Contexts, Practices and Challenges: Critical Insights from Continuing Professional Education

Book excerpt: Lifelong learning has become essential not only for professionals, but also for those they serve. Continuing professional education (CPE), an umbrella term used to describe the continuum of formal, nonformal, and informal learning opportunities that enable practicing professionals to continue to learn and to maintain professional competence across their careers, is the focus of this collection. The volume explores, analyzes, questions, and critiques CPE trends and issues across a variety of contexts, and it highlights new thinking and developments to assist providers and practitioners to re-envision their roles and set new directions in the field of CPE. This collection is inspired by the early seminal works of Cyril Houle who advocated that educational researchers and providers of CPE should listen to the experience of professionals as a basis for supporting their professional learning. This is the 151st volume of the Jossey Bass series New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education. Noted for its depth of coverage, it explores issues of common interest to instructors, administrators, counselors, and policymakers in a broad range of education settings, such as colleges and universities, extension programs, businesses, libraries, and museums.