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Care of the elderly in Germany can nowadays be guaranteed only thanks to the immigration of foreign domestic help and of foreign staff who do, however, not conform to the German job description of „Altenpfleger/in“ (specialist for old persons’ care). This tends to endanger high-quality standards in care. Further education courses directed towards an intercultural opening of old persons’ care could show a way from this dilemma: a team that consists of people from different origins can, with appr…
Mit zunehmendem Alter steigt die Wahrscheinlichkeit, kritische Lebensereignisse zu erfahren. Zugleich sind hinsichtlich der Persönlichkeit besondere Entwicklungen möglich – und damit verbunden auch die Fähigkeit, solche kritischen Lebensereignisse zu bewältigen. Wie die Erwachsenen- und Weiterbildung im Allgemeinen und die konfessionelle Erwachsenenbildung im Besonderen dabei unterstützen kann, zeigt der Autor auf.
Why do senior citizens stop taking part in continuing education? The author tries to find and explain reasons, drawing on a survey regarding courses of scientific continuing education of Ulm University. One key finding is that the biggest impediments are a lack of time and other obligations.
Older people often lack the competences for the handling of digital media. This is problematic in a society which is more and more based on digital exchanges. Courses of continuing digital education for older people prove to be successful when they are embedded into their living environments. In this article, the author presents several of these educational formats.
The “Boulevard of Thoughts 50 plus” (“Denk-Raum 50 plus”) is a successful example of self-determined learning in old age. Drawing on this example, the author discusses advantages of self-determined learning and shows success factors of such a format.
The study Competencies in Later Life (CiLL) provides, for the first time, information about central basic competencies of older adults. In doing so, two research approaches are combined. First, CiLL extends the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) to the age group 66 to 80 and analyses correlations between socio-demographic factors and basic competencies assessed with the PIAAC instrument. Second, a qualitative research part shows subjective opinions of …
The research project KLASSIK examines the question of whether it is possible to increase competencies for information processing skills of older people. To this end, training courses that serve as experimental groups, performed a special, metacognitive thinking training. In the project also included comparison groups received no training. Before the treatment a performance test and an intelligence test ensure that both groups come from the same starting conditions. After the final test an appro…
The ageing population presents a series of policy challenges, for which our current three phase model of the lifecourse is unhelpful, especially by overlooking the changing nature of the “third age”. Encouraging people to stay longer in paid work is a key priority for Government, and training is often advocated as a way of encouraging this. This paper summarises the demographic challenge and presents a proposal for rethinking the lifecourse. It then describes the findings of a project, which ex…
