Adult Education: R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I started my fifth year as an assistant professor of Adult Education. I like my job. I believe that people teaching other adults should recognize that both the student and teacher are teaching and learning.

However, I also recognize that professors of Adult Education DO have more knowledge about the areas in which they specialize.

Sometimes this sense that AE professors have expertise gets lost in the whole "let's just share our experiences we are all teachers and learners." Yes, we are. But we also have an expertise in an area of AE. My areas include adult learning, adult development, and literature related to race, class, gender and AE and some social justice movements, reproduction and resistance theory etc. Others have a particular expertise in workplace learning, historical movements in adult ed and HRD.

Adult Education programs and departments in the academy are at best understood and supported. More often the programs are misunderstood and at worst ignored (and sometimes reviled). So, in some areas of the country our programs are marginalized. In some areas of the country, we are hanging on for dear life. (Thank God, that is not the situation at the largest AE program in the nation--NIU). This is not the time to act as if just anyone can do our job in the academy.

Clearly, they can't. If they actually knew something about how to teach adults and how to plan programs (only two of the expertises of AE profs) there would be a lot more activity and a lot less lecture in courses across the academy and programs would be a lot more interesting, sensitive to stakeholders, and well-planned.

Some people don't want to listen to the benefits of AE and AE programs in their institutions. Their loss. Others are open to listening. Talk. Yes, we have learned and have knowledge about things relevant and vital to the academy. Let's start talking!