Adult Meaning Making In The Undergraduate Classroom

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.