Research
We explore how adult education can be made inclusive, digital and effective.
Services
Digital tools, specialist portals and data – for teachers, researchers, students and interested parties.
Institute
We offer research, transfer and infrastructure for lifelong learning.
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 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…
Research on learning - a retrospective The history of empirical research on adults’ learning reaches back until the twenties of the last century. This contribution evokes some interpretative research on the pedagogy of learning and teaching for adults. It seems that the adult education sciences’ disciplinary memory is underdeveloped as many instructive older analysis seem to have fallen into oblivion. Recent studies mostly don’t pay attention to the linkages and continuity of the questions. …
Findings of the empirically and medically oriented sports sciences point to the fact that ageing processes can be retarded and their consequences alleviated by adequately dosed exercise. The compensation-oriented intervention plan derived from this fact is, however, based on normative ideas of an unproblematic functioning of the body which is seen as the essential prerequisite of a high quality of living in old age. The objective of an education for the elderly that focusses on an emancipative …
The author describes the education and development of men as a hot topic in social offside between dominant masculinity, marginalised movement of man and aspiring women’s education and development. The historical and political starting points for men’s education are different to those of women’s education: Men have to become conscious of the need of giving up private and public privileges while women are profiting of their grandmothers’ successful fights for equality. Various resistances agains…
Political education as a par t of general adult and continuing education with regards to lifelong learning and on the background of social change, is confronted with a new challenge. Science, economics, representatives responsible for education and learning of adults and politics are looking for instruments to navigate the consequences of globalization. – The author focusses – besides social questions of inequality – problems of cultural identity as one of these consequences and identifies lear…
Currently a dilemma within organization studies seems to be represented by, on the one hand, proponents who argue for a retro-wave, to go back to the original ideas of organization studies, the core tasks of enterprises and importance of the relevance of organization studies to practitioners. On the other hand, another contemporary movement may be observed within organization studies, which is to defend the use of general theories of the social sciences. This latter trend is represented through…
This article is concerned with the discourse and policy of lifelong learning in Europe after 1973. It deals with the question whether the 1980s have to be seen as a period of diminishing interest in lifelong learning or as a formative phase of so called neoliberalism. Applying a corpus lingustic approach, it analyses the official documents of the European Communities as archived in the database EUR-Lex. The results are interpreted as the expression of a new European governance regime called “te…
