--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Adult learning is frequently spoken of by adult educators as if it were a discretely separate domain, having little connection to learning in childhood or adolescence. This chapter will examine critically this claim by exploring four major research areas (self-directed learning, critical reflection, experiential learning and learning to learn) each of which have been proposed as representing unique and exclusive adult learning processes.
Issues in Understanding Adult Learning
Despite the plethora of journals, books and research conferences devoted to
adult learning across the world, we are very far from a universal understanding
of adult learning. Even though warnings are frequently issued that at best only
a multitude of context and domain specific theories are likely to result, the
energy expended on developing a general theory of adult learning shows no sign
of abating. Judged by epistemological, communicative and critically analytic
criteria, theory development in adult learning is weak and is hindered by the
persistence of myths that are etched deeply into adult educators' minds (Brookfield,
1992). These myths (which, taken together, comprise something of an academic
orthodoxy in adult education) hold that adult learning is inherently joyful,
that adults are innately self-directed learners, that good educational practice
always meets the needs articulated by learners themselves and that there is
a uniquely adult learning process as well as a uniquely adult form of practice.
This chapter argues that the attempt to construct an exclusive theory of adult
learning - one that is distinguished wholly by its standing in contradiction
to what we know about learning at other stages in the lifespan - is a grave
error. Indeed, a strong case can be made that as we examine learning across
the lifespan the variables of culture, ethnicity, personality and political
ethos assume far greater significiance in explaining how learning occurs and
is experienced than does the variable of chronological age.
Major Areas of Research on Adult Learning
The four areas discussed in this section represent the post-war preoccupations
of adult learning researchers. Each area has its own internal debates and preoccupations,
yet the concerns and interests of those working within each of them overlap
significantly with those of the other three. Indeed, several researchers have
made important contributions to more than one of these areas. Taken together
these areas of research constitute an espoused theory of adult learning that
informs how a great many adult educators practice their craft.
Self-Directed Learning
Self-directed learning focuses on the process by which adults take control of
their own learning, in particular how they set their own learning goals, locate
appropriate resources, decide on which learning methods to use and evaluate
their progress. Work on self-direction is now so widespread that it justifies
an annual international symposium devoted solely to research and theory in the
area. After criticisms that the emphasis on self-directed learning as an adult
characteristic was being uncritically advanced, that studies were conducted
mostly with middle class subjects, that issues concering the quality of self-directed
learning projects were being ignored and that it was treated as disconnected
from wider social and political forces, there have been some attempts to inject
a more critical tone into work in this area. Meta-analyses of research and theory
conducted by Australian, Canadian and American authors have raised questions
about the political dimension to self-directedness and the need to study how
deliberation and serendipity intersect in self-directed learning projects (Collins,
1988; Candy, 1991; Brockett and Hiemstra, 1991). There has also been a spirited
debate concerning Australian criticism of the reliability and validity of the
most widely used scale for assessing readiness for self-directed learning (Field,
1991). At least one book, developed in the South African adult educational experience,
has argued that self-direction must be seen as firmly in the tradition of emancipatory
adult education (Hammond and Collins, 1991).
A number of important questions remain regarding our understanding of self-direction as a defining concept for adult learning. For example, the cross-cultural dimension of the concept has been almost completely ignored. More longitudinal and life history research is needed to understand how periods of self-directedness alternate with more traditional forms of educational participation in adults' autobiographies as learners. Recent work on gender has criticised the ideal of the independent, self-directed learner as reflecting patriarchial values of division, separation and competition. The extent to which a disposition to self-directedness is culturally learned, or is tied to personality, is an open issue. We are still struggling to understand how various factors - the adult's previous experiences, the nature of the learning task and domain involved, the political ethos of the time - affect the decision to learn in this manner. We also need to know more about how adults engaged in self-directed learning use social networks and peer support groups for emotional sustenance and educational guidance. Finally, work is needed on clarifying the political dimensions of this idea; particularly on the issues of power and control raised by the learner's assuming responsibility for choices and judgments regarding what can be learned, how learning should happen, and whose evaluative judgments regarding the quality and effectiveness of learning should hold sway. If the cultural formation of the self is ignored, it is all too easy to equate self-direction with separateness and selfishness, with a narcissistic pursuit of private ends in disregard to the consequences of this for others and for wider cultural interests. A view of learning which views adults as self-contained, volitional beings scurrying around engaged in individual projects is one that works against cooperative and collective impulses. Citing self-direction, adults can deny the importance of collective action, common interests and their basic interdependence in favour of an obsessive focus on the self.
