'Development' is one of those familiar concepts that seeps almost unnoticed into the conversations of educators. They are self-evidently concerned with the development of people. But what is development? Are there particular stages that we pass through in our life course?
contents • introduction • development • stages • gender, culture and political convenience • life events • conclusion • further reading and references

For adult educators, youth workers and those concerned with lifelong learning one of the great attractions of the literature examining life course development is that it may identify qualities or problems that are the distinctive property of young people and adults. If this can be done then the grounds exist for the establishment of specialisms such as youth work and adult education or learning. In the case of the latter, for example, we might look to possibilities around:
• process - do adults think differently? (This is what came to the centre of Knowles’ theory of andragogy)
• situations - do they find themselves in different circumstances to other age groups?
• experiences - does the accumulation of experience change things. What difference does having been through a greater range of things make?

A further interest is that if there are some qualities that are uniquely youthful or adult, there may be implications for the sort of learning environments that could, and should, be fostered - and what subject matter should be attended to.

Read the whole article http://www.infed.org/biblio/lifecourse_development.