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This research explores the question of whether the current thinking in the adult education literature on how to teach adult students reflects the best thinking about good teaching. Two bodies of literature are reviewed. First, the literature on good teaching is reviewed to get a sense of the dominant ideas about how to recognize and judge good teaching. Then, the literature on teaching adults is reviewed both to determine the dominant ideas and to analyze the extent to which those ideas are reflective of the best ideas about good teaching. In depth interviews are presented with four people who teach in undergraduate programs at colleges or universities and who teach both 18 to 22-year old undergraduates and adult students. The teachers were asked to talk about their lives growing up and being students in order to show the effect of those events on their ideas about teaching. Each teacher then discussed the question of good teaching by talking about his or her own teaching practices. The analysis of the interviews concludes that none of the teachers use practices that are advocated in the adult education literature. The teachers all acknowledge that adult students are different from their younger counterparts; none of them say that those differences are fundamental to the activity of teaching. The conclusion of the dissertation is that good teaching is good teaching, no matter the age of the student, and that the adult education literature does not generally reflect the best ideas about good teaching. In fact, the research points out that much of the literature in the entire field of education does not incorporate the best ideas about good teaching. More research needs to be done on good teaching, and more work needs to be done to ensure that the best ideas about good teaching are reflected in the education literature.

I suggested that some of the world's troubles may be relieved if social change is driven by activism which is informed by moral philosophy. Teachers who are social activists may illustrate a way to ground their work as both teachers and activists in reflection which provides clarification of assumptions and a moral basis for social action. They might also show a way to cope with criticism of activism as mindless or dangerous as well as criticism of moral education and controversial issues education as biased or lacking in objectivity. I interviewed six teachers of science or social studies who are social activists outside the classroom. Their concerns included feminism, environmentalism, politics, community, racism, abortion, violence, poverty, prolife and nuclear issues. I discussed with them their lives, work and thinking and found a wide range of experiences and views. Yet all their views fit in the range of views described by philosophers as teleological (consequence-based) or deontological (rule-based). They were also philosophical in their own right. I concluded that the moral basis of their activist and classroom work justified disclosure of their views to students, and sets their work as a model for the encouragement of student and citizen activism in the 'real world'.

Although popular education efforts developed during the decade of Sandinista government in Nicaragua were singularly successful in promoting literacy and constructing popular power, they were limited by an exclusive focus on class analysis and a masculine epistemological framework. In the deployment of the practice-theory-practice methodology of popular education, the specificities of women's day-to-day experience--centered in both private and public realms, and including subjective as well as "objective" dimensions--were not considered as aspects of that practice or reality. Because reality was not understood dialectically, (a) its transformation was limited to the public sphere, at the expense of challenging inequalities for women in the domestic realm; (b) was concerned only with women's immediate needs, at the expense of the strategic gender needs which must be pursued if women are to overcome their marginalization; and (c) neglected women's intimate, psychological aspects, at the expense of examining sources of rivalry and competition between women so that a new form of "sisterhood" or "power-with" could be developed to replace the verticalism and "power-over" inherent in the male exercise of power. Feminist pedagogy might contribute more to popular education than a modification of content--adding gender consciousness to class analysis, and introducing themes such as the validation and reclaiming of women's bodies in order to deconstruct their subordinated identities. By recognizing the existence of multiple forms of oppression and the complexity of interconnected power relations, this pedagogy has opened pathways toward achieving a holistic approach to confronting oppression by means of educational practices. Using power relations as a point of departure for popular education, regardless of the specific context of any particular group, would allow the development of the critical consciousness, common visions, and collective will to strive for comprehensive equity in social relations.

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