The new skills agenda: increased lifelong learning or new sites of inequality?

The last five years have seen a radical transformation in adult education in England with a concentrated emphasis on national basic skills provision. This was prompted initially by a government response to low levels of literacy in the British adult population, identified by an influential international survey, showing unfavourable comparisons with other European countries. The response to the disclosure that seven million adults in England were not functionally literate saw the creation in 2001 of a national basic skills strategy in England entitled Skills for Life. It is a far‐reaching strategy creating a new infrastructure to support adult basic skills learning opportunities over a seven‐year period. It also created the entitlement to free basic skills learning opportunities, as a cornerstone to creating national economic competitiveness and social cohesion. Such an entitlement could be interpreted as a commitment to providing wider access to foundation skills for adults who had previously missed out, as part of a lifelong learning agenda. However, a critical reading of the policy texts, and recent funding priorities, show the strategy rooted more in a response to what is perceived as the skills demands of a knowledge economy for global competitiveness than to issues of social inclusion and increased opportunities for lifelong learning. The result of this may well be the creation of new sites of inequality that affect older women and adult ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) learners disproportionately, the very people that are identified as being needed to fill skill gaps in the economy.     

加拿大终身学习评价工具“综合学习指标”及其启示

加拿大终身学习评价工具“综合学习指标”以学会求知、学会做事、学会共处和学会生存为框架,通过统计涵盖终身学习的17个指数,准确地了解加拿大在终身学习方面的进展、成效和不足,是迄今为止世界上第一个以统计学指标评价终身学习的极具使用价值的测量工具。了解该工具的构建对于我国终身学习的开展和学习型社会的建设具有重要的借鉴意义。     

终身学习与教师专业发展

在知识经济和信息时代,教师的终身学习成为必然.基础教育课程改革是教师学习的现实动力,教师专业发展的规律使终身学习内容不断深化,远程教育是实现教师终身学习的有效方式.     

Active and inclusive citizenship for women: democratic considerations for fostering lifelong education

In this paper a critical feminist theoretical framework is used to explore the challenges of creating democratic learning spaces that will foster active and inclusive citizenship for women. Three democratic considerations are addressed to assess how adult educators can create more inclusive opportunities for lifelong education for women. The first consideration is the need for a careful examination of structural inequalities that create disadvantages for women in pursuing lifelong education. The second consideration is the need to create a broader and more gender inclusive understanding of the scope of lifelong learning possibilities, so that women’s learning experiences are not devalued. The third consideration explores how to take up gender as a complex variable within the broader discourse of inclusion. This paper is informed by preliminary results from a current SSHRC (Social Science and Humanities Research Council) study on lifelong learning trajectories for women in Canada and a CCL (Canadian Council on Learning) study on active citizenship for women in Nova Scotia.     

Towards a lifelong learning target for 2015

This paper begins by reviewing the progress which has been made over the past decade in the aim to reach targets such as Education for All and other Millennium Development Goals, especially as far as adult education and gender equality are concerned. While there have been achievements in some countries, universal primary education is not even likely to be reached by 2015. Giving a few examples of recent studies, this paper considers the measurement of lifelong learning and its effects on a country’s economy and its people’s health and well-being. While it is of course much easier to collect data about formal education than about non-formal and informal learning, the author stresses that the latter need to be included more in new strategies alongside formal education. The paper concludes by highlighting ten essential components for a lifelong learning target fit for purpose in a climate-changing society.     

Information, Knowledge and Learning

The recommendations of the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education are assessed in the light of their vision of a learning society and criticised in terms of the inevitability of a knowledge economy with a new lifelong learning sector. While the National Committee has produced a report which demands careful study by everyone involved with higher education it has not provided us with a workable blueprint for the construction of a learning society.
The relationships between information, knowledge and learning are analysed in terms of three interacting economies – a cognitive economy, a learning economy and a knowledge economy. Technology will play a vital role in the evolution of these three inter-linked economies in the following ways:
• The cognitive economy will be transformed by the role of machine agents
• The learning economy will be transformed by the development of new ways of structuring and accessing instantiated knowledge
• Interactions between the creators and supplies of knowledge will create a trading economy based on wideband communications and internet technologies.
The major driver of the development of a knowledge economy will be a demand for lifelong learning. After a decade or so, by far the largest part of lifelong learning will be delivered off campus and into the workplace or home. In responding to these developments higher education will have to adapt radically.     

A General Approach for Using Data in the Comparative Analyses of Learning Outcomes

This paper brings together some key concepts and proposes a conceptual framework for understanding and evaluating determinants of learning outcomes. The framework facilitates the process of theorizing and hypothesizing on the relationships and processes concerning lifelong learning as well as their antecedents and consequences. The specific aims are to outline a general approach for evaluating learning outcomes, identify data gaps within this approach, and discuss some of the implications for research and development. Along with more specific frameworks, this general approach can be used to guide policy relevant research in education. In particular, it can be used to inform efforts aimed at establishing a coherent information system on the impact of lifelong learning on both economy and society.     

