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Research centre Education – Generation – Lifecourse

Fresh perspectives and innovative research for new learning worlds in Europe

Coordinator:

Lynne Chisholm¹ (Institute of Educational Sciences)

Abstract

Established in 2005, the Research Centre Education – Generation – Lifecourse² engages in critically reflexive and action-oriented research and theory-building into education and training in European knowledge and civil societies. In both qualitative and quantitative terms, education and training are increasingly significant for all spheres of life, raising fundamental questions about the shaping of teaching and learning processes both for the formation of subjectivities as well as in social context. The emergence of an internally open Europe (after 1989) and the implications of cultural and economic globalisation processes mean that the Research Centre’s research and networking activities are largely oriented towards comparative and intercultural perspectives. A clustered, network-based and incremental development strategy underlies its dynamic, producing a series of interlinked projects thematically anchored around key thematic research issues.

Introduction

The relations between contemporary cultural, social and economic modernisation and forms of education in its widest sense are the backdrop for the newly-founded Faculty of Education’s guiding principles. The Faculty’s research and teaching activities address the key role of lifelong and lifewide education and training in the context of rapidly emerging European knowledge societies and pluralistic civil societies. The Education – Generation – Lifecourse Research Centre, newly established at the Institute of Educational Sciences in 2005, presents the opportunity to critically, reflectively and actively approach key challenges posed by these problematics:

• redefining education per se and its possibilities and limits for contributing to social and cultural development;
• the impact of generational and gender relations on learning processes and competence development in societies undergoing rapid demographic changes;
• the implications of increasingly individualised and recursive lifecourse patterns for what people want, need and have to learn;
• enhancing people’s ability to act and to live together in multicultural, mobile societies.

The potential of this Research Centre lies in two main features of its activities. Firstly, its work focuses on the interactions and tensions between the three classical interfaces of the structure-agency dialectic – hence the hyphens between the words education, generation and lifecourse. Secondly, it seeks to act at those interfaces by launching a dialogue and networking between basic and applied research, between research, politics and everyday practice in education, and between universities and society.

Aims

The Research Centre studies and critically analyses education and training in social context and it monitors and evaluates education and training policies that impact on and respond to social change. Contemporary modernisation gives rise to a plethora of basic questions regarding the structure, contextualisation, localisation, realisation and effects of teaching and learning processes both for the formation of subjectivities as well as in social context. Against this backdrop, structural and cultural changes in generational and gender relations and in the social construction of the lifecourse play key roles in all kinds of education and training.

In view of an emerging multicultural and multiethnic Europe together with the impact of globalisation on cultural pluralisation and structural economic change, this Research Centre’s focus is comparative and intercultural. By engaging in relevant, up-to-date research, its work seeks to document and understand current patterns of change and/or the interactions between these and education/training. The Centre also places the transfer potential of research results at the core of its concern, especially with a view to what these can contribute not only to the development of educational science but also to the quest for quality assurance and the continuous improvement of educational quality on the ground.

Responding to these issues demands a sound mix of basic and applied research on such questions as the following:

• Which approaches and settings are prerequisites for positive transitions to knowledge societies? How can we make optimal use of the entire range comprised by informal, non-formal and formal learning? How are different kinds of learning connected with individual and social developmental dynamics? What are the implications for teaching/training and learning across the full spectrum of educational settings and institutional environments?
• What kinds of learning are implicated in generational relations and relationships at micro and macro levels and what kinds of educational strategies and settings are meaningful and effective here?
• How do people develop specific competences, be they vocational or social, (inter)cultural or political, and including practical life management competence, in particular with a view to fostering active and democratic citizenship and subjectivities viable for contemporary life?
• How can educational action support social change and development and/or adequately and effectively address social needs – in particular with a view to a living in multicultural and multiethnic societies that generate new kinds of social, economic and political tensions?

