Chapter 9: It Doesn’t End At 18: Insight Into Adult Human Development as an Instrumental Area for Preservice Teachers to Understand, Apply, and Teach

The broad field of educational psychology has long neglected to regard adulthood with the same importance as childhood and adolescence in lifespan human development. Early researchers believed that most development happened prior to adulthood, and this belief shaped what would become a tradition of focusing upon early development often at the expense of investigating developmental processes in adults (Louw &Louw, 2020).

Now, as teacher preparation programs face the monumental task of deciding what coursework will produce well-prepared, quality teachers when students graduate from their program, educational psychology courses have tended to be placed peripherally, often serving as a “gatekeeper” course to entering the teacher education program, implying the “real” teacher education begins with coursework following (Patrick et al., 2011).