This book assembles over 50 papers from the 7th Triennial European Research Conference of the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA), which was held from the 4th to the 7th of September 2013 at Humboldt-University in Berlin. The title of the conference was "Changing Configurations of Adult Education in Transitional…

India is at the cusp of becoming an economic powerhouse. For that to happen, however, the country needs to alter its workforce education system by reengineering the Indian Vocational Education and Training (VET) System. India's VET strategy includes creating basic work-centered common curriculum for the unskilled; developing a more flexible…

Chinese vocational colleges are being compromised because the central government is moving more of its educational resources to the top-tier universities. Although vocational college enrollments have slowed in the increasingly high-tech eastern provinces, colleges in the western part of the country are poised for increased enrollments to address…

Collaborative games will enable new kinds of possibilities for learning. In the future, the goal of game-based learning should be to introduce new ideas and deepen learners' in-depth understanding. However, studies have shown that shared high-level knowledge construction is a challenging process. Moreover, thus far, few empirical studies have…

We examine participation in Career and Technical Education (CTE) using a typology that better reflects the CTE credit-taking experience of all public high school students, and it is based on the several changes in academic requirements that all students need to meet in order to graduate, including those considered CTE students. We argue that the…

In this article, we discuss the usefulness of collaborative, multi-sited and cross-cultural ethnography. Giving three examples from our work, we suggest that it is possible to find new kinds of interpretations by joint reflections that draw from several studies with their own research questions. The cases presented discuss teachers'…

This article analyses the school exclusion and subsequent educational inclusion of pregnant young women participating in a course of antenatal and key skills education at an alternative educational setting. It examines the young women's transitions from "failure" in school to "success" in motherhood and re-engagement with…

This article provides an outline and critical review of assessment, an evaluation of learning outcomes, in vocational education and training (VET) in Finland. Assessment of VET is formative, development-orientated and criteria-based. There are no national tests and information from vocational skills demonstrations is used instead. Assessment…

In response to the early Education Reform Proposal's recommendation to provide more diverse opportunities for lifelong learning at the senior secondary level and beyond, there has been a considerable expansion in the post-secondary education sector--Professional and Vocational Education (PVE)--in Hong Kong over the past ten years. The…

Dewey continues to offer arguments that remain powerful on the need to break down the divisions between "academic" and "vocational" in terms of his specific theory of knowledge. Dewey's writings are used to argue that a democratic curriculum needs to challenge such divisions to encompass the many forms of knowledge…

In an attempt to reform high schools and prepare students with the knowledge and skills needed for the 21st century, educators and policymakers have turned to programs that combine career and academic pathways. One such program, Linked Learning, has taken up the reform challenge by relying on technical adjustments, rearranging students'…

Vocational teachers' prior occupational experiences are construed as those that will guarantee high-quality teaching in vocational education, although individuals are no longer required to have formal teaching qualifications to be employed as teachers in Sweden. This lack of strict requirements raises the issue of the preparedness of…

This article examines how certain contextual factors explain levels of education attainment and participation amongst youths in 30 European countries, whilst also exploring the scope for action of education policy when dealing with these issues. Through simple OLS regressions, we first evaluate the impact of a group of contextual indicators on the…

Over the period of this journal's life the education of adults has been changed and developed in a wide variety of ways: the same phenomenon--adult learning--has been given a variety of meanings and the education of adults has assumed many titles. The aim of this paper is to unravel some of the changes that have occurred in this field during…

Internationally, "College for All" policies are creating new forms of vocational higher education (HE), and shifting relationships between HE and further education (FE) institutions. In this paper, we consider the way in which this is being implemented in England, drawing on a detailed qualitative case study of a regional HE-FE…