Adult learners are people
- who have a good deal of first hand experience
- who have set habits and strong tastes
- who have some amount of pride
- who have tangible things to lose
- who have developed a reflex towards authority
- who have decisions to make and problems to solve
- who have a great many preoccupations outside a particular learning situation
- who are bewildered often by their options
- who have developed group behaviours consistent with their needs
- who have established emotional frameworks consisting of values, attitudes, and tendencies
- who are supposed to appear in control and who therefore display restricted emotional response (unless they feel very safe) who have strong feelings about learning situations
- who are secretly afraid of falling behind and being replaced
- who skip certain basics
- who perhaps more than once have found the foundations of their lives stripped away
- who can change
- who have a past
- who have ideas to contribute
Source: Davis, L.N. & McCallon, E: Planning, conducting & evaluating workshops – A practitioner’s guide to adult education learning concepts, Austin, Texas, 1974.