Adult undergraduate student identities at research extensive universities were uniquely coconstructed, shaped by this selective and competitive youth-oriented cultural context. Drawing upon social constructivist theory, this study explored this coconstruction through positional and relational adult student identities. Positional identities were coconstructed through negotiating academic acceptance in meeting demanding academic challenges and through facing otherness as a mature adult. These adults also viewed their positional identity based in an evolving sense of agency to academically succeed through goal oriented efforts, as well as through their adult maturity and life experiences. These adults articulated relational identities predominantly based in faculty’s tacit or explicit academic acceptance of them in one of four types of relationships. This study suggests that the adult undergraduate student identity is multi-layered, multi-sourced, evolving, and at times, paradoxical in beliefs of self, position, relationships, and learning contexts within the research extensive university setting.

This study explores adult undergraduate beliefs about their construction of knowledge in the class-room and the relationships between such knowledge and their adult roles outside the classroom. Five belief structures, called “knowledge voices,” were delineated from interviews with 90 adult students. These belief structures included the entry voice, the outside voice, the cynical voice, the straddling voice, and the inclusion voice. Each of these five knowledge voices suggests a particular construction of the adult student learning world, perceptions of knowledge, and understandings of relationships between the collegiate classroom and the adult learners’ worlds of work, family, self, and community.

Who are adult learners in higher education, and how do they differ from younger college students? In this chapter, the author presents an overview of adult student enrollment patterns, their participation motivators, and their lifestyle differences from younger college students.

No abstract

Through acts of hope, adults face four challenges of emotion in their pursuits of collegiate learning.