Project Details
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Time for Adult Learning and Education. An empirical reconstruction of temporalities and time modalities in different learning settings of continuing education.

Subject Area General Education and History of Education
Term from 2020 to 2024
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 448214507
 
Final Report Year 2024

Final Report Abstract

The project aims at investigating the role time plays in non-formal learning in adulthood, as there are – in contrast to childhood and adolescence – no structured time-institutions for education (in contrast to compulsory school education). If learning is not simply seen as happening en passant, time for continuing education must be negotiated, structured, and integrated into everyday life. At the same time, empirical research on participation in adult learning and education reveals that time conflicts (e.g. with family or professional obligations) and missing legal entitlements (e.g. paid educational leave) form decisive barriers to participation. It is, therefore, of central interest how and with which effects learning time is realized in practice and conceived individually and which different qualities of time are observable. The project examines the configuration of time-related structures and practices in courses (collective temporalities) and experiences and the formation of time in the participants’ learning (individual time modalities). Instead of assuming time as a merely technological-operational entity or a natural quantity a priori, the project analyses the relational interplay between collective temporalities and individual time modalities from a practice-theoretical perspective. As fundamental as time is for pedagogical issues, it eludes immediate observation. Therefore, the empirical investigation deploys a qualitative-reconstructive, multi-method and multi-perspective research design: Participant observation of courses aims at a (re)construction of the temporalities by systematically comparing courses from different learning settings (intensive ‘block week’, ‘day or evening course’ as well as ‘online course’). Through narrative interviews with course participants, individual time experiences and different shapes of qualities in learning time come into view (time modalities). Finally, an integrating analysis focuses on the multi-level analysis of the interplay between the collective temporalities in courses and the individual time modalities of learning. For this purpose, the Documentary Method offers an appropriate methodological framework to meet the specific challenges of the research object by means of reconstructing implicit knowledge. The results of the research project will not only contribute to fundamental research in the field of time and learning (which offers insights not only for adult education but also for educational sciences in general), but also help illuminate the phenomenon of (non-)participation in continuing education beyond sociographic and -economic characteristics.

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