Critical Reflection
Developing critical reflection is probably the idea of the decade for many adult
educators who have long been searching for a form and process of learning that
could be claimed to be distinctively adult. Evidence that adults are capable
of this kind of learning can be found in developmental psychology, where a host
of constructs such as embedded logic, dialectical thinking, working intelligence,
reflective judgment, post-formal reasoning and epistemic cognition describe
how adults come to think contextually and critically (Brookfield, 1987, 1991).
As an idea critical reflection focuses on three interrelated processes; (1)
the process by which adults question and then replace or reframe an assumption
that up to that point has been uncritically accepted as representing commonsense
wisdom, (2) the process through which adults take alternative perspective on
previously taken for granted ideas, actions, forms of reasoning and ideologies,
and (3) the process by which adults come to recognize the hegemonic aspects
of dominant cultural values and to understand how self-evident renderings of
the 'natural' state of the world actually bolster the power and self-interest
of unrepresentative minorities. Writers in this area vary according to the extent
to which critical reflection should have a political edge, or the extent to
which it can be observed in such apparently a-political domains of adult life
as personal relationships and workplace actions. Some confusion is caused by
the fact that psychoanalytic and critical social theoretical traditions co-exist
uneasily in many studies of critical reflection.
The most important work in this area is that of Mezirow (1991). Mezirow's early work (conducted with women returning to higher education) focused on the idea of perspective transformation which he understood as the learning process by which adults come to recognize and re-frame their culturally induced dependency roles and relationships. More recently he has drawn strongly on the work of Jurgen Habermas to propose a theory of transformative learning "that can explain how adult learners make sense or meaning of their experiences, the nature of the structures that influence the way they construe experience, the dynamics involved in modifying meanings, and the way the structures of meaning themselves undergo changes when learners find them to be dysfunctional" (Mezirow, 1991, p.xii). Applications of Mezirow's ideas have been made with widely varying groups of adult learners such as displaced homemakers, male spouse abusers and those suffering ill health, though his work has been criticised by educators in Nigeria, the United States, New Zealand and Canada for focusing too exclusively on individual transformation (Collard and Law, 1989; Ekpenyong, 1990; Clark and Wilson, 1991).
Many tasks remain for researchers of critical reflection as a dimension of adult learning. A language needs to be found to describe this process to educators which is more accessible than the psychoanalytic and critical theory terminology currently employed. More understanding of how people experience episodes of critical reflection (viscerally as well as cognitively), and how they deal with the risks of committing cultural suicide these entail, would help educators respond to fluctuating rhythms of denial and depression in learners. Much research in this area confirms that critical reflection is context or domain-specific. How is it that the same people can be highly critical regarding, for example, dominant political ideologies, yet show no critical awareness of the existence of repressive features in their personal relationships ? At present theoretical analyses of critical reflection (frequently drawn from Habermas' work) considerably outweigh the number of ethnographic, phenomenological studies of how this process is experienced. Contextual factors surrounding the decision to forgoe or pursue action after a period of critical reflection are still unclear, as is the extent to which critical reflection is associated with certain personality characteristics.
Experiential Learning
The emphasis on experience as a defining feature of adult learning was expressed
in Lindeman's frequently quoted aphorism that "experience is the adult
learner's living textbook" (1926, p. 7) and that adult education was, therefore,
"a continuing process of evaluating experiences" (p. 85). This emphasis
on experience is central to the concept of andragogy that has evolved to describe
adult education practice in societies as diverse as the United States, Britain,
France, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Estonia, Czechkoslovakia, Finland and Yugoslavia
(Savicevic 1991; Vooglaid and Marja, 1992). The belief that adult teaching should
be grounded in adults' experiences, and that these experiences represent a valuable
resource, is currently cited as crucial by adult educators of every conceivable
ideological hue. Of all the models of experiential learning that have been developed,
Kolb's has probably been the most influential in prompting theoretical work
among researchers of adult learning (Jarvis, 1987). But almost every textbook
on adult education practice affirms the importance of experiential methods such
as games, simulations, case studies, psychodrama, role play and internships
and many universities now grant credit for adults' experiential learning. Not
surprisingly, then, the gradual accumulation of experience across the contexts
of life is often argued as the chief difference between learning in adulthood
and learning at earlier stages in the lifespan. Yet, an exclusive reliance on
accumulated experience as the defining characteristic of adult learning contains
two discernible pitfalls.
