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 …
A planned offer of further education organisations, orientated by the participant`s needs and interests, implies empirically confirmed data. The situation of data concerning further education behaviour and -interests of migrants in Germany referring to this is however moderate. This is on the one hand due to the definition problem of such constructs as “further education” and “people from migrant background” and adjunct to the difficulties with the operationalisation. On the other hand the data…
Based on several contemporary international impulses on national educational policy, the article discusses the interaction of management and educational research, particularly indicator-aided educational reporting. First, the author scans the relevance and weaknesses of international interventions. In the light of national self-determination of educational issues, he stresses the significance of national educational reporting as well as the consideration of federal structure and regional levels…
Religion and adult education The combination of "Religion and adult education" has conspicuously various facets, especially in practice. Religious adult education will be presented by means of examples of Christian, Islamic and Jewish adult education. But Religion is also subject matter of secular adult education and for that reason it will be considered separately in this context. An additional focus will be on the inevitable reference to religious aspects of intercultural adult education b…
How can continuing education in actual practice really use empirical data on the area of continuing education? The author, a business manager at an adult college special-purpose association, demonstrates in his article the practical potential offered by empirical educational research. The data generated serve as a comparative parameter for local statistics and can help identify and corroborate fields of development. He elucidates this using the examples of milieu marketing and course leader qua…
New service for programme research. The DIE online archive of further education programmes The German Institute for Adult Education (Deutsche Institut für Erwachsenenbildung, DIE) has an archive of Volkshochschule programme plans from 1957 to 2004. Now, a new stage of development has commenced, in the form of its online archive of further education programmes: a smaller-scale digitalised continuation which also forms a picture of the structure of the Volkshochschule situation. This article p…
Wie wirken Praxis, Empirie und Theorie der Erwachsenenbildung zusammen? Der Autor beschreibt kennzeichnende Merkmale und Aufgaben, um ausgehend von dieser Analyse die Notwendigkeit einer Vermittlung zwischen den drei Bereichen darzulegen. Ziel ist es, Kernpunkte der Erwachsenenbildung herauszuarbeiten, sie einem wissenschaftlichen Diskurs zu unterwerfen und gemeinsam überprüfbare Kriterien festzulegen, um Kontinuität und Qualität des Diskurses sicher zu stellen.