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Professionalization in adult education and the memory culture The discussion of the adult education and its history opens for a closer look at the process of its professionalization. The position of the temporal delimitation and the focusing on the contents come into focus. It turns out that the history of woman education is not represented explicitly in textbooks on the history of the adult education. Focussing on historical factual knowledge and experience knowledge, the analysis of memor…
Proceeding from the educational policy objective of achieving greater participation in continuing education, this article presents a set of instruments with which the learning and educational behaviour of adults can be measured statistically. Taking the example of data selected from the Continuing Education Reporting System (Berichtssystem Weiterbildung (BSW)) and the Adult Education Survey (AES), the potential for analysis and the generation of knowledge offered by statistics on continuing edu…
The report contributes statements by educational counsellors indicating their self-expectations and objectives and their attempt to obtain a high beneficial level of counselling in continuing education. At the same time, the ratio of the competences of counselling personnel in continuing education to their self-defined objectives is observed. This qualitative empiricism backs the analysis of the location of continuing educational counselling as a location in the triangle between public expectat…
Natural Sciences as a Constitutive Element of Modern Adult Education Imparting natural scientific knowledge to a socially broad audience was already quite common in manifold forms before adult education as such was really constituted in the last third of the 19th century. Some of the questions raised when natural science spread in the 18th and 19th centuries are still or again relevant in the 21st century. This paper tries to demonstrate that notion in a summarized form on the basis of an ex…
Dealing professionally with negative emotions Tolerance of frustration and ambiguity as a key competence of providers of continuing education Dealing with disruptions is a key challenge in educational activities. This article uses abusive, insulting or fault-finding statements by participants to analyse professional ways of dealing with negative emotions. Tolerance of frustration and ambiguity are developed theoretically, understood as an element of a broad “feelings-management” and propa…
Recent international trends in Adult Education (AE) mirror the diverse realities this field is experiencing around the world. This article discusses the trend towards democratization through a revision of existing knowledge in three main domains: theory, research and practice. First, a theoretical framework of democratization as applied in AE will be outlined. Second, recent research developments will be reviewed as they inform the process of democratization through Adult Education which is occ…
Counselling: Changes for a Sustainable Development If counselling should survive as a generally accepted human service at the beginning of the 21st century, a fundamental shift in paradigms and the therewith connected development of sustainable offers for counselling becomes necessary. Permanent co-evolution of needs from clients, economy and society calls for specific skills and knowledge for analysis and coping with multiple subjective realities, ecological contexts, non-linear causalities…
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. …
Learning a language is an indispensable prerequisite for participating in both public and working life. Adult education, also in Germany, is currently facing a great challenge in the area of language teaching: In addition to language teaching for migrants and refugees, a key problem is the alphabetization of German and non-German speaking functional illiterates. This paper looks at the conditions for successful language learning by the adults here in focus in organized teaching and learning set…
In this paper, the authors examine the setting of and working with boundaries between everyday work and innovation development, based on an empirical analysis of an innovation lab in the social economy. The lab allows intrapreneurs to learn and use entrepreneurial practices to foster social innovation. The process of boundaries setting can be made clear by the spatial structuring of performative practice, the constitution of symbolic spaces, the rhythm of divergence and convergence as well as a…
