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The article discusses the chances of using a gerontological data base (Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study of Adulthood, German Acronym: ILSE) for analyses in educational biography research: Learning to age tends to be the central category of this analyses. The article comments on the current debate of aging and education and expounds the problems of politically driven activation of elders and the programmatic turn in the discussion. In a second step the article elaborates on what terms it is …
The article deals with cooperation under the perspective of governance from an organisational view. According to the variety forms of cooperation in the field of adult education, cooperation can be seen as a medium that adult educational organisations can use for their reproduction and coordination in different institutional environment. Based on empirical findings from a case study, it can be shown that organisations initiate cooperation for collecting resources and legitimation. So, organisat…
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…
This article discusses the consequences of increasing access of non-traditional students to higher education (HE) in Sweden for society, individuals, and HE. The findings are based on a recently finished European Research Project called Access and Retention: Experiences of Non-traditional Students in Higher Education (RANLHE) with seven countries involved. First, an introduction about opening access to HE is presented, followed by a review of Swedish HE policy. Next is a presentation of the RAN…
The article deals with the question of organizations' internal control problems, which appear during the implementation of scientific continuing education, and how these problems relate to the implementation process and also to the general opening of universities for higher education to adult learners. Based on qualitative empirical results from a currently ongoing DFG project, three control problems are deployed and appropriate forms of action are demonstrated. The results provide evidence of …
Departing from the variety of understandings of “region” both in general and in Adult Education, the author aims at a new definition of the term against the backdrop of current discussions on space. Based on a geographic approach, the author analyzes recent literature in the field of Adult Education. He identifies a shift in both politics and research. He, suggests, with Schöning, to evaluate the concept from a variety of perspectives – from the point of view of the subject, of the organiz…
With increasing age, xenophobic and pejorative attitudes of people with a migration background and other cultures grow. Both adult education in older age and social work are hence faced with new challenges. On the basis of a statistic inventory on hostility of elderly people, different forms and specifications and also dimensions of discrimination are systematized by means of theory constructions. Enabling to focus on social community approaches, e.g. the concept of Habitus, as suggested by Bou…
The study Competencies in Later Life (CiLL) provides for the first time representative data regarding the competencies of older people between the age of 66 to 80 years in three different domains: literacy, numeracy, and problem solving in technology-rich environments. It is shown that there are significant differences between people with different qualification, but also between people of different birth cohorts. Despite major qualification differences between men and women, there are no signi…
