Adult education is also stamped by linear legends, including its implicit models of biography. These are, as shall be shown in the first section of this consideration, concepts of a setting-out-biography. They oversee the aspect of life coming to an end. For that reason adult education often just shows half of the picture of an adult. The adult appears as a timeless entity, being in principle open for development. His “Unteachableness” is not really seen as a result of the structural rigidity o…
The Need for Comparative Research on the History of Adult Education and its Challenges Research on the history of adult education has been established as a sub-discipline of adult educational science – however, mainly in a national context. Even nowadays comparative research on the history of adult education is still a step-child of research, facing major challenges which are consequently also problems of presentation.
For over 40 years, the „Bibliography of Adult Education“ has been published. This service of the DIE (German Institute of Adult Education) has now been changed into a more modern online format. Looking back, the bibliography may well have been a little hampered by its aspiration to completeness, but it still has performed an essential role in making adult education an important discipline within educational science.
The primary objective of guidance and counselling in continuing education and training is its focus on customers by means of changing perspective on their interests and concerns as a key principle for processes, methods and tools. Quality of guidance services is the outcome of well-planned and structured approaches respectively customer-focused guidance procedures. It is also the result of a process in each individual counselling situation and cannot be completely regulated by institutional and…
The German Society for Promotion of Research at Old Age (Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Forschung im Alter – DGFFA) wants to give an impulse for the intensification of the discussion on those aspects of the demographic change, to which the universities/colleges would need to devote themselves to in due time, if they strive to consolidate their future viability in a society of lifelong learning. The presented suggestions in this contribution are components of a position paper that a wor…
The author looks at two forms of learning in virtual environments: learning with hypermedia and learning by confrontation with virtual objects and „persons“ (simulations). For hypermedia, research has found a rather wide discrepancy between media-specific learning potential and actual outcome, which, especially for beginners, tends to be rather small. - Many empirical studies on learning in simulated reality have shown that simulations can indeed be conducive to learning, but that this is not a…
Taking demographical development as a starting point, Turek identifies functions of political education. It should help to avoid the »clash of generations «. Demographical change, however, is only one of several trends: the change from modern industrial society towards a transnational technological society calls for a new »contract across generations«. Political education initialises a future-oriented selfremodelling of society and thus becomes an investment into its human resource…
“Reflections on Self-Education” is dedicated to Rolf Arnold on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Like hardly any other representative in the field of continuing educational science, over the past decades Rolf Arnold has provided impulses for the reflection on adult teaching and learning e.g. based on his contributions to constructivist education, interpretive paradigms as well as empowerment didactics. His approach has developed continuously and is now regarded as systemic-constructivist educa…
Methodogical deliberations on network analyses The network analysis as an empirical examination method for gathering social relationships is presently gaining increasing dissemination in different branches of study and fields. In the contribution network analysis basic approaches are the framework for reference and analysis for research works in the field of adult education are illuminated. In doing so a special focus is placed on the development of adequate examination concepts. Concluding …
Holzapfel, Günther: More self-consciousness for pedagogy! A reply to REPORT 3/2003 titled "Brain and Learning" Referring to REPORT 3/2003 with its main theme "Brain and Learning" the author criticizes tendences in pedagogy which consider some results of neuro-sciences as confirmation for a naturalistic and biologistic trend. He pleads for emphasizing those aspects of neuro-sciences which are confirmations against obsolete concepts of learning and education as an accumulation of knowledge wi…
