Understanding Adult Educator

This dissertation is a case study on the adult educator's self-identities and career develop in Shanghai. By collecting many of oral data from co-researcher and resorting to the materials about adult education theory and the social change in china, this research work finally presents several wonderful personal life stories and their career situations of three adult educators within various eras in neoteric China. This research try to make readers take notes of adult educators's personal development and the professionalization of adult education.This dissertation is composed of five chapters:The first chapter is the prolegomenon, which comprises the origin of this research, the status quo of adult education development in Shanghai and illustrates the research issue on adult educator's existing which means their personal life and work experiences.The second chapter is about the narrative research method which is used in this research. There are the description of the narrative research method, the research participators, the design of the research path and the effective expressive method of research result in this chapter.In the Third chapter, the main content consists of the introduction of the analysis frame and the academic basis of this research.In the fourth chapter, the three adult educators' life stories is reconstructed basing on researcher's annotations. So these stories would read like some autobiographical reportages. The readers can understand the research results from these stories.The last chapter shows the research results by presenting the analysis elite of the research text. In the point of the personal life histories, it clarifies the three adult educator how to construct their life meanings within their self-identities and career developments. The final analysis production would state in three dimensions including times and substance changing, social relationship changing and culture transition. In the three cases about Shanghai adult educator, we can found that: The adult educators' self-identities and career developments change along with the space-time and substance environment changing. These adult educators who come from different eras which possessed different substance conditions represent obviously distinctness in the self-identity methods and career development.Adult educators, who take part in this research, constantly update the method and contents of their self-identities along with social relationship's extending or meaning others. In the self-identities processes they design their career and adjust to their job. Ultimately, they realized their interactively spiral developments between self-identities and career developments.It's demonstrated that, in the three cases, the cultures to which adult educator have been acclimatized overall their lives would influence their attitudes about substence, life and work, influence their self-identities and vocational career developments. Meanwhile, the culture in the adult education field would participate in the construction of adult educator's vocational consciousness and vocational behaviors.