New Challenges and Opportunities for Lifelong Learning in South Africa

The imperatives for lifelong learning in South Africa are driven by its reinsertion into the global economy and by the social and political necessities of equity and redress after the years of colonialism, segregation and apartheid. It is therefore not surprising to find the discourse of lifelong learning infused into new policy documents. Utilizing Belanger's framework, which argues that lifelong learning is not a norm to prescribe but an empirical reality to analyze and reconstruct, the contexts for lifelong learning in South Africa are surveyed by focusing in on the state of initial education, adult education, and the learning environments. The framework, which acknowledges the daily lived realities of women and men, is a helpful way of retaining an holistic and integrated vision of lifelong learning and its humanistic, democratic goals. For lifelong learning in South Africa to deepen for more than a small group of well-educated, mainly urban, formally employed people, the author concludes that initial education, adult education and the learning environments of all the people will have to be improved. If this does not happen, then at least two polarized 'lifelong educations' will result.     

Revisioning Education for All in the age of migration: Global challenges and opportunities for lifelong learning

This paper revisits and revisions Education for All (EFA) in the age of global migration with the aim of developing more inclusive approaches towards social justice and equity in education. Drawing on cases of internal and international migration in China and Canada, this paper compares and contrasts policies and practices in the education of migrants and their children to discern common issues and challenges in both country contexts. The findings reveal that despite China’s nine-year compulsory education law for all school-aged children, migrant children are often deprived of equitable learning opportunities, resulting in their being the most educationally marginalised in China. The case of Canada demonstrates some of the challenges facing immigrants in having their prior learning and work experience recognised. Lessons learned from this comparative analysis have important implications for the post-2015 EFA revisioning process in terms of developing a holistic, inclusive lifelong learning framework which ensures that the learning needs of both young and adult learners are met through access to equitable learning opportunities as well as recognition of their prior learning and experience.     

The Norwegian competence reform and the limits of lifelong learning

Today, ‘lifelong learning for all’ figures prominently within the education and training policies of governments throughout the developed world and is presented as a powerful solution to a wide range of economic and social challenges. Norway is often regarded as a country that has perhaps made more progress towards this ideal than many others. Norway invests considerable resources in its education system and has already achieved a highly educated population by international standards. Its experience may be instructive therefore of the problems that more advanced countries confront in attempting to further progress the lifelong learning agenda even under relatively favourable conditions. Drawing upon a range of secondary material and interviews conducted with key stakeholders, this paper explores the main achievements, problems and challenges that Norway has faced in attempting to implement a recent reform of adult and continuing education and training, entitled the Competence Reform. To date, the reform would seem to have had only a relatively limited impact especially with regard to low‐qualified workers in sectors with poor training records and relatively high concentrations of ‘learning‐deprived’ jobs. In reflecting upon this experience, Norwegian policy makers appear to be reaching the end of a cycle of policy and academic thinking concerned mainly with boosting the supply of skills through the education system and are now embarking upon a new and challenging agenda aimed at increasing the utilisation and development of skills within the workplace.     

终身教育视域下的泛在学习支持服务体系构建

信息技术变革与教育理念革新加速了终身教育走向实践的进程,普适计算技术与泛在学习方式的出现,更加快了全民学习型社会的构建步伐.泛在学习不仅需要泛在的数字学习环境与基础设施,更需要泛在的学习支持服务,这是实现泛在学习的基础与关键,也是实践终身教育理念的“软环境”.从终身教育视角阐述泛在学习的基本特征,研究并设计泛在学习支持服务体系框架,分析体系结构实现的关键技术,将推进泛在学习与终身教育的有机融合.     

构建终身教育体系 加快建设学习型社会——略论浙江省教育发展战略的新取向

人均受教育年限偏低是近年来困扰浙江经济和社会发展的突出矛盾,并引起全社会高度关注。为此从多方面分析了人均受教育年限偏低的原因及对转变经济发展方式的影响和制约,指出社会教育发展滞后将成为今后教育发展战略的“瓶颈”和“软肋”,介绍并分析了国内外社会教育的发展现状,提出构建终身教育体系、加快建设学习型社会的对策建议。     

Reviews

In the UK policy context, skills, education and learning are seen as a universal solution to a vast array of economic and social problems. In challenging this view, this paper argues that those educationalists calling for progressive reforms to the education system need to acknowledge the reality of the contemporary workplace and the institutional context of UK capitalism. When it comes to the question of how the UK might move towards a more inclusive high skills society, no matter where we start to look - be it the economy or a highly class-divided English education system - it all seems to add up badly. In challenging the current policy agenda, educationalists will need to insist that progressive educational reform cannot be separated from the struggle for broader political, social and economic change.     

