Diversity management is a popular management approach. It promises to allow diversity in organisations and thus to appreciate people for what they are. It undertakes to recognise different points of view, ideas, abilities and potentials; not to standardise cultural variety but to reinforce it. For adult education, this concept seems highly promising. After all, one claim of educational management is to promote personality development and personal progress in a business context. However, critica…
Foreign languages à la mode. Trends in adult language acquisition based on the example of the VHS programme Learning foreign languages is a high-status activity in organised adult learning. Based on VHS (adult education centre) statistics, the author shows that foreign languages are an indispensable element of the VHS programme range; hardly any other area is in such constantly high demand, a demand which can also be seen in relation to income status. Now making up 30 percent of all courses,…
Going on from the report year 1 (http://www.die-bonn.de/esprid/dokumente/doc-2000/gnahs00_01.pdf) which offered a compilation of data accessible in internet, a discussion of case studies Finland and Switzerland and a suggestion of a ‘minimal’ data collection plan, in the report year 2 an overview of official (governmental) and institutional (providers) surveys on adult education is given. The design of a survey on experts from the national statistical offices is explained and the unexpected sma…
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…
Das europäische Parlament und der Rat der Europäischen Union haben 1996 zum "Jahr des lebenslangen Lernens" erklärt. Der Begriff ist keineswegs neu - bereits in den 60er Jahren war von "lebenslangem Lernen", "lifelong education", "éducation permanente" die Rede. Gibt es 1997 also neue Argumente, Konzepte und Perspektiven? Diese Frage soll aus unterschiedlicher Sicht im ersten Teil des vorliegenden REPORT erörtert werden. Noch ein zweiter Begriff hat Hochkonjunktur und wird häufig im Zusammenhan…
Die Chancen und Möglichkeiten, die in einer didaktisch und inhaltlich gut begründeten Kombination von E-Learning und Präsenzlernen (blended learning) bestehen, werden anhand der Ergebnisse einer Teilnehmerbefragung zum Projekt ENTER vorgestellt. Zum Schluss werden Anregungen für Blended-Learning-Arrangements.
The following article focuses the neglected relation between identity and learning by reconstructing foreign language learning efforts by adults. In spite of educational policy’s proclamation of (continuous) lifelong learning, real learning processes are characterised by various discontinuities. Adults deal with these discontinuities by perceiving, describing and structuring them dependent on their self-images as learners. Interpretations of interviews with adult language learners supply eviden…
