This article is based on the first wave of an ongoing worldwide Delphi study which is currently analysing the immediate and expected effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on adult education and adult learning. While the methodology of Delphi studies varies a lot, in a nutshell, the core idea of a Delphi study is that it explores the future of a particular field in a collaborative way. The authors contacted more than 50 international experts in the field of adult education for a qualitative online survey between April and May 2020, asking them to provide information, observations, expectations and advice. While the findings show many cross-national similarities, there are also many differences. Clearly, adult educators are still trying to understand the implications of the crisis, which they perceive as unprecedented.
This article addresses cross‐country and cross‐period differences in average levels of training activity from an institutional perspective. Firm‐provided training in Europe between 1999 and 2010 is scrutinized in order to explore whether diverse institutional arrangements that can be linked to welfare state regimes can yield discernible cross‐country patterns. An emphasis is placed on the limits of national skills strategies that are not well embedded in wider institutional environments. This is grounded in a view that policy efforts to influence training activity, involves nothing less than ‘reforming’ societies. Insights of this research should contribute both to a critical reflection of the EU's targets in the field of lifelong learning as well as supporting policy learning between member states.
The quality of adult educators is on the agenda of European educational policy and thescientific community in Europe. In these contexts, professionalisation and qualitymanagement are often conflated. This paper is based on the hypothesis that qualitymanagement and professionalisation follow two different approaches. The paperoutlines the two approaches with a focus on their two different logics. After a briefcomparison of the two approaches, the paper examines the conflation of these twoapproaches in the expertise Key competences for adult learning professionals(Research voor Beleid, 2010). The paper ends with a plea for acknowledging theboundaries between professionalisation and quality management, and shows ways ofbuilding bridges between them without neglecting their essential difference
The paper analyses mainly non-vocational courses offered by a sample of 47 out of the approximately 900 public adult education centres (Volkshochschule - VHS) in Germany. The focus is on courses, events or other learning forms dealing with refugees in Germany from 1947 to 2015. Refugees can be taught in all-refugee or in mixed-groups, but it can also mean that flight and refuge is an educational issue for non-refugees. The method of program analysis is used. The results demonstrate changes over time. German adult education centres have partly turned into language schools for refugees and migrants. Civic or liberal education courses have lost importance. Refugees and migrants are addressed more than in the past when mainly non-refugees were informed about the reasons why people become refugees. Finally, ideas for courses are put forward. They are related to past practices and other studies.
Adult education research is frequently an own subject of research. Such research is often focused on the analysis of journals. This paper will instead analyse triennial research conferences of the European Society for the Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA) between 1994 and 2013. The research was carried out mainly via a bibliometrical program analysis of conference papers. Results support previous findings in the analysis of adult education research, but a number of differences or blind spots of ESREA and adult education research in general will become visible.
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