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Representative surveys on participation in continuing education are the basis for analyses of lifelong learning as well as a description of the continuing education sector within the educational system. The information which is made available should be sufficiently differentiated in order to be able to distinguish different types of learning activities. One of the most important distinctions is the one between general and continuing vocational education. This article examines how and with what …
In the context of lifelong learning, the validation of prior learning has become a contested topic. Views differ about whether procedures should be oriented to (work) requirements – verifying that people match a defined competence profile – or be designed to support people in their personal development. In the latter case, the procedures mainly involve self-evaluation while in the first case they are concerned with external evaluation. In this paper a validation procedure is analysed that inclu…
This article explores „biography“ as a separate field of research within adult education. It focuses on analysing the outcome of alphabetization and basic education courses on biographies and coping mechanisms of functional illiterates. At the same time, the importance of biography research for practical work with illiterates is highlighted. The article also discusses a list of requirements that need to be met for an innovative adjustment of such practical work, and thus making better use of it…
The article presents the results of a DFG project on program planning of workplace learning, which was conducted between June 2013 and May 2015 at the Department of Adult Education/Continuing Education at the Humboldt University of Berlin. The central questions were: a) How do internal and external stakeholders influence the program planning and training design in the context of workplace learning (targeted audiences, objectives, contents, didactic fields of action)? b) Which specific forms of …
Starting from constructivist, neurophysiologic and learning psychological deliberations the actual learning place should be described as the human being because only within him is where the learning takes place. Unanimously though, learning is always carried out in interaction with contextual factors. The outer environment – and therewith also local conditions – influence the processing of information. Hereunto three examples are named: (1) The Loci method links memory contents with places. (2)…
Subjects move and act in spatial contexts and through their actions, they create spaces. This also applies to adult learning and to the professional practice of adult education, yet the systematic incorporation of spatial aspects into adult education research to date has remained marginal. This publication takes the category of space as a focal point, with the various chapters defining and honing its meaning for adult education. It brings together the relevant theoretical discourses, summarizes…
Networks of citizens’ commitment – On the role of adult education within the scope of the network work with the older Introduced are the partial results of a research project in North-Rhine-Westphalia, in which networks of citizens’ commitment in Düsseldorf in the area of work with older people have been evaluated. At the beginning of the contribution the term of network is explained, then the personal pre-requisites for citizens’ commitment are sketched and concluding the model of self-orga…
The "Yellow Series" contains an didactically structured inventory of relevant topics in the field of adult education. It imparts professional knowledge based on the academic state of research. The volumes are intended for self-studying but are also suited as additional reading for studying and training. The systematic preparation of each topic also supports specialists in assuring the theoretical and methodological base of their actions.
This assumption does not seem plausible at first glance, but rather absurd instead. The regular manifestation of modern age as a knowledge-based society on the one hand as well as the consensual acceptance of the appeal for lifelong learning on the other hand, create the opposite of an image in which the pedagogical aspect of continuing education has been lost. The author argues that learners are increasingly left unsupported, lifelong learning has become more fiction than reality and continui…
PISA for adults? Remarks about the consequences of PISA for adult education The PISA results shown by the OECD for the school area also have consequences for adult education. For the development of adult education itself but also for a holistic concept of lifelong learning it will be of importance to be able to refer to specific international comparative results. The contribution describes measures of policies of adult education that were initiated following the PISA results and it scetches…
