God’s people as a learning community Biblical foundations of lifelong learning The article presents the around 2.500 year-old roots of a concept of lifelong (religious) learning which is being developed in the book Deuteronomium of the Hebrew Bibel. Learning is considered an existential self-realization of God’s people which encompasses not only ethics, but also history and constitutional law. With respect to the history of people’s duty to learn in Judaism, the author evaluates perspective…
Normative Patterns of Biography and Contradictory Experiences as Resources in Women’s Educational Biographies As part of a research project on discontinuities in female educational and professional careers, this essay focusses on conflicting expectations women experience – conflicts between set normative social standards and biographies on the one hand, and the different individual plans and perspectives on the other hand. Group discussions among the participants of a Women’s Studies Program…
Gender mainstreaming is gaining relevance in gender and equality policy. But gender democracy means not only equal rights and chances of men and women but also the depart from hegemonial virility as a dominant social structural principle. This political target is far from being reached. Education under the perspective of gender democracy should be orientated at the “new man”. – The article is the answer of the (male) author to three questions for the understanding, the development and the most …
Für die Erwachsenenbildung hilft die Biographieforschung, die Frage nach den Lernprozessen Erwachsener präziser herauszuarbeiten: Welche Bedeutung für die eigene Biographie haben Bildungsprozesse? Was erfahren wir von Teilnehmenden der Erwachsenenbildung über ihre Einschätzung von Bildung? Inwieweit werden Vorbilder konstituiert oder konstruiert? Diesen Fragen gehen die Beiträge dieses Heftes nach.
From 1992 to 2007 a considerable amount of German and EU funding was put into development projects described as “Qualification Development Management” (German acronym: QUEM) and aimed to support the quality of vocational qualification structures in the former GDR. QUEM was sponsored by the ABWF (Study Group for Corporate Continuing Education Research). In this article the author, a scientist working on QUEM, sums up the activities in the programmes and projects which were funded. He identifies …
The article presents the results of a DFG project on program planning of workplace learning, which was conducted between June 2013 and May 2015 at the Department of Adult Education/Continuing Education at the Humboldt University of Berlin. The central questions were: a) How do internal and external stakeholders influence the program planning and training design in the context of workplace learning (targeted audiences, objectives, contents, didactic fields of action)? b) Which specific forms of …
Teachers and trainers can only act on what they notice. In line with use-inspired basic research, the question pursued in this book is how teachers’ and trainers’ competence to perceive, analyze, and diagnose situations of learning and instruction can be enhanced resulting in long-term effects. The present state of research with regard to adult education science’s professionalization discourse, teacher education research, competence as well as expertise research is drawn upon in order to gain a…
There is growing interest in evidence-based interventions that can improve student teachers’ professional development. But how can these interventions be implemented into everyday teacher education practice by teacher educators themselves—without losing their initial, lab-tested effectiveness due to teacher educators’ practical educational autonomy? Through a quasi-experimental field study the following question is investigated: What is the impact of different degrees of educational autonomy…
It becomes apparent in the current critique on methods of competence diagnostics that the problem does not lie in empirical or methodical, but mainly in theoretical deficits. Psycho-dynamic explanations are missing. Moreover, competences are mainly constructed as individual traits while social dimensions are ignored. Both deficits are considerable blank spaces. This paper argues that competence cannot be the cause of performance, but only the conscious notion of how masterly ways of acting look…
This article focuses on the requirement for teachers and trainers in adult education to reflect on their professional actions and teaching experiences. After a short overview of the current debate on professionalism, a definition of the term didactical reflection is elaborated, differentiating between two levels of reflection: on one hand a direct didactical reflection on teaching actions or situations and on the other hand a self-including reflection. Subjective definitions of successful teach…
