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As a result of the project, 8,646 completed questionnaires and 80 interviews from the ten European countries of Spain, England, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Finland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovenia and Serbia firstly provide proof that numerous benefits are felt by the participants and that there are links between these benefits and organised adult education. Secondly, they prove that those participating in adult education courses implicitly increase their levels of tolerance, consideration for others and willingness to help, and learn to voice their own interests. This suggests that learning in adult education courses makes an important contribution to democratically organised societies. Thirdly, participating in adult education programmes may result in individuals changing their behaviour as a result of the emergence of new possibilities that enable them to continue working on their personal life projects or due to challenges relating to their family, career, health or leisure activities being overcome.

According to the statistics, three overarching categories of benefits can be identified: The first category encompasses changes in terms of general convictions pertaining to self-control, self-efficacy and the meaningfulness of life. Participants feel better able to cope with the demands placed on them and the challenges faced in their lives. The second category comprises general changes in (social) attitudes to learning. Tolerance, social engagement and the participants’ general approach to learning and willingness to embrace change are all enhanced. The third category is made up of changes experienced in four areas of life, namely family, career, mental well-being and health.

Those taking part in adult education ultimately feel healthier and lead a healthier lifestyle, stay active for longer, believe they are capable of doing something that benefits their lives, build long-lasting social networks and develop better prospects in and for their old age. The interviews were an effective way of uncovering these benefits, as they gave the former participants in adult education the opportunity to talk about their experiences and the personal changes they felt they had undergone.

The logo of the Benefits of Lifelong Learning EU project is a bell. The project can now ring this bell for all to hear and raise awareness among those working in educational research and education policy throughout Europe of the fact that lifelong learning benefits society as a whole and individuals at all stages of their lives.

Contacts:
Jyri Manninen, Bettina Thöne-Geyer, Monika Kil, and Marion Fleige

The presentation of some preliminary results from the BeLL study on the First Symposium of the educational counselling in Lower Austria led to some interesting observations. Preliminary results of the Europe-wide study „Benefits of Lifelong Learning“(BeLL) (www.bell-project.eu) were the base for discussion in the workshop “Benefits of liberal adult education”. First results indicate that benefits of liberal adult education are particularly in the area of an increased motivation for studying in addition to the acquisition of competences and a subjectively experienced increase in self-effectiveness.

Additionally, we can recognize an increased feeling of mental and physical well-being, the expansion of social networks, an increased readiness for civic and social engagement and an experienced improvement in professional chances. These preliminary results were discussed in the workshop from the viewpoint of their connectivity to educational and career counselling. The workshop participants agreed that the results of the BeLL study can be useful in two ways: On one hand, they give information about the subjectively felt benefits of certain course types and therefore serve as material for educational counselling. On the other hand, the results offer clues on how to address potential participants or how to develop marketing strategies. Thus, not only the increase of knowledge but also the wish of becoming more self-confident, being healthier or more involved in networks might serve as starting point.

Overall, the research results give a new perspective into the use of liberal adult education not only for potential participants, but also for education managers and politicians. However, the workshop made clear, that the wider benefit approach is not easy to be linked to the common understanding of adult learning. The idea of adult learning and its benefits is often based on instrumental outcomes of training like diplomas, degrees and better salary levels. It seems that the “soft” wider benefits of learning, like the expansion of social networks, an increased sense of purpose in life or a better mental well-being aren’t obvious. The value of these wider benefits of lifelong learning for the individual as well as for the society still has to be demonstrated and explained for potential participants as well as for policy makers. It is not enough, if they are well known by the actors in the adult education sector only.

Sociologist Howard Becker (1984) gave this advice for getting started when faced with a mountain of qualitative data (or even a few interview transcripts): read it all several times, put it to one side and then just write as much as possible of whatever comes into your mind. Becker’s advice has been a crucial and sanity-preserving stage in my qualitative data analysis, however code-based and orderly the ‘real’ or proper analysis that follows. This week I have been reading and rereading the English and Welsh BeLL interviews and here are some first thoughts, Becker-style.

The characters jumping up from the transcript pages all seem larger-than-life, more rounded, more complete than participants in many other interviews. Is there something about talking about one’s educational decisions as an adult which demands or provokes a fuller self-exposure?

