The Adult Higher Education Alliance (AHEA) book series, founded in 2012, supports AHEA’s mission and purpose. The series provides a forum for professional educators to share resources and information, stimulate practitioner research, and integrate interests and concerns from a variety of areas within adult higher education, including distance, international, and liberal education. The series also serves a vehicle for cooperative consultation and collaboration among professionals in the field, promotes rights of adult students, influences institutional and public policies concerning the principles of quality practice applied to adult education, and promotes cultural diversity and multicultural perspectives.

The first three volumes in the series, Conversations about Adult Learning in Our Complex World, Developing and Sustaining Adult Learners, and Building Sustainable Futures for Adult Learners, were published in conjunction with the annual Adult Higher Education Alliance Conferences (co-conferences with American Association of Adult and Continuing Education, 2011-2013). These volumes filled a unique niche in the field of adult education as they offered a venue for scholars and practitioners to present ideas in conference papers, receive feedback from peers and attendees during conference sessions, and have some time to integrate that feedback into the final chapters, which were submitted shortly after the conference. This model of scholarly dialogue and collaboration is the heart of the AHEA organization and is evidenced in the publication.

The forthcoming book in the series, Mentoring in Formal and Informal Contexts, will be a collection of works on mentoring in the many contexts in which it exists. The book with be arranged thematically as either formal or informal mentoring and further into subthemes (mentoring in health care, education, the workplace, etc.). Mentoring in Formal and Informal Contexts is important because it is focused on an important and timely topic, extends the scope of AHEA to a larger audience, and offers a current volume for scholars and practitioners based on both research and practice-based research.  This collection is appropriate for a wide variety of professors, researchers, practitioners, and students in the field of adult education.

We are proud to offer this book series to the many benefits of AHEA membership.