First, experience should not be thought of as an objectively neutral phenomenon, a river of thoughts, perceptions and sensations into which we decide, occasionally, to dip our toes. Rather, our experience is culturally framed and shaped. How we experience events and the readings we make of these are problematic; that is, they change according to the language and categories of analysis we use, and according to the cultural, moral and ideological vantage points from which they are viewed. In a very important sense we construct our experience: how we sense and interpret what happens to us and to the world around us is a function of structures of understanding and perceptual filters that are so culturally embedded that we are scarcely aware of their existence or operation. Second, the quantity or length of experience is not necessarily connected to its richness or intensity. For example, in an adult educational career spanning 30 years the same one year's experience can, in effect, be repeated thirty times. Indeed, one's 'experience' over these 30 years can be interpreted using uncritically assimilated cultural filters in such a way as to prove to oneself that students from certain ethnic groups are lazy or that fear is always the best stimulus to critical thinking. Because of the habitual ways we draw meaning from our experiences, these experiences can become evidence for the self-fulfilling prohpecies that stand in the way of critical inisght. Uncritically affirming people's histories, stories and experiences risks idealizing and romanticising them. Experiences are neither innocent nor free from the cultural contradictions that inform them.
Learning to Learn
The ability of adults to learn how to learn - to become skilled at learning
in a range of different situations and through a range of different styles -
has often been proposed as an overarching purpose for those educators who work
with adults. Like its sister term of 'meta-cognition', learning how to learn
suffers for lack of a commonly agreed on definition, funtioning more as an umbrella
term for any attempts by adults to develop insight into their own habitual ways
of learning. Most research on this topic has been conducted by Smith (1990)
who has drawn together educators from the United States, Scotland, Australia,
Germany and Sweden to work on theory development in this area (1987). An important
body of related work (focusing mostly on young adults) is that of Kitchener
and King (1990) who propose the concepts of epistemic cognition and reflective
judgment. These latter authors emphasize that learning how to learn involves
an epistemological awareness deeper than simply knowing how one scores on a
cognitive style inventory, or what is one's typical or preferred pattern of
learning. Rather, it means that adults possess a self-conscious awareness of
how it is they come to know what they know; an awareness of the reasoning, assumptions,
evidence and justifications that underlie our beliefs that something is true.
Studies of learning to learn have been conducted with a range of adult groups and in a range of settings such as adult basic education, the workplace and religious communities. Yet, of the four areas of adult learning research discussed, learning how to learn has been the least successful in capturing the imagination of the adult educational world and in prompting a dynamic programme of follow-up research. This may be because, as several writers have noted, in systems of lifelong education the function of helping people learn how to learn is often claimed as being more appropriate to schools than to adult education. Many books on learning to learn restrict themselves to the applicability of this concept to elementary or secondary school learning. While it is useful to acknowledge the school's foundational and formational role in this area, it is also important to stress that developing this capacity is too difficult to be left solely to primary and secondary education. Learning to learn should be conceived as a lifelong learning project. Research on learning to learn is also flawed in its emphasis on college students' meta-cognition and by its lack of attention to how this process manifests itself in the diverse contexts of adult life. That learning to learn is a skill that exists far beyond academic boundaries is evident from the research conducted on practical intelligence and everyday cognition in settings and activities as diverse as grocery shopping and betting shops (Brookfield, 1991). The connections between a propensity for learning how to learn and the nature of the learning task or domain also need clarification. Learning how to learn is much more frequently spoken of in studies of clearly defined skill development or knowledge acquisition, and much less frequently referred to in studies examining emotional learning or the development of emotional intelligence.
