Research
We explore how adult education can be made inclusive, digital and effective.
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Digital tools, specialist portals and data – for teachers, researchers, students and interested parties.
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Designing consultancy Research on consultancy for adult education and extracurricular youth education? Besides a scientific debate, the following contribution is about facing the challenge of the action competence consultancy in the context of making pedagogues professionals. The aim is to modify and design existing interdisciplinary knowledge for consultancy in the context of adult education. How consultancy in the practice of adult education can be analysed interdisciplinary and which po…
Critical adult education Adult education in the horizon of contemporary societal criticism The essay contacts basic lines of the early critical theory in order to connect it with power analytical surveys on neoliberal restructuring of education. Foucaults analytics of power serves as a guide to decipher the current self-organisation discourse in adult education as part of a power-knowledge-complex. Thereby the present reform strategies manifest themselves as gouvernemental arrangements for …
Political education as a par t of general adult and continuing education with regards to lifelong learning and on the background of social change, is confronted with a new challenge. Science, economics, representatives responsible for education and learning of adults and politics are looking for instruments to navigate the consequences of globalization. – The author focusses – besides social questions of inequality – problems of cultural identity as one of these consequences and identifies lear…
This article presents didactic approaches to financial literacy using the example of the CurVe project (debt counselling as a starting point for basic education – curricular integration and transitions) which was launched at the German Institute for Adult Education (DIE) in March 2013. The project analyses the connection between excessive debt and basic educational needs. Its focus is on participative didactics and its goals include the strengthening of basic education through the conceptualisa…
The process of regulation in the heterogeneous field of education and examination necessarily creates encounters and collaboration of persons, who are standing for different positions and have variable styles of action. In a research project, initiated and financed by the German Ministry of Education and Research, the transfer of formal regulations for examination in certain fields of further education into the reality of the examination has been analyzed. The project utilized three regulated e…
In the usually clearly word- and text-oriented research field of adult education, for a while now, approaches have been observed, which understand visual presentations as data to be analyzed in a methodically controlled way. These data are used in order to generate and substantiate knowledge about adult education, whereby intensity, contexts, theoretical background and methods or methodology are different. This article presents these approaches in the research fields focusing on students, progr…
The rigid division between the three subsystems of continuing vocational training in Germany (continuing vocational training for employees, continuing vocational training for the unemployed, individual continuing vocational training) hinders the implementation of an integrated labour market and qualification policy. As a result an effective and efficient use of the financial means for training (combination of financing resources) is not possible.
Counselling: Changes for a Sustainable Development If counselling should survive as a generally accepted human service at the beginning of the 21st century, a fundamental shift in paradigms and the therewith connected development of sustainable offers for counselling becomes necessary. Permanent co-evolution of needs from clients, economy and society calls for specific skills and knowledge for analysis and coping with multiple subjective realities, ecological contexts, non-linear causalities…
It is widely acknowledged that adult education is a moral enterprise in many respects. There is a demand for empirical research on which groups of actors are dealing with professional ethical issues and which specific ethical problems arise in adult education practice. The authors analyze ethical standards and policies of adult education associations in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Based on the outcomes of this analysis, they present a proposal on how a discourse on ethical standards in ad…
Receptive or hostile to continuing education? Course tutors caught between the pressure to conform and resistance This article presents the results of a qualitative dissertation. The author has investigated the acceptance of adult education teacher training courses among part-time and freelance teachers based on the example of the initial adult education teacher training qualification offered by the North Rhine Westphalia VHS (adult education centre) regional association. For the issue of a…
