Lifelong Learning - A Political Agenda! Also a Research Agenda?

Adult and continuing education are undergoing simultaneous processes of institutionalization (adding schools for adults) and deinstitutionalization (broadening the scope of interventions and focusing on learning processes inside and outside schools). Lifelong learning assumes that learning takes place in all spheres of life, including the workplace, everyday life, and cultural activities. The new political awareness of the need for learning and education has necessitated that learning be studied in all its contexts, including in various life spheres (work, family, leisure and cultural activities, citizenship) and knowledge and competence domains (professions, skills, arts) defined by societal division of labor. Researching the subjectivity of learning and social structural and historical dynamics requires an interdisciplinary research strategy. Themes for research include the following: gender and wage labor; the role of self-regulation and sustainability in work life; and the relationship of knowledge and democracy to professional learning and professional identity. Like literacy and numeracy, learning for active citizenship must be given the status of an indispensable cultural technique. The following competencies should be considered competencies for a general social literacy: competence to create cohesion; ecological competence; competence for balancing a threatened or broken identity; historical competence; sensibility to experience expropriation; and technological competence. (Contains 20 references) (MN)