Emergent Trends
Three trends in the study of adult learning that have emerged during the 1990's,
and that promise to exercise some influence into the twenty first century, concern
(1) the cross-cultural dimensions of adult learning, (2) adults' engagement
in practical theorizing, and (3) the ways in which adults learn within the systems
of education (distance education, computer assisted instruction, open learning
systems) that are linked to recent technological advances.
Cross Cultural Adult Learning
Although the literature base in the area of cross-cultural adult learning is
still sparse, there are indications that the variable of ethnicity is being
taken with increasing seriousness (Cassara, 1990; Ross-Gordon, 1991). As China
has opened its borders to adult educators in the 1980's research on Chinese
conceptions of adult learning is starting to emerge (Pratt, 1992). As literature
in this area points out, framing discussions of cultural diversity around a
simple binary split between white and non-white populations vastly oversimplifies
a complex reality. Among ethnic groups themselves there are significant intra
and inter-group tensions. In the United States, for example, Black, Hispanic
and Asian workers have points of tension between them. Within each of these
broad groupings there is a myriad of overlapping rivalries; between African-Americans
and immigrants from the British West Indies; between Colombians, Puerto-Ricans,
Cubans and Dominicans; between Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Hmong tribes
people. Also, the tribal cultures of native Americans cannot be conceptualized
as a culturally homogeneous block.
Two important insights for practice have been suggested by early research into cross cultural adult learning. First, adult educators from the dominant American, European and northern cultures will need to examine some of their assumptions, inclinations and preferences about 'natural' adult learning and adult teaching styles (Brookfield, 1986). For the Hmong tribes people from the moutains of Laos who are used to working cooperatively and to looking to their teachers for direction and guidance, ways of working that emphasize self-directedness and that place the locus of control with the individual student will be experienced, initially at least, as dissonant and anxiety-producing (Podeschi, 1990). However, their liking for materials that focus on personal concrete experience fits well with the adult education practices that emphasize experiential approaches. Second, 'teaching their own' is a common theme surfaced in case studies of multicultural learning. In other words, when adults are taught by educators drawn from their own ethnic communities they tend to feel more comfortable and to do better. Ethnocentric theories and assumptions regarding adult learning styles underscore the need for mainstream adult educators to research their own practice with native and aboriginal peoples. This will require a critically responsive stance towards their practice (Brookfield, 1990) and a readiness to examine some of their most strongly held, paradigmatic assumptions (Brookfield, 1987).
Practical Theorizing
Practical theorizing is an idea most associated with the work of Usher (Usher
and Bryant, 1989) who has focused on the ways in which educational practitioners
- including adult educators - become critically aware of the informally developed
theories that guide their practice. Practical theorizing has its origins in
practitioners' attempts to grapple with the dilemmas, tensions and contradictions
of their work. Actions educators take in these situations often appear instinctual.
Yet, on reflection, these apparently instinctive reactions can be understood
to be embedded in assumptions, readings and interpretations that practitioners
have evolved over time to make sense of their practice. Practitioners seem to
come to a more informed understanding of their informal patterns of reasoning
by subjecting these to critical review drawing on two important sources. First,
they compare their emerging informal theories to those of their colleagues.
This happens informally in individual conversations and in a more structured
way through participation in reflection groups. Colleagues serve as reflective
mirrors in these groups; they reflect back to the practitioner readings of her
or his behavior that come as an interesting surprise. As they decsribe their
own reactions and experiences dealing with typical crises, colleagues can help
the individual worker re-frame, broaden and refine her own theories of practice.
Second, practitioners also use formal theory as a lens through which to view
their own actions and the assumptions that inform these. As well as providing
multiple perspectives on familiar situations, formal theory can help educators
'name' their practice by illuminating the general elements of what were thought
of as idiosyncratic experiences. These two sources - colleagues' experiences
and formal theory - intersect continuously in a dialectical interplay of particular
and universal perspectives.
Distance Learning
In contrast to its earlier equation with necessarily limiting correspondence
study formats, distance education is now regarded as an important setting within
which a great deal of significant adult learning occurs (Gibson, 1992). Weekend
college formats, mutli-media experimentations and the educational possibilities
unleashed by satellite broadcasting have combined to provide learning opportunities
for millions of adults across the world. That adult educational themes of empowerment,
critical reflection, experience and collaboration can inform distance learning
activities is evident from case studies of practice that are emerging. Modra
(1992) provides an interesting account of how she drew on the work of radical
adult educators such as Freire, Shor and Lovett to use learning journals to
encourage adults' critical reflection in an Australian distance education course.
