Supporting Adult Education for a Sustainable Life Course: Asian and European perspectives on Education, Work and Citizenship

This Symposium jointly hosted by CR&DALL at the University of Glasgow and the Centre for Learning and Life Chances in Knowledge Economies and Societies (LLakes), UCL Institute of Education, London on behalf of the ASEM LLL Hub has just successfully completed its first day with some 70 delegates from Asia and Europe.

It has brought together two research networks that cooperate internationally within the framework of the ASEM Education and Research Hub for Lifelong learning. The network 'National Lifelong Learning Strategies’ explores lifelong learning policies and practices in the framework of national socio-economic development, giving particular attention to citizens’ motivation and barriers to continuing education and training. The network ‘Workplace Learning' focuses on workplaces that exist not simply in companies and public services, but equally across a wide range of organisational and social contexts, including in the third sector (non-profit-making NGOs, voluntary work, etc.) and in diverse forms of self-employment, including under irregular and precarious conditions. For both,  ‘life-work-learning’ interplay between workplaces, institutions, family and community is a key framework for understanding how opportunities for lifelong learning, including professional and personal development at work, are distributed, structured, used and experienced in Asian and European countries.

Competing visions and paradigms for lifelong learning co-exist at national as well as international levels.  The fact that one ‘official’ discourse may be dominant at any one time does not mean that other ways of thinking about lifelong learning have disappeared. They are alive and well in a range of critical traditions and perspectives that retain their power to engage and persuade. In this symposium, contributors critically analyse issues in lifelong learning that have important implications for policy in different parts of the world.  Evidence, ideas and the polity can mobilise political thinking in new directions, as policy makers search for the new ‘big idea’. In turbulent times, ideas for better connecting system worlds and life worlds in the pursuit of broader and more just forms of meritocracy can focus compellingly on learning as a lifelong process which links, rather than separates, the older and younger generations and incorporates the realities of working lives.

The symposium is being held in co-operation with two recently funded projects within the H2020 – Young 3 programme and the LETAE project funded within the LLP, for which it will act as a second national seminar, and serve as a fore-runner to the final European level conference in Barcelona.

Today in addition to keynotes from Professor Tom Schuller and Professor Han Songhee, some 16 excellent papers were presented in parallel sessions.