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Applying Culture and Appreciative Education lenses, this qualitative study, eliciting detailed descriptions, examines six North American adult and higher education scholars' lived learning experiences and insights gained from their academic collaborations in and with the East. Our findings indicate that participants hold unique international collaboration experiences with commonalities. Most participants experienced language and cultural barriers in real-time, on-site collaborations that they would not have considered otherwise without these experiences. Many differences made them realize the fundamentals for intercultural collaborations. They consciously learned to reposition with appreciative mindsets and co-construct goals and solutions with counterparts. All participants indicated that transnational contexts enable profound reflective and authentic learning, renewed understandings of cross-cultural sensitivity, and different ways of thinking and doing. This study demonstrates that international collaborations promote adult learning with self-awareness for a new dimension of global learning and cultural competency in the internationalization of adult education.

Adult education, lifelong education, and lifelong learning have been playing critical roles in responding to contemporary, economic, political, social, and cultural challenges in many parts of the world. This article looks at the new vistas of adult and lifelong education/learning from Eastern perspectives, which highlights the state of adult and continuing education from some Asian countries. It especially focuses on some current themes these countries present. From this material, some implications for the field of adult and continuing education are shared.

Immigration is a hotly debated and deeply polarizing topic in American society. The past few decades have seen an influx of immigrants from Asia, Africa, and the Americas who contend with having a double-minority status. This qualitative study advances an understanding of the lived experiences and acculturation process of immigrant academics of color within American academia. Findings indicate struggles of cultural disequilibrium, marginalization, and the challenges of gaining or regaining cultural, professional, and social capital. Their experiences and perspectives have explicit implications for adult learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disease resulting from complex interaction involving genetic and environmental risk factors on background of aging. In terms of genetic risk factors, recent studies provided a growing number of evidence for the idea that certain polymorphisms in familiar Parkinsonism genes may contribute to risk for sporadic PD in populations of specific ethnic backgrounds. To address this issue, a case-control study was conducted to determine the prevalence of LRRK2 Pro755Leu variant in 401 patients with sporadic PD and 398 unrelated healthy controls in Han population from mainland China. Heterozygous LRRK2 Pro755Leu variant was found in four patients and two healthy controls, but no statistical differences in genotypic or allelic frequencies between PD and control groups (genotype: P=0.686; allele: P=0.687) were detected. Furthermore, to evaluate its role in ethnic Chinese population, a meta-analysis was performed on Pro755Leu in population of Chinese ancestry throughout Asia. And it was detected at a similar frequency in PD and control cohort (Z=0.48, P=0.63, odds ratio=1.44, 95% CI: 0.32-6.40). Given these findings, it was quite reasonable to suppose that LRRK2 Pro755Leu variant rarely increased risk for PD in ethnic Chinese population in Asia., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.)