The central question of how adults learn has occupied the attention of scholars and practitioners since the founding of adult education as a professional field of practice in the 1920s. Some eighty years later, we have no single answer, no one theory or model of adult learning that explains all that we know about adult learners, the various contexts where learning takes place, and the process of learning itself.What we do have is a mosaic of theories, models, sets of principles, and explanations that, combined, compose the knowledge base of adult learning. Two important pieces of that mosaic are andragogy and self-directed learning. Other chapters in this volume focus on some of the newer approaches to understanding learning; the purpose of this chapter is to revisit two of the foundational theories of adult learning with an eye to assessing their "staying power" as important components of our present-day understanding of adult learning. Early Research on Adult LearningWhile we have known for centuries that adults learn as part of their daily lives, it wasn't until the early decades of the twentieth century that learning was studied systematically. The question that framed much of the early research on adult learning was whether or not adults could learn. The first book to report the results of research on this topic, Thorndike, Bregman, Tilton, and Woodyard' s Adult Learning (1928), was published just two years after the founding of adult education as a professional field of practice. Thorndike and others approached adult learning from a behavioral psychological perspective. That is, people were tested under timed conditions on various learning and memory tasks.

Early discussions of insider/outsider status assumed that the researcher was predominately an insider or an outsider and that each status carried with it certain advantages and disadvantages. More recent discussions have unveiled the complexity inherent in either status and have acknowledged that the boundaries between the two positions are not all that clearly delineated. Four case studies -a Black woman interviewing other Black women, Asian graduate students in the US interviewing people from 'back home', an African professor learning from African businesswomen, and a cross-cultural team studying aging in a nonWestern culture -are used as the data base to explore the complexities of researching within and across cultures. Positionality, power, and representation proved to be useful concepts for exploring insider/outsider dynamics.What does it mean to be an insider or an outsider to a particular group under study? Can women understand men's experience? Can Whites study Blacks? Straights study gays? The colonized study the coloniz er? Early discussions in anthropology and sociology of insider/outsider status assumed that the researcher was either an insider or an outsider and that each status carried with it certain advantages and disadvantages. More recent discussions of insider/outsider status have unveiled the complexity inherent in either status and have acknowledged that the boundaries between the two positions are not all that clearly delineated. In the real world of data collection, there is a good bit of slippage and fluidity between these two states. Critical and feminist theory, postmodernism, multiculturalism, participatory and action research are now framing our understanding of insider/ outsider issues. In particular, the reconstruing of insider/outsider status in terms of one's positionality vis-à -vis race, class, gender, culture and other factors, offer us better tools for understanding the dynamics of researching within and across one's culture.

The link between development and learning is explicit in Mezirow’s theory of transformational learning. Indeed, numerous studies have documented that growth and development are outcomes of transformational learning. What has not been questioned, and what is argued in this Forum article, is that it appears one must already be at a mature level of cognitive functioning to engage in the transformational learning process. For transformational learning to occur, one must be able to critically reflect and engage in rational discourse; both of these activities are characteristic of higher levels of cognitive functioning.

Within the last few years, mentoring has emerged as a popular topic in several fields. Articles and talk shows imply that success in life is somehow related to having a mentor or being a mentor. The purpose of this review is to evaluate the extent to which such enthusiasm can be substantiated by research. The literature on mentoring is divided into three sections: the mentoring phenomenon in adult growth and development, mentoring in the business world, and mentoring in academic settings. A concluding section summarizes findings across these three settings, speculates about the relevance of mentoring for adult educators, and suggests avenues for future inquiry.

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