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Vocational continuing education is becoming more significant in modern employment biographies. A growing range of work-based study programmes and the recent opening tendency for persons holding vocational qualifications attracts attention to universities as providers of continuing education. Still, academic formats play a comparatively small role in the market of continuing education. The report explores the reasons for the low acceptance of academic continuing education. For this purpose, 72 p…
How to relate Natural Sciences to Adult Education Drawing on an intensive debate on the improvement of scientific literacy going on in Germany for more than ten years, this article deals with possible contributions of adult education. Starting with the marginal supply of science courses for adults, I focus on typical didactical arrangements and concepts. Based on an empirical study, exemplary didactical concepts are analysed regarding aims, topics, course type, and audience. The results are…
Voluntary Commitment and Learning. Results of a Survey on Volunteers by the Federal Government The Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth’s (BMFSFJ) survey on volunteers, carried out in 1999 and 2004, shows that voluntary work is on the rise, especially in the area of work with young people and adult education. Learning motives play a major role in voluntary commitments. Technical expertise is also considered to be important, but more so by men than by women. O…
The increasing functional illiteratism among young adults is the background for the project „Gilgamesch“ – a cooperation of the university and the adult education centre in Munich. The learners are organized in small groups, the emphasis of the courses is on verbal improvement, cognitive ordering and handling of knowledge and on the development of individual strategies to overcome writing problems. The project’s theoretical and practical results will be transmitted to various institutions deali…
Theoretical basics of a gender equal didactics Substantiations and consequences The contribution makes a subject of discussion the significance of the category gender for theoretical basics of didactical approaches in adult education. Structural gender characterize the adult education research, the institutions, the educational situations, the educational apprehension as well as the people participating with the educational actions and the worlds of their lives. These conditions for outco…
Als „DIE spezial“ werden in lockerer Folge – durchschnittlich ein Band jährlich –Veröffentlichungen profiliert, die für die Weiterbildungslandschaft grundlegend und nachhaltig sind. Die hier publizierten Inhalte sind für alle Akteure der Weiterbildungslandschaft wichtig, entspringen oft empirischen und renommierten Forschungsvorhaben und lassen besondere handlungsleitende oder steuerungsrelevante Wirkungen erwarten.
Initial results of the Level One Survey Germany (leo.) show that functional illiteracy affects 14.5 percent of working-age population (18–64 years of age). This translates into 7.5 million people who lack functional literacy skills in Germany. We will first introduce the method and design of the study. We will then explain the decisions taken in order to obtain the estimate of the dimension of functional illiteracy. These decisions were carefully taken, and they have contributed to a rather con…
Due to special legal status, differences in social structure, and fewer chances on the labor market, people with migration background are less successful in initial schooling and vocational training programs. They are also under-represented in the area of adult education. The role of continuing education counseling, therefore, is to inform immigrants interested in education of the many individual educational opportunities that are available, to purposefully remove educational barriers, and to p…
The article focuses the question whether workforce literacy strategies in research and policies may tend to exclude relevant fields of literacy, which have emancipatory chances for participants, but which regularly fail in including low qualified or literate adults, namely the area of basic civic education. The relevance of basic civic education will be discussed using contemporary theories, which point at a crisis of democracy and explain this by the spread of income and capital and its legiti…
Empirically based on interviews, the article gets to the bottom of how independent travelers address their educational experiences. Visitors of the Dogon people in Mali are confronted with an inaccessible unfamiliarity, whereas voyagers to Ladakh are irritated by the prevalent differences inducing the reflection of their individual experiences. Educational qualities can be attributed to both forms of experience.