Smith and Castle (1992) propose the use of "experiential learning technology,
facilitated from a distance, as a method of developing critical thinking skills"
with "the scattered, oppressed adult population of South Africa" (p.
191).
Further Research
Ten important issues need to be addressed if research on adult learning is to
have a greater influence on how the education and training of adults is conducted.
First, much greater definitional clarity is needed when the term 'learning'
is discussed, particularly whether it is being used as a noun or verb and whether
it is referring to behavioral change or cognitive development (Brookfield, 1986).
Many writers speak about adult learning systems when they are really referring
to adult educational programs. Although learning often occurs in an adult educational
program, it is not a necessary or inevitable consequence of such a program.
Second, the interaction of emotion and cognition in adult learning needs much
greater attention. For example, can we speak of the emotional intelligence adults
develop ? Classificatory schema and conceptual categories dealing with adult
learning tend to focus on settings for learning (communities, schools, religious
communities, the workplace and so on) or on externally observable processes
(self-directed learning, collaborative learning, and so on). Emotional dimensions
to conceptual or instrumental learning, or how adults learn about their own
emotional selves, are matters that are rarely addressed. We need much more attention
to how making meaning, critical thinking and entering new cognitive and instrumental
domains are viscerally experienced processes. Third, adult learning needs to
be understood much more as a socially embedded and socially constructed phenomenon
(Jarvis, 1987). Current research on adult learning draws almost exclusively
from psychologistic sources. It is easy to forget that the 'self' in a self-directed
learning effort is a socially formed self and that the goals of adults' self-directed
learning can therefore be analysed as culturally framed goals. Learning is a
collective process involving the cultural formation and reproduction of symbols
and meaning perspectives. It should not be understood or researched as if it
were disconnected, idiosyncratic and wholly autonomous. Fourth, many more cross-cultural
perspectives are needed to break the Eurocentric and North American dominance
in research in adult learning and to understand inter-cultural differences in
industrialised societies. Blithe generalizations about 'the adult learner',
'adults as learners' or 'the nature of adult learning' imply that people over
25 form a homogenous entity simply by virtue of their chronological age. Yet
the differences of class, culture, ethnicity, personality, cognitive style,
learning patterns, life experiences and gender among adults are far more significant
than the fact that they are not children or adolescents. We need to be much
more circumspect when talking about adults as if they were an empirically coherent
entity simply by virtue of the fact that they are no longer in school. In particular,
we need to challenge the ethnocentrism of much theorising in this area which
assumes that adult learning as a generic phenomenon or process is synonymous
with the learning undertaken in university continuing education clases by white
American middle class adults in the post war era.
Fifth, the role played by gender in learning is as poorly understood in adulthood as it is at other stages in the lifespan. It is still an open question as to whether the forms of knowing uncovered in some studies of adult women learners are solely a function of gender, or the extent to which they are connected to the developmental stages of adulthood, or are culturally constructed. Sixth, the predominant focus in studies of adult learning on instrumental skill development needs widening to encompass work on spiritual and significant personal learning and to understand the interconnections between these domains. This is particularly so given the fact that in surveys of adult learning most people point to learning in workplaces, families, communities and recreational societies to be more prevalent and significant than learning undertaken within formal education. Seventh, a way should be found to grant greater credibility to adults' renderings of the experience of learning from the 'inside'. Most descriptions of how adults experience learning are rendered by researchers' pens, not learners themselves. More phenomenographic studies of how adults feel their way through learning episodes, given in their own words and using their own interpretations and constructs, would enrich our understanding of the significance of learning to adults. Eigth, the growing recognition accorded to qualitative studies of adult learning should be solidified. In speaking of research that has influenced their practice, adult educators