Higher Education and Lifelong Learning

• Simon Marginson

Higher education can be understood as a process of self-formation that enables the student to become more self-determining. But how does this idea play out today’s high-participation HE systems? They have made educated human capabilities more widespread, yet the opportunities to use them seem to be shrinking as societies become more unequal.

Educational opportunities, motivation and attainment in times of social change

• Ingrid Schoon
• Rainer K. Silbereisen

This book brings together research by leading experts and young scholars in psychology, sociology, economics, social policy and education to investigate how social inequality, individual motivation and social change make a difference to young people as they negotiate their transition to adulthood.

Power and professionalism in FE

• Maire Daley
• Kevin Orr
• Joel Petrie

Using Machievelli’s ‘The Prince’ as a metaphor, the contributors stringently examine how power is exercised and experienced in the Further Education sector and where it is leading. Playfully but with fierce commitment to FE, they consider adult education and the FE systems throughout the UK and in Ireland and Australia.

• Louise Webber

Women with families face particular challenges when they undertake Higher Education, such as coping with the demands of study, new family routines, and the changed identity when mother becomes student. This book is a valuable guide for women in similar situations, and will enhance the understanding of tutors, lecturers and policymakers.

An appreciation of the work of Gareth Williams

• Ronald Barnett
• Paul Temple
• Peter Scott

Leading international analysts examine Gareth Williams’s contribution to the economics of higher education in essays that are a testimony to Williams’s conception that the field cannot be properly understood unless viewed alongside social policy, changes in knowledge production, the life chances of students, and their actual learning experience.

Narratives of first-generation African Caribbean women

• Jan Etienne

The benefits are explored of lifelong learning for black Caribbean women who came to Britain in the 1950s and ’60s. We see the social and cultural identities they bring to learning, their sisterhood as they rise above past oppression. Notions of ageing in poor health, poverty and isolation are challenged by the learners’ different, happier reality.

Reflections on the past and future role of further education colleges in England

• Ann Hodgson

In this detailed, scholarly and yet remarkably accessible collection, Ann Hodgson brings together leading FE researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, from whose work emerges a fascinating narrative of the development of the sector and the place it finds itself in today.

• Maire Daley
• Kevin Orr
• Joel Petrie

In the Brothers Grimm tale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses they escape from the room they are locked in to dance all through each night. Using this as a metaphor for the possibility of subversion and autonomy in FE teaching, twelve practitioners suggest professional development that will culminate in a collective, celebratory result.

Adult learning in Britain today

• Philip Stevens

Rita and Gerald traces the history of adult learning in the UK through six renowned institutions, from Ruskin College to the OU. The stories of 150 students studying courses ranging from entry-level English to post-graduate degrees chart how adult education has adapted to change over two centuries and show why the sector is needed more than ever.

• Bryan Cunningham

This collection offers a range of perspectives on the ways in which societal, legislative, and educational trends have transformed the work of the academic. The book reminds readers that academic life has never been static, and that new times have brought forth new professional conditions, expectations, identities, and paradigms.