Stephen Brookfield
The father of Molly and Colin, and the husband of Kim, Stephen D. Brookfield is currently Distinguished Professor at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. He also serves as visiting faculty in the adult education doctoral program at National-Louis University in Chicago. Prior to moving to Minnesota, he spent ten years as Professor in the Department of Higher and Adult Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he is still Adjunct Professor.
Stephen's main research activities have been in the areas of adult learning, teaching, and critical thinking. He has been chair of the Adult Education Research Conference (1985) in North America and a member of the national executive committee of the Association for Recurrent Education in the United Kingdom (1981). He currently serves on the editorial board and advisory boards of Adult Education Quarterly (United States), Studies in Continuing Education (Australia) and Studies in the Education of Adults (United Kingdom.
Stephan began his teaching career in 1970 and has held appointments at colleges of further, technical, adult and higher education in the United Kingdom, and at four universities in North America. In 1989, he was Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Technical and Adult Teacher Education in what is now the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. He has run numerous workshops on teaching, adult learning, and critical thinking around the world and delivered many keynote addresses at regional, national, and international education conferences.
He has twice won the Cyrill O. Houle World Award for Literature in Adult Education: in 1968 for his book Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning and in 1989 for Developing Critical Thinkers. The former book also won the 1986 Imogene E. Okes Award for Outstanding Research in Adult Education.
Visit Stephen Brookfield's homepage at http://www.geocities.com/stephenbrookfield.
(Office: 651-962-4982--sdbrookfield@stthomas.edu)
Select Papers
"Adult Learning: an Overview" in A. Tuijnman (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Adult Education and Training. Oxford: Pergamon Press/Elsevier Science, 1995.
"An Agenda for Adult Education" in A. Tuijnman (ed.) International Encyclopedia of Adult Education and Training. Oxford: Pergamon Press/Elsevier Science, 1995.
"The Getting of Wisdom: What Critically Reflective Teaching Is and Why It's Important" Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995.
"Storming the Citadel: Reading Theory Critically" Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995.
"Self-Directed Learning, Political Clarity and the Critical Practice of Adult Education" Adult Education Quarterly 43/4 (Summer 1993).
