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Changing the focus on Natural Sciences At present, public debates postulate more attention to natural sciences in the education sector. First, we will examine the precarious status of natural sciences in adult education and than argue that the traditional focus on natural sciences need to be readjusted. This change of focus aims at a general understanding of scientific developments by which both the individual and the society as a whole will gain and maintain its capacity to judge and act on…
How to relate Natural Sciences to Adult Education Drawing on an intensive debate on the improvement of scientific literacy going on in Germany for more than ten years, this article deals with possible contributions of adult education. Starting with the marginal supply of science courses for adults, I focus on typical didactical arrangements and concepts. Based on an empirical study, exemplary didactical concepts are analysed regarding aims, topics, course type, and audience. The results are…
The author diagnoses a widening gap between scientific and general public: as political and social estimation of science rises, it vanishes from daily life and is taken into well-funded but not ver y well-known institutions and thus hidden from the view of the public. At the same time, ever-rising numbers of people are confronted with the results of scientific research in their daily lives and thus in a way in intimate contact with science, but at the same time unable to understand its workings…
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The individual and society today On the relevance of actor-network-theory, post-academic science and self-directed learning Introduced are deliberations on a post-academic science that came into being by the societal change as well as the requirements concerning self-directed learning in future.
Ausgehend von einem gesellschaftsanalytischen Problemaufriss werden zwei Begründungslinien entfaltet, die einerseits den Bereich der Wissenschaftskommunikation fokussieren und andererseits Bezüge aus der Erwachsenenbildungswissenschaft aufgreifen. Denn gilt der formulierte Anspruch an Wissenschaftskommunikation, kann nicht mehr ‚Wissensvermittlung‘ als Beschreibung der Formatstrukturen aufgerufen werden, sondern erst über den Bezug zum ‚Aneignen‘ in der Ausgestaltung des Formats werden die Te…
Reshaping the Relationship between Natural Sciences and Society – The implicite Learning in Contemporary Society How much does an average citizen need to know in the field of natural sciences in order to cope with the challenges of contemporary society? This question is being asked from various points of view. We will reconstruct current debates related to this question along three different lines: on the European level, within academia, and by means of a concrete case study. By relating the…
Natural Sciences as a Constitutive Element of Modern Adult Education Imparting natural scientific knowledge to a socially broad audience was already quite common in manifold forms before adult education as such was really constituted in the last third of the 19th century. Some of the questions raised when natural science spread in the 18th and 19th centuries are still or again relevant in the 21st century. This paper tries to demonstrate that notion in a summarized form on the basis of an ex…