They also seem very different – different educational and work backgrounds, different interests, families, struggles and motivations for their learning. Yet, despite these differences, they all spoke of their lifelong learning experiences in terms of how they are using their courses in understanding and directing their lives, often in explicit opposition to other aspects of their lives which they feel are directed by others. There is an overwhelming sense of joining adult education courses as part of a ‘taking control’ of their lives. Participants make links between their development of new or existing skills, confidence in these skills, confidence in themselves, feeling able to apply these skills in new ways & contexts, and a resulting sense of achievement which gives them the power to do more, to learn more, be more. A cycle – you do it, you learn, you believe you can do it, you do it, you do it more, you branch out, you learn more and do more. Crucial to this cycle (and this cannot be overestimated) is the sense that each individual adult put it in motion for themselves. Adult education was a way for them to each take the reigns.

These interviews also say something about being and places, about where we spend the minutes, hours and days of our lives. I got the sense that aside from the benefits produced by participation on the courses (the friends, the skills, the confidence, the new opportunities, the new community ties), participants enjoyed their actual class-time: sitting in a room hearing about Chinese art or standing in a lab processing images. They enjoyed these immediate experiences. This too is a type of control over our lives, but in a very direct, very ‘in the present’ sort of way. No matter the strains of my life, I can change – if slightly – how I spend my days. I can choose to spend two hours a week in a small funny-smelling room above a bank to the east of the city, in the company of all sorts of people, learning about Sanskrit poetry. I can make these two hours a real and regular part of my week and in doing so, I am changing my life.

Part of this is sitting amongst a new group of people – people who are not family members or work colleagues or people who have known you for years. These are people who don’t really know anything about you, and so you can be someone else- or perhaps you are already someone else as soon as you are sitting amongst them, ready to invent or be invented.

Further, these interviews certainly say something about balancing acts: about balancing the hours of the week between the pulls of work, family and health; about balancing the life-story narratives that are constant and unrelenting works-in-progress in our heads (not just someone who used to do that job and how does this job, but someone who painted as a child and returned to it as an adult); and about balancing one’s place in the larger context, contributing to a community or being more active in politics.

The formal analysis of the individual interviews and their relationship to the quantitative data will give us a far more detailed, complete and academically robust picture of the benefits of lifelong learning. But I will always remember these first impressions, the voices from the transcripts and what they told me about control, creation, dreams and endeavour, about how we can be the people we want to be.

Reference:
Becker, H. S. (1984). Writing for Social Scientists. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

The BeLL study is the first large-scale analysis about the wider benefits of liberal adult education – and also first having a comparative element. The data have been collected from 10 European countries, and it is obvious that comparative analysis of benefits and liberal adult learning opportunities in these countries will be one of the key tasks.

Liberal adult education is defined as voluntary, non-vocational and obviously non-formal learning activity. In the BeLL data the courses attended range from “Furniture upholstery” and “Guitar for Beginners” courses at village adult education centre to more or less organized courses discussing “Current affairs and international issues”.

In some countries liberal adult education has a clear organizational structure, and learning activities are at least partly funded by the state and municipalities, and respectively statistically documented. For example in Finland it is possible to define, which are the training providers offering liberal adult education courses, how much they receive funding and how many students they have.

In many other BeLL countries this is not the case. In fact there is neither a coherent nor comparable liberal adult education system in Europe. In the BeLL survey we contacted 8894 adult learners in 10 European countries, and asked how many liberal adult education courses they have participated during the past 12 months, what type of courses, and which organizations provided these courses. According to the first results, the respondents have participated a total of 13338 liberal adult education courses, which have been organized in each country by 7 to 12 very different training organizations.

So far we have been able to classify the course topics into 25 categories, which can be reduced into 10 main categories (like languages, social and political education, health and sports, etc.). This part of the comparative analysis is rather easy, and the course topics are identical in all countries. But how to compare 70 – 120 different course providers? It is impossible to classify them. More theoretical perspectives like “adult learning systems” (Rees 2013) are a bit too general to be used with our data. At the moment we are looking for solutions from “national profiles”, where existing country specific information is combined with BeLL data.

If liberal adult learning opportunities are difficult to compare, the analysis and comparison of actual wider benefits of learning is a little bit easier task, because BeLL project providers a good empirical data on that. There is also qualitative data (interviews and open questions in survey), which can be used to complement the statistical results and causal interpretations.

It is obvious that differences in wider benefits are not based mainly on the differences between the countries and cultures, but also on the gender, age, educational level and type of courses attended. It will be interesting to analyze what are the genuine differences between the countries, and which wider benefits are more universal at European level.

Reference:
Rees, G. 2013. Comparing Adult Learning Systems: and emerging political economy. European Journal of Education, Vol. 48, Number 2, June 2013.