Review of Learning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide (3rd Edition)

For the Spring of 2015 IDT 525 course, Instructional Approaches in Learning and Cognition, the required text was Learning in Adulthood: A Comprehensive Guide (3rd Edition) by Sharan B. Merriam, Rosemary S. Caffarella, and Lisa M. Baumgartner.

This text has a little bit of everything in it, as it covers adult learning from many angles and addresses a little bit of a lot of different theories. Unfortunately it lacks focus and order, making it a tough read, and when you combine this with its bloated size (560 pages), this makes it a tough sell. At least it is not terrible expensive for a textbook, coming in at $48 from Amazon.

By trying to cover so much ground in one book, the authors were often unable to provide and context or background for the learning theories, and there is not enough depth for most of the theories so that additional research will need to be done by the reader if they want to learn more than the most basic details. Making matters worse, there is obvious bias to the writing, particularly when it comes to newer approaches to adult learning, including embodied, spiritual, and narrative learning, as well as non-Western learning perspectives.

The nicest thing I can say about this book is that it did lead me to do my own research into pedagogy, so slogging my way through it was not a complete waste of time. I decided to hold onto this book because I was not going to get much money for selling it back, but I certainly would not buy another one if it became lost or damaged.

Thanks for checking in, and next time we will start getting into the courses and books from summer semester of the MSIDT program.

Merriam, S., Caffarella, R. and Baumgartner, L. (2007). Learning in adulthood: A comprehensive guide (3rd Edition). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.