In today’s societies literacy is regarded as the prerequisite for participating in the professional and private spheres of everyday life. It is regarded as a human right, a tool for personal empowerment and a tool to influence the behaviour of individuals, families and communities. Despite the international consensus that literacy skills determine opportunities and provide access to today’s information-based societies, many adults in both industrialized and developing countries find themselves …
Popular education is a term which has been used for a considerable time. At the outset, however, it should be pointed out that there are multiple perspectives, but they do not “speak” much to each other. There is a tendency to define popular education in narrow and formulaic terms, according to which tradition one is drawing on. I counter this by discussing four traditions and attempt to distil common features across the multiplicity.
Numeracy practices are always dependent on the social context in which they emerge. These contexts, however, are unstable because of a range of technological and socio-political changes. How does this instability affect people’s agency in the world? After reviewing key approaches to numeracy practices research, we distil key findings from recent numeracy studies. We introduce the concept of the numerate environment to examine the context in which opportunities, supports and demands present them…
Implementing network type structures has become a widely appreciated strategy to promote actor-relationships in the field of adult and community education and to coordinate them purposefully. However, there is still a lack of knowledge on how a “successful” coordination of actor-relationships can be practically achieved. This paper offers some clues to answering the question by outlining basic characteristics of social networks and then giving reference to a recent case study from Germany.
