Research
We explore how adult education can be made inclusive, digital and effective.
Services
Digital tools, specialist portals and data – for teachers, researchers, students and interested parties.
Institute
We offer research, transfer and infrastructure for lifelong learning.
This contribution suggests a reconstruction of didactic behavior in the context of adult education. Didactics is perceived as a specific kind of practice that can be analyzed with respect to its immanent significances. Thus, criteria of adult education didactics can be identified. These criteria are not only empirically found aspects concerning the conditions of success. Incorporated challenges concerning disciplining, impositions of teaching and authority matter as well. Notwithstanding adult …
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)…
The mature adult who participates voluntarily in free educational programmes is a basic assumption, which equally often supports theories and practices of adult education as it is empirically challenged. Neither supply nor demand is consistently characterized by voluntariness. Up to a certain degree, programmes and participation are mandatory. The assumption that responsible adults do not want to, should not and cannot be taught is also considered to be problematic. The article reveals good rea…
The research memorandum for adult and continuing education (2000) focuses systematically on main research areas and contributes significantly to the systematization of the research landscape, the enhancement of possible collaborations and the provision of an overview of research achievements in the discipline for research sponsors as well as the public. Since 2007, adult educational research projects can be entered in a data base in accordance with the memorandum systematic. Acknowledging that …
Die Einzelveröffentlichungen des DIE vermitteln den aktuellen Kenntnisstand zu einem spezifischen Themenfeld der Weiterbildung. Die Bände sind meist als Reader konzipiert und dokumentieren Ergebnisse aus DIE-Projekten oder von Fachtagungen. Die DIE-Einzelveröffentlichungen richten sich an Vetreter/innen aus Wissenschaft, Praxis und Bildungspolitik.
Particularly, disabled people belong to those being excluded from social participation. From these peoples’ point of view, the UN-Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities formulates specific challenges for the system of adult and continuing education. What results from these challenges with regard to the various social and individual functions given to adult education and lifelong learning? Answers from the field of adult education, from the pedagogy for the disabled and from socio…
Thriller series with top class actors of the German television occasionally play teachers and learners in adult education settings. And they use the cliche of the organised adult education as a place for problematic customized services. The author watched several different thriller series and advises to take note of the transported image in a sober way: teachers and learners of adult education will have to live with being portrayed in television thrillers as fogy or suspect figures. At the same…
In the view of cultural history, andragogy precedes pedagogy. The task of the andragogy is the social distribution of cultural innovations. The passing on of such innovation to the following generation is the task of pedagogy. Andragogy and pedagogy have been carried out over thousands of years in the mode of informal learning. With the dawn of literacy, formal learning emerges which then institutionalizes forms of schooling for the young generations. Institutions for andragogical formal learni…
Political education as a par t of general adult and continuing education with regards to lifelong learning and on the background of social change, is confronted with a new challenge. Science, economics, representatives responsible for education and learning of adults and politics are looking for instruments to navigate the consequences of globalization. – The author focusses – besides social questions of inequality – problems of cultural identity as one of these consequences and identifies lear…
