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The paratext of biographical interviews This article profiles everything which the biography researcher intentionally prompts or unintentionally receives during field work from his interview partners in the way of “paratext” which contributes to the design of the subject of research. Thus a notion which is usually used in the field of literature science is in this manner adopted in biographical research.
Little is known about the qualifications of trainers in further vocational education. Some hold a degree in educational sciences. At the same time prospective trainers seem to be part of the target group of programs that specialize in adult education. The study focuses on which contents are intended in these programs and whether they could qualify for a later occupational activity as a training professional. For this purpose the course descriptions of 32 programs were analyzed and 10 responsibl…
The article describes the project „Deutscher Bildungsserver“ which is working as a meta-server to supply users with an information system of relevant data in the field of education, adult and further education. The internet is offering big quantities of information and the chance to build up complex documents. Both make it more difficult to select and evaluate information. The „Deutscher Bildungsserver“ incorporates information critically bringing it into an order making it easier for users to …
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.
For over 40 years, the „Bibliography of Adult Education“ has been published. This service of the DIE (German Institute of Adult Education) has now been changed into a more modern online format. Looking back, the bibliography may well have been a little hampered by its aspiration to completeness, but it still has performed an essential role in making adult education an important discipline within educational science.
The article illustrates a heuristic model that describes the multidimensional interdisciplinary social phenomena of functional illiteracy in a clearly arranged way. To implement professional literacy programmes that match the different target groups, scientific findings about educational deprivation, life circumstances and barriers to equal participation in connection with low literacy skills are to be arranged in a proper order. One result of the research project “HABIL” is the development of …
In this article, the reactor disaster in Fukushima (March 2011) together with the changes in energy policy following in its wake are used to enquire about reactions in the fields of natural science and technical didactics. The empirical finding is that didactical discourse has been little affected by Fukushima. The reason for this, in the view of the author, is to be found in the theoretical problems associated with specialised didactics, in this case didactics involving technology, as well as …
In modern society, the production of knowledge is multiplied and taken from the universities who were traditionally dedicated to this task, into the general public. The role of institutions of secondary education changes from diffusing to producing knowledge; teachers representing, in this context, the once-universal authority of science. Against this background, the authors present their DFGfunded project „Wissensgesellschaft. Umgang mit Wissen im Kontext sozialer Welten vor dem Hintergrund de…
Why have we lately seen a renaissance of the concept of „region“ in the social sciences? The author explores changing perspectives on this concept against a background of technical and social development. While the electronic media allow networking as a form of cooperation that is motivated by functional aspects and exceeds regional boundaries, cooperation within the physical boundaries of a region is facilitated by ease of personal contacts, shared facilities and common institutions. Both tend…
Unlearning has been established as a phenomenon in common parlance, but has been neglected by educational science so far. Very few authors use the term “unlearning”, even rarer is a clear, precise and sophisticated definition. This article starts with the dilemmata appearing when using the term as a category of analysis in empirical studies. The critical re-analysis of one of these studies yet evokes a work programme designed to explore the phenomena of unlearning. As a first step, this article…
