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The report introduces the topic of municipal education monitoring based on the »Aachen Declaration« on municipal educational responsibility by the German Association of Cities and Towns. The statistics on adult education centres are essential for the still limited local continuing education monitoring. Two examples (Rheingau-Taunus district and City of Trier) explicate the data benefits, which indicate strengths and weaknesses and reveal operative requirements to decision makers in institutions…
In the present contribution the final report of the Expert Commission on Financing Lifelong Learning is compared to a firework: it has provoked a short-term enthusiasm and attention. What is there to do in order not to let the ideas deflagrate but conserve chances for their implementation? The author asks the actors of further education to help oneself offensively with the arguments of the report (“public interest“, “more investments necessary“, “increase sovereignty demand“) and to advertise t…
Transformations in German adult and continuing education (ACE) are discussed in their relation to more far-reaching transformations in society concerning the ways in which knowledge and non-knowledge are processed. Some features of the discourse related to the notion of „knowledge society“ as well as empirical findings on the general spreading of knowledge transfer activities are pointed out, before three instances of change in ACE are discussed. While issues of transferring knowledge appear to…
“Bildung” and Biography in Self-organized Learning If subjects of learning are related to the learners thinking and acting in past or future, learning gains a biographic dimension. The notion of “bildung” can be attributed to a learning process, when frames of interpretation get transformed and re-arranged. The councelling of learning in a learning environment opens spaces, where learning processes like this can come true. This interrelation is examined in the contribution with an analysis o…
Research on learning of distance learners An empirical insight into the practice of distance learning Albeit the high relevance of distance education and distance studies in the field of lifelong learning strategies, there is only few knowledge on the actual process in which the distant student learns. This article presents and discusses the results of a research project, in which distance students filled in questionnaires concerning their learning several times a week over a period of thre…
References to theory of present research on further education Commonly in the scientific discourse one distinguishes between basic research and implementation orientated research. The latter often takes place as order research that in the ususal case is application orientated and practice orientated. This type of research often exhibits only an implicit reference to theory as several examples show. In this context an intensified co-operation between basic research and implementation orientat…
The Need for Comparative Research on the History of Adult Education and its Challenges Research on the history of adult education has been established as a sub-discipline of adult educational science – however, mainly in a national context. Even nowadays comparative research on the history of adult education is still a step-child of research, facing major challenges which are consequently also problems of presentation.
Beratung hat sich in der Weiterbildung als immer wichtiger werdendes Thema etabliert. Die Felder von Beratung haben sich dementsprechend ausdifferenziert: Gab es früher vorwiegend Weiterbildungsberatung und sozialpädagogische Beratung für benachteiligte Zielgruppen, sind seit einigen Jahren Organisations- bzw. Institutionsberatung, für unterschiedliche Kontexte nutzbar gemachte Lernberatung, sowie Systemberatung dazugekommen. Beratung erhält geradezu den Charakter einer neuen flexiblen Informat…
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…
This article starts from the premise that an academic discipline directed at practice has to question, within which terms its research results become useful beyond science. For empirical research, the authors put forward the idea of use-inspired basic research. This approach might be a helpful orientation due to (further) educational science’s double challenge to simultaneously prove academic productivity and practical as well as societal usefulness. By reference to points of decision regularly…