Inclusion in school: a policy,ideology or lived experience? Similar findings in diverse school cultures

This article summarises three case studies examining the implementation of inclusive practices, which evidence the exclusionary pressures acting in school settings that put the needs, rights and entitlements of vulnerable children and young people at risk. It examines how three very culturally different secondary schools in England interpreted inclusive policies and illuminates the various constraints to the implementation of inclusive practices as experienced by senior leaders, teachers, parents and pupils in these schools. Conceptual unpreparedness towards inclusion versus integration, knowledge and false conceptualisations of special educational needs and difficulties associated with differentiation and time limitations were the main barriers presented. The implications for initial and professional teacher education are posited; it is suggested that inclusion can work by removing the diagnostic paradigm associated with special educational needs and by creating a framework for teachers' lifelong learning focusing on a social justice oriented pedagogy that will empower teachers conceptually and practically.     

以终身教育观念为指导深化高校成人教育改革

终身教育既是人的知识和技能的不断构建,又是人类学会生存和发展的能力源和推进器。在知识经济时代,随着知识更新的加速和信息的爆炸性增长,传统的终生一次性教育的观念已经不适应知识经济社会的要求,终身学习和终身教育必将成为社会的主导观念。高校成人教育应该深化教育改革,树立大众化教育观念、素质教育观念、网络教育观念、多元化观念,开展继续教育,实行开发办学,以终身教育思想为指导构建总体教育结构框架。     

Lifelong learning in South Africa: dreams and delusions

The new South Africa has formally embraced the concept of ‘lifelong learning’ in its education and training policies. But what is the concept of ‘lifelong learning’ that has informed these policies and what progress has there been in implementing them? Have these new policies brought significant changes to education and training for adults?     

职业教育市场化危机及其课程设置的价值取向选择

我国经济转型过程中的职业教育发展出现了过度市场化的危机,不利于职业教育本身的可持续发展,也不利于培养具有终身学习能力的技术人才。解决危机需要系统性的变革,即对整体的职业教育课程设置理念和价值取向进行调整,以适应国际职业教育发展的趋势和未来更加激烈的市场竞争环境。     

Learning for well-being: creativity and inner diversity

This article explores the perspective that well-being and creativity can be nurtured in children through understanding and addressing the diverse ways in which children learn, communicate, and develop (inner diversity). In particular, our working hypothesis is that focusing children’s and young people’s learning towards the realization of their well-being supports and enables creativity. But it also requires, firstly, addressing how children perceive, engage with, and express creativity in different ways and, secondly, nurturing the development of core capacities to, in turn, underpin their capacity to develop key competences and skills in formal and non-formal learning settings. In recommending that education systems take the well-being of children as their central purpose, we are suggesting that there are capacities, ranging from personal qualities to behavioural skills, which are necessary for the development of the personal resources to enable lifelong and life-wide learning.     

Participatory Action Research as Change Strategy: A Case of Developing Inclusive Teaching and Learning Practices in an Adult Education Centre in Gauteng East District of South Africa

Adult education is one of the platforms of skills development for the mostly disadvantaged people of South Africa who did not get formal education owing to past segregation and apartheid laws. Recently this sector has implemented inclusive education and is in the process of transforming and changing to achieve inclusion. This interpretative-qualitative case study within participatory action research explored the role of participatory action research as a change strategy to develop inclusive teaching practices and enhance adult student learning in an adult education context. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, participant observations, documentary analysis, focus group interviews and group interpretative meetings in all four phases, i.e. planning, observation, action and reflection. After the group data analysis with co-researchers during group interpretative meetings and the researcher’s analysis using an interpretative-thematic inductive qualitative data analysis framework, the study found that participatory action research is viable as an educational change strategy, as it enhances collaboration among adult education teachers and improves their ability to be reflective and critical in their practice, which is fundamental in the development of inclusive teaching practices.

     

Developing inclusive practice: teacher perceptions of opportunities and constraints in the Republic of Ireland

There has been a significant policy shift from parallel systems of special and mainstream education in the Republic of Ireland towards provision underpinned by enabling legislation with a presumption for inclusion. The role of teachers in establishing inclusive learning environments is critical and it is generally accepted that inclusive practice relies to a large extent on teacher knowledge, skills, understanding, capacity and attitudes. This exploratory study aimed to gather information on teachers' attitudes about inclusion, and perceived constraints in creating inclusive learning environments. A range of schools from urban, semi-urban, provincial and rural backgrounds were included and data were collected using semi-structured interviews (n?=?24) including all principals, class teachers and support staff in the participating schools. Teachers recognised the challenge of responding appropriately to diversity within schools and are generally supportive of the principle of inclusion. However, there are clear concerns around their individual capacity and the capacity of their schools to develop inclusive learning environments. A positive school ethos was a significant factor in ensuring inclusive practice. International research indicates that the complex mix of positive teacher beliefs combined with fears and perceived inadequacies is quite common in the evolution of practice towards inclusive learning environments.