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Due to special legal status, differences in social structure, and fewer chances on the labor market, people with migration background are less successful in initial schooling and vocational training programs. They are also under-represented in the area of adult education. The role of continuing education counseling, therefore, is to inform immigrants interested in education of the many individual educational opportunities that are available, to purposefully remove educational barriers, and to p…
Justice in/of continuing vocational training? Is there a correlation between continuing training and justice, or put differently; can continuing training contribute to improving opportunities for social participation? The authors pose this question in a broader societal context and approach it against the background of the social capital approach. They refer to empirical findings from Northern Ireland which put into perspective the wide-spread idea of the positive correlation of social capit…
The development of interest in adult education This article presents results of a project funded by the DFG on the development of interest in continuing and further education. We connect our work to most recent research on biographical genesis of interest and focus occuring during an individual’s participation in adult education. As theoretical approach we refer to the Munich theory of interest and the pragmatist approach. We empirically investigate the opportunities and limitations of a qua…
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…
Numeracy practices are always dependent on the social context in which they emerge. These contexts, however, are unstable because of a range of technological and socio-political changes. How does this instability affect people’s agency in the world? After reviewing key approaches to numeracy practices research, we distil key findings from recent numeracy studies. We introduce the concept of the numerate environment to examine the context in which opportunities, supports and demands present them…
The objective of this empirical study is to provide an overview of the strategies and measures that further education institutions employ concerning migration and diversity. Focusing on organization-wide approaches which foster diversity, the study analyses the level of organization and management, human resources and the spectrum of educational opportunities. The survey was addressed to public educational institutions that are legally recognized as well as to private institutions. The empirica…
The relation between sustainability and widening access to adult learners in higher education is both well comprehensible and highly vague. Accordingly, and following the arguments of Seghezzo (2009) and Foster (2001), the paper aims to complement academic discourse on widening access of higher education by showing the benefit of using the concept of sustainability not merely as an operational measurement index or a learning topic content-wise. Rather, a different understanding of sustainabilit…
Education Programmes under one Roof. The new EU action Programme for Life-long Learning (p. 34-37). The new EU education programme PLL (Programme for life-long learning) aims at combining the previous programmes SOKRATES II and LEONARDO DA VINCI II under the same roof, and hence extends the previous range of opportunities for financial backing through a cross-section programme which enables cooperation outside the boundaries of education. The article gives an overview about the complete program…
Exclusion by precarious inclusion and the “new spirit” of adult education “The social question in Europe has a new name: Exclusion” (Kronauer 2002, p. 9). A growing number of groups of the society are in danger of being excluded from the support of the society: the shield against social risks, in the first place unemployment, illness and poverty is increasingly becoming weaker; compensation benefits against a missing justice and selectivity such as for example adult education training opport…
The German Atlas of Continuing Education documents empirical educational research results which identify geographical location, in addition to socio-economic status, as an important dimension of inequality in educational opportunities for adults. Generally, the German Atlas of Continuing Education describes the provision of continuing education and participation in continuing education at the levels of federal states as well as districts and independent cities over time. In addition, the Atla…
