Revisiting Adult Development: Changing Capabilities, Perspectives, and Worldviews

How do adults develop across their lifetimes? How do organizations and society help or hinder that process? How do we prepare adult educators to play a key role? Grappling with these abiding questions throughout our careers, we are increasingly aware of their centrality to building individual, organizational, and societal capabilities required to address pressing, complex challenges of our times that are driven by rapidly changing technology, increasing globalization, continued political and social unrest, and burgeoning environmental threats. Today's times call for a concerted effort to help adults to develop--to bring forth the capabilities required to address such compelling issues. This issue of Adult Learning addresses adult development within the context of changes in capabilities, perspectives, and worldviews that occur as people move through life. Our purposes are to highlight theory, practice, and research that increase understanding of adult development and to promote thoughts, discussions, and actions to support and encourage adult development. We conceptualize adult development as a broad, multi-dimensional, intellectual, emotional, cognitive, and transpersonal (TP) construct. We view it as directional (see Table 1). In other words, developing adults increases capabilities to dwell in the world as people, learners, managers, leaders, citizens, and so on. Given this premise, what do the shifts look like? What changes in behavior, thought, and insight do people experience? What triggers or propels changes? And what can educators, managers, and organizations do to help or hinder the processes of adult development? Contributors explore these questions. Taking an autobiographical approach in "Facilitation of Adult Development," Tom Boydell tells the story of his experiences in a Polytechnic and as a management consultant. Using the metaphor of a play, he describes and illustrates the evolution of thoughts, practice, and research throughout his career, relating these to adult development theory and to a developmental framework, Modes of Being and Learning--a stage model of development depicting shifts in worldview, the overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world. In "Intentionally Developmental Teaching: Applying Process Tools for Adult Learner Development," Marjorie Treffe and Steve Ernest define development "as the process by which adult learners mature" (p. 17), often occurring in more than a single domain or dimension, noting that development "may involve dialogical processes with oneself and others, becoming a continuous learner, increased agency, and perceptions of being part of something larger than oneself' (p. 17). They describe activities and process tools learners can use to intentionally and consciously drive development that were created and applied in a master's-level adult education course called Participation Training (PT). In "Identity Development in Personal Branding Instaiction: Social Narratives and Online Brand Management in a Global Economy," Ann Brooks and Chinedu Anumudu hone in on identity development, conceptualized by McAdams (as cited by Brooks & Anumudu, p. 24) as "an individual's internalized, evolving, and integrative story of the self" through personal narrative creation and personal branding. They examine one consulting firm's online self-study materials as a typical example of instructional materials for personal branding, which engage learners in a process to develop a coherent narrative identity as the basis of a brand that can be marketed. They ask what identity narratives typical personal branding instructional materials foster and how learning activities foster development of particular identity narratives. Finding the materials "model some of the best adult teaching and developmental instructional practices, while at the same time they deeply embed a particular social narrative into learners' personal identity narratives" (p. …