Research
We explore how adult education can be made inclusive, digital and effective.
Services
Digital tools, specialist portals and data – for teachers, researchers, students and interested parties.
Institute
We offer research, transfer and infrastructure for lifelong learning.
The support of food and move literacy in learning groups mainly aims for a benefit in terms of a health-promoting and sustainable lifestyle. The general education system has developed differentiated education plans containing basic contents and competences on these topics. In adult education comprehensive health education addresses aspects of food- as well as move literacy. In the context of literacy and basic education, however, there are only a few learning opportunities that focus on nutriti…
Teachers and trainers can only act on what they notice. In line with use-inspired basic research, the question pursued in this book is how teachers’ and trainers’ competence to perceive, analyze, and diagnose situations of learning and instruction can be enhanced resulting in long-term effects. The present state of research with regard to adult education science’s professionalization discourse, teacher education research, competence as well as expertise research is drawn upon in order to gain a…
Foreign languages à la mode. Trends in adult language acquisition based on the example of the VHS programme Learning foreign languages is a high-status activity in organised adult learning. Based on VHS (adult education centre) statistics, the author shows that foreign languages are an indispensable element of the VHS programme range; hardly any other area is in such constantly high demand, a demand which can also be seen in relation to income status. Now making up 30 percent of all courses,…
Supporting Projects Replaces Safe-guarding the Infrastructure. Northrine-Westphalian structural change. The state funds of Northrine-Westphalia for further education were reduced from € 120 Mio to € 88 Mio between 2000 and 2007 by governments of different colours. The most recent reduction was carried out while promising € 12 Mio annually out of the European Social Funds (ESF) instead. This rearrangement from institutional base support to project-oriented support is a great challenge for furthe…
The article focuses the question whether workforce literacy strategies in research and policies may tend to exclude relevant fields of literacy, which have emancipatory chances for participants, but which regularly fail in including low qualified or literate adults, namely the area of basic civic education. The relevance of basic civic education will be discussed using contemporary theories, which point at a crisis of democracy and explain this by the spread of income and capital and its legiti…
Temporalized “Bildungsgestalten” (educational formations) – The formation of the subject in the context of Lifelong Learning The article outlines the reference framework of an ongoing DFG-financed research project. Based on theoretical assumptions which rest upon German Bildungstheorie the project analyses Lifelong Learning as a special mode of the formation of subjects. The projects’ core research concept, which brings into focus the importance of education for the formation of the subjec…
The "unreigned" subject Learning in adult education In adult education – but not only this profession - humanistic psychology, chaos theory, constructivism, modernisation theory are, among others, in many cases normatively charged. Thus they are no longer theories for explanation but instructions for the design of social reality, namely of further education. In contrast to this the author here is interested in the system of relations, in which the subjects are interwoven when they enter a …
In the recent years, the effectiveness of training teacher has become a big subject in empirical educational research. In this paper, an exploratory interview study (N?= 3) will be presented, in which the graduates of a general educational teacher training report on the effectiveness of the program. The study examines the question about the impact of the teachers who participated in the General Education Teacher Training. The teaching action here is conceptualized as part of the field of teache…
The article discusses the chances of using a gerontological data base (Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study of Adulthood, German Acronym: ILSE) for analyses in educational biography research: Learning to age tends to be the central category of this analyses. The article comments on the current debate of aging and education and expounds the problems of politically driven activation of elders and the programmatic turn in the discussion. In a second step the article elaborates on what terms it is …
When crediting non-university previous achievements in higher education courses, the term “professional competence” is often used. However, the results of the 2014 “AnHoSt study” and the 2016 “Anrechnungsmonitor” show that the crediting procedures at German HEIs have so far mainly related to formal qualifications, but not to competences acquired in non-formal or informal learning contexts. Even individual crediting procedures are generally based on the formal curricula of apprenticeship and fur…
