Adult Development: A Global Imperative

As individuals and adult educators we consistently face an array of what seem to be increasingly complex challenges. These run the gamut from battling poverty and illness with their deleterious and deadly effects, to acquiring literacy and workplace competencies and to building expertise in communication, collaboration and innovation. And we live in a time of rapidly shifting technology, social and political unrest, and burgeoning environmental threats. How are we to grow, thrive and lead? One option is to consider what we can learn and apply from adult development theories and practices for own and others' intentional development--and then to deliberately act to foster adult development in individuals and within organizations and communities. There are, of course, many views of what constitutes adult development and how it occurs. In this paper, written to initiate dialogue and discussion, I focus on the perspective that development in adulthood represents a set of substantive qualitative changes that we may undergo moving from dependency to interdependency, from being shaped to a great degree by our environment, to constructing and co-creating thoughts and views. Theories, e.g., by Boydell, CookGreuter and Kegan, are related to concepts of individual, workforce and community development, and intentional/deliberate adult development practices in universities and the workplace are described. [For the full proceedings, see ED581791.]