People with low literacy skills are often experiencing difficulties to manage their everyday life. For example, filling out forms, correspondence or banking may pose huge challenges. But what about the political participation of functional illiterates in a society which is dominated by the use of literacy? The following article focuses on how participants of literacy classes use their possibilities of contribution. These assumptions are based on first results of the qualitative research project…
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…
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…
The scope of literacy courses. Results of a representative survey among adult education centres As part of the EQUALS project, the German Adult Education Association (DVV) collected statistical data on literacy courses at adult education centres; this article presents the data and compares it with figures from 1994. The number of courses has risen, as has the number of participants, but fewer institutions than before provide this service. Compared with 1994, the participants are older and t…
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…
