Chapter 8: Design As Professional Development: The Inner and Outer Journeys of Learning to Develop Online Learning

The graduate students I teach aspire to work in various contexts of higher and adult education, and represent a wide range of practitioners, from teachers and program planners to administrators and counselors. For the most part, these students have not undertaken formal academic preparation in education. Our program in higher and adult education, like many around the country, emphasizes history, foundations, policy, theory, and research. The study of such a curriculum can be theoretically exciting and challenging, causing students to reflect on and possibly reframe many implicit assumptions they hold about education. It can be a valuable approach to developing future faculty in these areas. Because of their theoretical orientation, however, these approaches risk not speaking directly to the practice contexts in which most of our students work or will work. This is particularly true for a course in adult learning that I have taught for many years. Often a core component of programs in adult education, as well as many higher education programs, such a course often focuses on a systematic review of research and theory on the sociocultural contexts for adult learning, participation and motivation, individual differences in adult learning, and various theoretical approaches to understanding how adults learn (Merriam & Caffarella, 1999). In other words, they are heavy on research and theory and light on practical application.