about our humanity, and how learning is either created or suppressed in the field of adult education. The paper examines four concerns in relation to sexual orientation: The degree of emotional and physical safety for the gay adult learner in the classroom, the impact of homophobia on both the gay and heterosexual learner and instructor, the freedom and support accorded the adult educator to practice from the reality of their sexual orientation, and the efforts being made by the adult education field to search out and utilize the resources available on this subject-both theoretical and practical.Item Assessing & Improving Online Learning Using Data From Practice(Midwest Research-to-Practice Conference in Adult, Continuing, and Community Education, 2003) Merrill, Henry S.; DiSilvestro, Frank; Young, Raejean C.This research uses a qualitative case study approach to investigate online course instruction, and the dimensions of both learner and facilitator/instructor engagement. The research team analyzed archival data from course management software "Course Statistics," and coded indicators using word processing software to examine learner and facilitator writings in the courses.