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Adult education and historiography The paper aims to explore the role and function of the historical issues within the field of Adult Education and its relations to scholarly historiography to date. Quite similar to the traditional paradigm in the history of education was the history of adult education for a long time also primarily based on pedagogical considerations. Thus research received almost no attention neither from historiography nor from educational science. Despite the current boo…
Adult Education is rarely associated with genuine research methods. But recently a number of innovative methodical approaches have emerged which have been implemented in adult education. Often these empirical approaches are interconnected and therefore will be in the focus of our attention. This edition of REPORT will present and evaluate these innovative research methods in adult education.
The concept of self-optimisation is closely linked to discourses on lifelong learning and has been discussed in adult education research for some time. The talk about selfoptimisation is mostly articulated as a critique or critical analysis, appears as almost self-evident and thus gets caught up in the pull of normalisation. The established problematisation of self-optimisation is therefore also subjected to problematization in this paper in an attempt to reopen the thinking of the problem. Th…
The development of typologies is used as a method in social and educational research that helps to systematically reduce complex information. Thus, developing typologies facilitates theoretical as well as empirical clarification and contributes in this way to the attainment of scientific insights. Typologies are based on the results of comparisons derived from analysing empirical material. These results are then clustered and outlined as dimensions for allocating individual cases, identifying i…
This article provides an overview of the debate on learning environments and learning locations within adult education research; the authors use a historical review of main research topics in order to understand current learning environments and recent theoretical and empirical discussions. The term of learning environments or learning locations has been introduced into research on adult education in the 1970ies; since this time, each following decade can be characterized by several specific re…
