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This article originates in a piece of educational research into the experiences of further education (FE) student teachers in the West Midlands region of England. This cohort of students experienced significant upheaval in their college workplaces and placements during the 2010/2011 academic year. Pressures on FE funding were exacerbated by a Comprehensive Spending Review by the coalition government in late 2010 – prompted by the on-going global economic crisis. Some of the repercussions of these funding cuts for staff and students in the sector are discussed in this article, as perceived by this cohort of student teachers working in a range of FE providers across the West Midlands. Many of these repercussions can broadly be seen as an extension of existing managerialist practices, as the justification for an increasing squeeze on local resource allocation continues to be a wider appeal to global market ‘realities’. But we theorise that new public management (NPM) plays an important role in a reductive kind of knowledge production for policy-makers which fuels and legitimises on-going policy intervention, and we see this as an important shaping force in the emerging professional identity of these new teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Work contexts are frequently referred to as spaces of learning and production of individual and/or collective knowledge. In such contexts specific dynamics are developed which cause the processes of learning and of knowledge production to have particularities. This paper aims at accounting for some dynamics that are associated with those processes, based on the main results of an ethnographic study on the adult educator team of a Portuguese local development association. The research identified ways of working/action rules based on the learning and knowledge production processes in the association. Mutual help, the reformulation and collectivization of practice, reflection in and about the action, and the negotiation of meaning about the practice are some of the mechanisms identified. The study also highlights how those dynamics of knowledge and learning and ways of doing may contribute to a practice which is closer to the needs of the adults to whom this team offers its education and training services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Portugal’s adult education policy between 1999 and 2010. Our empirical material consists of Portuguese as well as supranational policy documents. We use a theoretical framework which distinguishes three models of public policy, with different views on the roles of public policy and of education: (1) participative policy/emancipatory education, (2) centralised policy/education for social conformity and (3) minimum policy/training for competitiveness. Our results show that European lifelong learning guidelines have been reinterpreted in the Portuguese context, leading to a rapid expansion of adult education provision in an attempt to catch up with European numbers. Although Portuguese policy is a hybrid of the three policy models, latest developments show a dominance of minimum public policies for adult education and training for competitiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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A grant project was designed to facilitate the transition of students from a community college adult education program into a community college credit-degree program in manufacturing. Key features of the program included a focus on identifying policy implications; bridging the separation between the adult education segment of the community college and the more traditional post-secondary education segment; implementing a contextualized curriculum; using a learning community model; and using action research. Despite difficulty reaching the target number of students, the experimental and policy development emphasis of the grant allowed other key characteristics of the project to yield interesting results and to have a lasting effect on the participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the formation, operation, and social effects of adult education classes in France during the nineteenth century. These classes were created and operated prior to the formation of France's national education system and were part of the expansion of primary schooling for the working class, or more generally for “the people”. The more formally organised classes were typically held at local Catholic and non-sectarian primary schools throughout France, but this essay argues that classes held in a variety of other settings contributed to the diversity of adult education courses offered in the 1830s and 1840s. During this early period, the diversity of adult education courses led to wide-ranging social effects, including a challenge to the existing political and social order. Ultimately, however, adult education courses were incorporated into the developing national primary education system and became part of the formation of a generalised system of social distinction that defined and reproduced hierarchies of class and gender in modern French society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks into the organization and administration of adult education in the U.S. One research found out that 79 million dollars is allocated on adult education in 17,000 school districts. It was concluded that every state ought to provide specific financial aid to adult education as a part of its foundation program of assistance to public schools. Another research claimed that both professional leadership and state aid are necessary for the growth of adult education. A major contribution to evaluation of public library service emphasized standards and principles of educational services to adults which are based on knowledge of and relationship to the community.