The article discusses the chances of using a gerontological data base (Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study of Adulthood, German Acronym: ILSE) for analyses in educational biography research: Learning to age tends to be the central category of this analyses. The article comments on the current debate of aging and education and expounds the problems of politically driven activation of elders and the programmatic turn in the discussion. In a second step the article elaborates on what terms it is …
This article discusses participation of older people from five different perspectives: the perspective of images of old age, the perspective of individual potentials for change and participation, the perspective of the creation of public space, the perspective of social relationships and the perspective of structures of care. Participation is thus understood as a combination of personal, social, cultural, communal and societal factors. Education is seen as a central mechanism for building struc…
The IdA KompetenzCheck represents a scientifically developed test procedure for measuring non-formally and informally acquired competences and for evaluating competences in relation to German occupations. As part of the IdA KompetenzCheck, testees are confronted with an occupational profile’s typical fields of action. Multiple action-oriented questions concerning each field of action are presented in order to determine the corresponding level of competence. The IdA KompetenzCheck allows for tes…
The paper tackles the issue of procedures for the validation of competences, which are used in the tertiary education sector in order to evaluate an individual’s study ability on the basis of his/her vocational qualifications. This contested terrain will be explored by means of the University of Hamburg’s validation procedure (the so-called Eingangsprüfungsverfahren, §38 HmbHG). The focus of interest will be put on a qualitative reconstruction of individual decision-making processes during thes…
AiKomPass is a web-based tool to make informal and non-formal competences within the electrical and metal industries visible. It is based on an interview study with potential users and a task inventory, which covers tasks of work areas like process planning, production, maintenance and logistics within production processes. The tool itself was developed within a participative design process. It enables employees and people in search of employment to self-assess their ability to fulfil working t…
This article presents the results of a recent online survey of graduates of the Austrian Academy of Continuing Education. Methodically, the survey’s results on benefit items are interpreted and answers to open questions are analyzed by qualitative content analyses. Empirical findings are subject to an interpretation using concepts of professionalization and the political agenda of validation of informal and non-formal learning. An important finding is, that WBA enhances individual professionali…
In 2015, a report led by the mentors of the World Health Organization Age-friendly cities program, proposed a review of the concept of active aging, including, alongside the three pillars (health, security and participation), lifelong learning, both as formal education (access to grade and diplomas), and in their informal dimension (when learning take places in daily life or in leisure activities). This study aims to analyze if the question of lifelong learning was raised and what the salient t…
Lifelong education for seniors is becoming a significant policy focus because of factors relating to the global aging society phenomenon. Yet the modern ‘educational demoralisation’ that can result from informal experiential learning not being sufficiently valued or encouraged, may also apply to later life learning—typically manifest as a ‘fear of ageing’ as well as ageism. This is especially so in contexts where policymakers tend to just mainly focus on the worrying economic, health and other …
