Exploring the 'Black Box' of Process: A comparison of theoretical notions of the 'adult learner' with accounts of postgraduate learning experience

The literature concerning student learning in higher education is now wide ranging and diverse. This article suggests that whilst one strand of this literature appears to be describing learning as increasingly complex and difficult to understand, there is another strand that is using ideas about 'adult learning' in a simplistic and uncritical way. This appears to be particularly the case in some literatures connected with staff development. In response to a lack of research-based information about the relationship between ideas about 'adult' learning and the process of learning as described by adult learners themselves, particularly in higher education, a small research project was carried out. This aimed to explore individual accounts of the experience of learning to see whether or not such descriptions of process reflected the assumptions about 'adults' that appear to underpin this strand of writing. The experiences of these particular postgraduates revealed a diversity of approach and experience which did not fit with the idea of a distinctively 'adult' way of learning, and described a multiplicity of elements which did not appear in the dominant models.