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The Financing of vocational adult education has changed a lot over the last decade. Demand-led funding instruments were introduced at federal as well as state level, aiming to support various (target) groups. The paper reviews, whether these funding instruments addressed special gaps in the funding system and tries to provide first and preliminary impressions whether and to what extent these instruments might have contributed to increasing participation rates in Germany. The analysis suggests t…
Hans Georg Rosenstein describes the objectives and priorities of the renewed European Agenda for Adult Learning, which was adopted by the European Council in 2011. Both, the role of the European Commission are analyzed as well as the tools and budget for the agenda’s implementation. The article concludes with a critical classification of »Erasmus for all«, the new EU-programme for general and vocational education.
A sectoral educational training framework for continuing education can become a uniform reference point for continuing education. Projects such as Flexi-Path, QF2TEACH or the study »Key competences for adult learning professionals« fit together like pieces of a puzzle to form a larger strategy. The authors view the advantages of a sectoral educational training framework to be found in the fact that an SCEF-CE is closer to the continuing education system than general educational training framewo…
Educational training frameworks constitute an intervention in the context of strategies of the European Space for Lifelong Learning. It poses critical questions regarding the consistency of initiatives seeking to create transparency of activities, skills and qualifications in different fields of policy independently of one another.
Publically funded adult education has rarely contributed to the increase of educational equality. Often enough, it has been beneficial to those who had already enjoyed their share of education and employment. The author reflects on the German post-war history of continuing education and identifies several cycles of financial distribution. The initial focus of adult education was on educationally ambitious citizens. Based on a socio-political motivation, the learning of employees became increasi…
The article focuses on the development of the global educational discourse from a human rights perspective, particularly with regard to adult education and lifelong learning. The author discusses the historic milestones set by the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the consequent understanding of learning as well as the various national implementation strategies of the right for lifelong learning.
Adult education and its terminology This article focuses on the interaction between the history of ideas and adult education. The question of the disciplinary and the individual self-conception, which can be extended by an approach from the history of the understanding of concepts, is central to this consideration. After discribing the possible usage of general terminology it offers different perspectives and levels for adult educational analysis. As a conclusion it discusses to which extent…
Professionalization in adult education and the memory culture The discussion of the adult education and its history opens for a closer look at the process of its professionalization. The position of the temporal delimitation and the focusing on the contents come into focus. It turns out that the history of woman education is not represented explicitly in textbooks on the history of the adult education. Focussing on historical factual knowledge and experience knowledge, the analysis of memor…
This article provides an overview of the debate on learning environments and learning locations within adult education research; the authors use a historical review of main research topics in order to understand current learning environments and recent theoretical and empirical discussions. The term of learning environments or learning locations has been introduced into research on adult education in the 1970ies; since this time, each following decade can be characterized by several specific re…
