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Functional illiteracy is often perceived as being connected to a strong taboo. Nevertheless new empirical results show, that there is a widespread personal knowledge about functional illiterates. About 40?% of adults know someone who shows low performance in literacy. This knowledge theoretically offers great potential to inform those performing low in reading and/or writing about possibilities in Adult Basic Education. This potential however is by far not fully exploited. By the majority those…
Publically funded adult education has rarely contributed to the increase of educational equality. Often enough, it has been beneficial to those who had already enjoyed their share of education and employment. The author reflects on the German post-war history of continuing education and identifies several cycles of financial distribution. The initial focus of adult education was on educationally ambitious citizens. Based on a socio-political motivation, the learning of employees became increasi…
Environmental education that fosters meaningful community participation and learning has been considered a requisite to sustaining our human and natural environments in many of the global conferences, agreements, declarations and charters since the 1972 UN Conference on the Environment in Stockholm. Despite this growing consensus there is a small amount of published research in Australia in this field of practice we have decided to call popular and informal environmental education – education t…
Looking ahead – 30-year REPORT The 30th anniversary issue of the REPORT reviews ideas, research findings and articles from a present-day perspective and extrapolates these into the future. To this end, texts from the two founding editors, Horst Siebert and Johannes Weinberg, have subsumed articles under six different topical rubrics and reread these from a present-day perspective from thirty years of REPORT. The articles are prefaced and concluded by two interviews respectively providing a ret…
“Reflections on Self-Education” is dedicated to Rolf Arnold on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Like hardly any other representative in the field of continuing educational science, over the past decades Rolf Arnold has provided impulses for the reflection on adult teaching and learning e.g. based on his contributions to constructivist education, interpretive paradigms as well as empowerment didactics. His approach has developed continuously and is now regarded as systemic-constructivist educa…
This article addresses learning, educational and activity-related prospects upon entering into retirement age and the search for meaning in one's career associated with this. The topic is explored at various levels: first of all autobiographically taking the example of a new, self-employed orientation. At the second level, the case example can be interpreted as part of a societal trend towards activities crossing the age border. Finally prospects for the topic in the context of adult education …
Tendencies towards individualization have led to a pluralization of situations, phases and styles of living. Disengagement with reference to course participants manifests itself in the diversification of the group of course participants as far as their life situation (vertical disengagement), life phase (temporal disengagement) and style of living (horizontal disengagement) are concerned. The concept of social milieus as an integrative approach can represent tendencies of liberation and can a…
Communication competences of adult educators are challenged intensively. Successful learning largely depends on the subject matter’s mediative aspects: rhetoric and vocal processes prove to be significant for the learning atmosphere, group dynamics, understandable knowledge communication and setting group and feedback processes in motion. As a result, a sound and comprehensive repertoire of communicative competences is essential, which can be acquired in close relation to linguistics and speech…
