Editorial

Abstract

With the expansion of the coverage of JACE in each of its issues, Volume 28.1 offers a plethora of contributions from around the world. Despite the increasing challenges that we have all experienced during the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, and in particular the pressures in carrying out research, our contributors show that research and scholarship remains high on their agenda. The issue begins withTabithaMukeredzi’s exploration of workplace learning amongst professionals working in Adult Education and Training Centres in South Africa. Her major recommendation of this study to government in her country is to promote in the future ‘deep learning-in-practice and minimise the surface learning in crisis management that is prevalent in the centres’. There follows two articles from Greece. The focus of Pandelis Kiprianos and Ioannis Mpourgos is Second Chance Schools for adults in an area in the west of the country, and the reasons that those who drop out of school use this part of the education system. Theodora Doufexi and Anastasia Pampouri consider another part of the system: continuing professional education programmes of the Centre of Vocational Training in central Greece. Their study shows a link between progression within the workplace and a positive evaluation of the effectiveness of training programmes. Nicolás Didier addresses the important topic of educational mismatch experienced by employees in Chile, where some 83.6% of those in work are either under-educated or over-educated. Using large-scale secondary data analysis from the Socioeconomic Characterisation Survey, he also inter alia explores credential inflation and job polarisation. These issues are discussed in the context of the fourth industrial revolution. The paper from Isaac Biney concerns the familiar topic of participation of adult learners in higher education, and the factors that hinder their progress in distance education mode. In this case, these challenges are explored using McCluskey’s Theory of Margin. Less familiar are accounts of this issue from Ghana, with here the sample of learners being drawn from the Accra Learning Centre. The next contribution from Charlie Potter also considers adult learners in higher education, in this case in the United States. In a large-scale quantitative analysis of the ‘Beginning Postsecondary Students 12/ 14’ dataset, this study focuses on the experiences of institutional transfer for adult students. It considers the characteristics, demographics and experiences of adult transfer