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An essential task for administrative staff in adult education is to develop and offer courses. In the field of economic education (basic education), there exist only very few offers and didactic material. Hence, there is a great demand to describe requirements concerning competencies to be taught in this area. Such requirements for competencies may serve as a base for the development of courses in adult education. This article explores the questions on which requirements concerning competencies…
Current political strategy to reform career guidance systems in Europe is regulated by subtle practices. Using the governmentality perspective, the purpose of this article is to make sense, in theoretical terms, of governmental reason and mechanisms in reshaping of career guidance systems. The investigation draws attention to mechanisms and practices such as monitoring and evaluation which indirectly operate in the policy process to make career guidance systems amenable for management. Drawing …
For various reasons adult participation in lifelong learning does not measure up to expectations tied to the agenda of lifelong learning. The article suggests that adults relate learning activities to their conceptions of life stages. Therefore, participation in institutionalized continuing education must rather be linked to life-stage-dependant decisions based on sociocultural patterns than to the acceptance of lifelong learning in general. Specifically in the stage of professional life, these…
The following article focuses the neglected relation between identity and learning by reconstructing foreign language learning efforts by adults. In spite of educational policy’s proclamation of (continuous) lifelong learning, real learning processes are characterised by various discontinuities. Adults deal with these discontinuities by perceiving, describing and structuring them dependent on their self-images as learners. Interpretations of interviews with adult language learners supply eviden…
In the context of lifelong learning, adults are increasingly being viewed from a biographical perspective. This article takes a look at how differently – and in some cases inconsistently – adults are construed as biographical subjects in education policy, in educational practice, and in research on adult education. It argues that to even begin to examine the processes and practices of biographical subjectification that take place in adult and continuing education, biographical research must be …