place much greater emphasis on qualitive studies as compared to survey questionnaires or research through experimental designs. Ninth, research on adult learning needs to be integrated much more strongly with research on adult development and adult cognition. With a few notable exceptions (Tennant, 1988; Merriam and Caffarella, 1991) these two strongly related areas exist in separate though parallel compartments, possibly because of adult educators' self-effacing refusal to become involved with what they see as academically 'pure' research. There is also a belief held by many adult educators that theirs is a field of applied practice and that questions of theoretical and conceptual import should therefore be left to academics working within universities. And, finally, the links between adult learning and learning at other stages in the lifespan need much more attention (Tuijnman and van der Kamp, 1992). To understand adult learning we need to know of its connections to learning in childhood and adolescence and to the formation during these periods of interpretive filters, cognitive frames and cultural rules.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
References
Brockett R G, Hiemstra R 1991 Self-direction in Adult Learning: Perspectives
on Theory, Research, and Practice. Routledge, New York
Brookfield S D 1986 Understanding and Facilitating Adult Learning. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco
Brookfield S D 1987 Developing Critical Thinkers. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco
Brookfield S D 1990 The Skillful Teacher. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco
Brookfield S D 1991 The development of critical reflection in adulthood. New Education. 13 (1): 39-48
Brookfield S D 1992 Developing criteria for formal theory building in adult education. Adult Ed. Q. 42 (2): 79-93
Candy P C 1990 Self-direction for Lifelong Learning: A Comprehensive Guide to Theory and Practice. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco
Cassara B (ed.) 1990 Adult Education in a Multicultural Society. Routledge, New York
Clark M C, Wilson A L 1991 Context and rationality in Mezirow's theory of transformational learning. Adult Ed. Q. 41 (2): 75-91
Collard S, Law M 1989 The limits of perspective transformation: A critique of Mezirow's theory. Adult Ed. Q. 39 (2): 99-107
Collins M 1988 Self-directed learning or an emancipatory practice of adult education: Re-thinking the role of the adult educator. Proceedings of the 29th Annual Adult Education Research Conference. Faculty of Continuing Education, University of Calgary
Ekpenyong L E 1990 Studying adult learning through the history of knowledge. Int. J. Lifelong Educ. 9 (3): 161-178
Field L 1991 Guglielmino's self-directed learning readiness scale: Should it continue to be used ? Adult Ed. Q. 41, 100-103.
Gibson C C 1992 Distance education: On focus and future. Adult Ed. Q. 42 (3): 167-179
Hammond M, Collins R 1991 Self-directed learning: Critical Practice. Kogan Page, London
Jarvis P 1987 Adult Learning in the Social Context. Croom Helm, London
Kitchener K S, King P M 1990 The reflective judgment model: Transforming assumptions about knowing. In: Mezirow J (ed.) Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco
Lindeman E C L 1926 The Meaning of Adult Education. New Republic, New York
Mezirow J 1991 Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco
Modra H 1989 Using journals to encourage critical thinking at a distance. In: Evans T, Nation D (eds.) Critical Reflections on Distance Education. Falmer Press, London
Podeschi R 1990 Teaching their own: Minority challenges to mainstream institutions. In: Ross-Gordon J M, Martin L G, Briscoe D (eds.) Serving Culturally Diverse Populations. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco
Pratt D D 1992 Chinese conceptions of learning and teaching: A Westerner's attempt at understanding. Int. J. of Lifelong Ed. 11 (4): 301-320
Ross-Gordon J M 1991 Needed: A multicultural perspective for adult education research. Adult Ed. Q., 42 (1): 1-16.
Savicevic D M 1991 Modern conceptions of andragogy: A European framework. Studs. in the Ed. of Adults. 23 (2): 179-201
Smith J E, Castle J 1992 Experiential learning for critical thinking: A viable prospect for South Africa? Int. J. of Lifelong Ed. 11 (3): 191-198
Smith R M (ed.) 1990 Learning to Learn Across the Lifespan. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco
Tennant M 1988 Psychology and Adult Learning. Routledge, London
Tuijnman A, Van Der Kamp M (eds.) 1992 Learning Across the Lifespan: Theories, Research, Policies. Pergamon, Oxford
Usher R S, Bryant I 1989 Adult Education as Theory, Practice and Research: The Captive Triangle. Routledge, New York
Vooglaid Y, Marja T 1992 Andragogical problems of building a democratic society. Int. J. of Lifelong Ed. 11 (4): 321-328
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact: thea@chicago1.nl.edu
Entered: 20 Jun 95