Problematics

As a multidimensional set of activities, the Research Centre operates in the tension field between social change in modern societies and relevant policy fields – not only education and training, but also in particular youth, employment and family. It addresses a spectrum of democratic social action spanning both social inclusion and interculturality, embedded in an understanding of lifelong/lifewide learning together with work-life balance whose rationale lies both in contributing to shaping knowledge societies and in fostering capacity and potential for active citizenship – and this implies making use of the full range of formal, non-formal and informal learning modalities. Three thematic clusters express these concerns:

Cluster 1: Teaching/training – learning – lifecourse

• Learning as a lifelong, lifewide and continuous, dynamic process, including research on the lifecourse and the social, political and educational settings that permit and further lifelong learning
• Teaching/training and learning across the entire spectrum of informal, non-formal and formal learning (including e-education), that is, educational processes as well as their respective learning fields, structures and institutions
• The critical study of education and educational policy and action not only to illuminate changing concepts of ‘education’ per se but also to analyse and evaluate specific learning and teaching/training situations, learning processes, target groups and institutional settings

Cluster 2: Education, training and participation

• Analysis of the conditions and learning opportunities for education for active and democratic participation in public life, in particular in civil society and politics in the wider sense; this comprises, for example, human rights education, anti-racist education, peace education, global education, environmental education, education for sustainable development, community education, equality, violence prevention and conflict solving.
• Educational theory-building about and research into the cultural dimensions of social life, in particular acculturation, enculturation, cultural identity, cultural change, multicultural society and intercultural education.
• Charting contemporary dimensions of the production and reproduction of inequalities in and through education and how to counter these processes, in order to foster equal opportunities and equality of treatment throughout life.

Cluster 3: Generation – gender – subjectivity

• The study of generational and gender relations and relationships, including media generations, at the macro, meso and macro levels, in the context of their implications for educational process and outcome.
• Exploring the structure and influence of mass media, media technologies and e-learning as learning settings with a view to understanding the relations between cultural production and reproduction and between active-passive production-consumption processes.
• For individualised and globalized life-worlds, analysis of life-historical identity practices in everyday life and in social context and their consequences for education and socialisation processes.

Activities and projects

The research centre’s activities comprise, in the first instance, a series of thematically linked projects (for details, see http://www.uibk.ac.at/ezwi/forschung/bgl/index.html) whose genesis derives from a synergy between continuity and innovation amongst the team members and their specific research interests. Projects span the clusters outlined above, addressing local, national, European and international levels of involvement. They operate in relationship with each other, generating follow-up and larger-scale projects as the Centre expands its activities, which are embedded in collaborative networks ranging from local/regional partners in arts/culture across national expert groups in adult education/vocational training to international groupings of universities and initiatives coordinated through international, intergovernmental and supranational organisations.

Linking research with teaching and learning

The Research Centre is committed to the development of an open European area of higher education and research – that is: to the internationalisation of European universities – and it is committed to the professional training of young researchers in its specialist fields. This means that the Research Centre aims to:

• link research projects with students’ work, for example by offering project-related course units and project-related qualification opportunities for junior research assistants and in the framework of master’s dissertations and doctoral theses;
• promote young researchers by offering professional opportunities that provide hands-on experience under the supervision of experienced researchers;
• develop a European M.A. in European Youth Studies (as included in the university’s current development plan), which uses innovative methods of postgraduate teaching and learning in an international context.

_______________________________

¹ Univ.-Prof. Dr. Lynne Chisholm, Chair for Education and Generation, Director of the Institute of Educational Sciences at the University of Innsbruck and Co-ordinator of the Research Centre Education – Generation – Lifecourse. 15 academics and researchers working at the Institute of Educational Sciences are associated with the Centre [Homepage: http://www.uibk.ac.at/forschung/profilbildung/bildung-generation-lebenslauf.html], including five senior academics: Lynne Chisholm (full professor) and associate professors Theo Hug, Helga Peskoller, Bernhard Rathmayr and Maria Andrea Wolf. In addition, the Research Centre co-operates with Univ.-Prof. Michael Schratz and his colleagues in the university’s Institute for Teacher Education and School Research.