Making Meanings: Exploring Teachers' Thinking in Adult Education.

The relationship between adult educators' disciplinary and pedagogic identities was explored through case studies of two adult educators. Both were males. One became an adult educator after spending 15 years as a social worker and social work trainer, and the other became a part-time adult educator after being a chartered surveyor. The former social worker stated that he continues to "trade on" his social work identity as a means of gaining credibility with some of his students but that he has become increasingly detached from some of the current received wisdom of the profession. Although he takes his teaching very seriously, he does not believe that he has made a transition into the pedagogic community of adult education. The former surveyor also takes his teaching very seriously; however, he conceives of it principally as the nurturing of a relationship with his students and as inducting them into the possibility of taking a more holistic approach to their own lives rather than feeling themselves to be labeled or constrained by their current course. The different approaches of both teachers was called into question a number of the assumptions underpinning the idea of a dimension along which disciplinary and pedagogic identities can be seen as in some way opposed. (11 references) (MN)