Third International Handbook Of Lifelong Learning

[Alayna Rother]

Aslifelong learning grows in popularity, few comprehensive pictures of the phenomenon have emerged. The Routledge International Handbook of Lifelong Learning provides a disciplined and complete overview of lifelong learning internationally.

The theoretical structure puts the learner at the centre and the book emanates from there, pointing to the social context beyond the learner.

Up-to-the-minute syntheses from many of the leading international experts in the field give vital snapshots of this rapidly evolving subject from wide-ranging perspectives including:

This authoritative volume, essential reading for academics in the field of Lifelong Learning, examines the complexities of the subject within a systematic global framework and places it in its socio-historic context.

Peter Jarvis is an internationally renowned expert in the fields of lifelong learning, adult and continuing education and is founding editor of The International Journal of Lifelong Education (Taylor & Francis). He is Professor of Continuing Education at the University of Surrey, UK, honorary Visiting Professor at City University and Professor of the University of Pecs, Hungary (honoris causa).

I have tried to stay fit since my teens, and four decades later, I was still training at the same intensity until pain in my joints creeped in. Like any stubborn person in denial, I ignored it and suffered. Then I spent a weekend with my sister and her husband, who showed me an innovative approach to strength training that would put less stress on my joints and at the same time increase my strength.

After doing my own research, I decided to switch from my intense weight lifting to Blood Flow Restriction (BFR) training, as he had suggested. With this, you place a cuff or band above your bicep and tricep to restrict blood flow to muscles during exercise. This enhances muscle strength and hypertrophy at about one-third the weight compared to traditional training, and strikes a balance between optimizing muscle development and recovery while minimizing stress on joints and tissues.

As a school leader in the second half of my life, this experience was not just a personal win-win but it led me to consider a larger payoff: Continuing to learn and develop new ways to improve my quality of life is an approach I can model with my learning community.

Steven Kotler challenges the conventional wisdom about aging and learning, and shows how testing the limits of an aging body and mind can transform our later years. It can make us more effective and resilient, and prove that we can model for others the value of learning no matter who or where you are in your developmental stages. For school leaders like me, Kotler's insights offer lessons on how continuous learning enhances an ability to support my school community far beyond conventional leadership.

Kotler's experiment is grounded in neuroscience and psychology. He debunks the "long slow rot theory" of aging, and instead presents evidence about how our brains remain pliant and capable of growth well into later years, and allows us to acquire new skills and adapt to challenges, provided we continue to engage in active learning.

One of the key scientific concepts Kotler explores is the idea of "flow," a state of deep focus and immersion in an activity. Flow is achievable at any age but is crucial for maintaining cognitive health and peak performance as we age. By pushing oneself to learn new, complex skills, older adults like me can still achieve high levels of performance and satisfaction.

For school leaders, these principles can be directly linked to our role as school leaders, helping us be better leaders and models for our school communities through continuous adaptation and learning.

This is the oxymoron of leadership. We are expected to project a certain image at the very same time children need fallible adults who demonstrate they can still learn, mentors who can inspire them to grow in a remarkably imperfect upward progression.

Discovering Blood Flow Restriction (BFR) training later in life allowed me to improve my strength and muscle tone without stressing my joints, illustrating the power of lifelong learning. Kotler's work on lifelong learning and cognitive flexibility show how I can better support my school community by modeling continuous growth and encouraging students and staff to embrace new challenges and learning outcomes.

She asked me, "Based on neuroscience, what can we tell parents about choosing a preschool for their children?" When I answered, "Based on neuroscience, absolutely nothing," I heard a gasp on the other end of the line. The journalist politely suggested that I must have been living under a rock for the past four years. She told me that there was a wealth of new neuroscience out there that suggested otherwise.

In early 1996, I read Sharon Begley's February 19 Newsweek article, "Your Child's Brain." Although I was glad to see that brain science was getting cover-story attention, some of the claims and statements in the article, especially those offered by childcare advocates who were not brain scientists, seemed farfetched. But that is not unusual in popular articles about science and research.

In spring 1996, because I was on the media list, I saw an advance copy of the aforementioned Carnegie Corporation report, Years of Promise, which briefly touched on what the new brain science might mean for educational practice. The report's discussion of the brain science was so fleeting that I dismissed the neuroscience as rhetorical window dressing to increase interest in educational policy and reform. About that time, during a visit to the MacArthur Foundation, I read an editorial in the Chicago Tribune titled "The IQ Gap Begins at Birth for the Poor." In this piece, as in others I was now collecting in my file cabinet, the writer claimed that applying the new brain science offered "the quickest, kindest, most promising way to break" the cycle of poverty and ignorance among the nation's poor and to "raise the IQs of low-scoring children (who are disproportionately black)...."

However, the more I read, the more puzzled I became. For the previous eighteen years, at three private foundations, I had been following research and awarding grants in education, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience. All during that time, I was wondering when I would begin to see credible research that linked brain science with problems and issues in child development and education. I was puzzled because, despite what the headlines proclaimed and the articles stated, I had not yet seen any such research.

In late spring 1996, I had received an invitation to attend a July workshop in Denver, Colorado, sponsored by the Education Commission of the States and the Charles A. Dana Foundation. The workshop's title was "Bridging the Gap Between Neuroscience and Education." Based on the reputations of the sponsoring organizations, I thought that the workshop would offer an ideal opportunity for me to learn about the new brain research and its implications. Unfortunately, I had a scheduling conflict and could not go, but my colleague, Dr. Susan Fitzpatrick, a neuroscientist, attended in my place.

When she returned from Denver and briefed me about the meeting, I had expected to hear about new research linking brain development, child development, and education. Instead, she began her briefing with a one-word description of the workshop: "Bizarre." She told me, and my subsequent reading of the workshop report confirmed, that there was little neuroscience presented in Denver and certainly none that I had not previously known about. There were, however, Susan told me, wide-ranging policy discussions, bordering on the nonsensical, in which early childhood advocates appealed to what might be most charitably described as a "folk" understanding of brain development to support their favorite policy recommendations. Reflecting on the Denver meeting and its report, it seemed as if there was, in fact, no new brain science involved in the policy and media discussions of child development. What seemed to be happening was that selected pieces of rather old brain science were being used, and often misinterpreted, to support preexisting views about child development and early childhood policy.

Thus, my response to the journalist's call reflected my conviction, based on what I had read and heard up to that point, that there was no new brain science that could tell parents anything about choosing a preschool. Her call, however, did change how I thought about the issue. If claims about brain science were confined to rhetorical flourishes in policy documents like Years of Promise or to the editorial page of the Chicago Tribune, it was probably relatively harmless. It might even draw attention to some important issues that policymakers and newspaper readers might otherwise ignore. However, it struck me as a very different matter if people were taking the brain science seriously as a basis for policy and legislation and if parents were asking what the new brain science meant for raising their children and choosing schools. Following that call, I was no longer comfortable being merely puzzled or bemused about what I read in the newspapers. I wanted to understand what was going on and to consider more carefully what the brain science might actually mean for children, parents, and policy.

My job as a foundation officer responsible for funding research in mind, brain, and education, plus some strategic letters from colleagues, earned me an invitation to the April 17, 1997, White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning: What New Research on the Brain Tells Us About Our Youngest Children. For those interested in children and education, the conference was an exciting development. It promised to focus the nation's interest, even if only for a few days, on science, children, and related, highly significant social issues. What better occasion could there be to understand the growing enthusiasm for what brain science meant for parenting and policy?

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