Formation and change of professional full-time occupations in public adult education between ideal-typical occupational concepts and specific job profiles of organizations

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Matthias Alke
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 471204135

Although the first forms of full-time activities in adult education can be reconstructed individually during the Volksaufklärung and the Weimar Republic, it was not until the educational reforms of the 1960s and 1970s that the institutional prerequisites for the expansion of full-time positions in adult education, which was now publicly accountable, were created. In this period, the ideal-typical job profile of full-time pedagogical staff (HPM) was constituted and anchored in many further education laws of the federal states. However, the social scope and recognition of job profiles depend on the reference of actors in the respective field, such as associations or the individual adult education organizations like Volkshochschulen. In adult education research, the importance of organizations for the individual professional development of professional staff has been empirically supported, but there are no studies on the influences of organizations on collective professionalization within the field. This project addresses this desideratum by examining job profiles of individual organizations in relation to standards and ideal-typical occupational concepts formulated by associations and other actors. The multi-perspective study comprises three components: (1) A qualitative-quantitative longitudinal analysis of job advertisements from the adult education sector to reconstruct the job profiles conceived by individual organizations. Here, among other things, job titles, tasks, requirements, compensation structures, formal qualifications, and other entry requirements are analyzed - also under aspects of regional and time-historical differences. The basis is a corpus of job advertisements from the adult education sector from the post-war period until today. (2) A document analysis of occupational concepts, legal texts, educational policy planning documents, association strategy and position papers, as well as occupational introduction and continuing education programs, in which ideal-typical occupational images and professional standards are historically documented. (3) In a synthesizing analysis, the findings will be examined in relation to one another, taking into account convention-theoretical approaches to the formation of professional categories. In this way, the project contributes to the development of theory on the formation of occupational categories as well as occupational conventions and standards in adult education at the interface of occupational and organizational research. Furthermore, the empirical and theoretical findings contribute to the historiography of professionalization and to the current debate on the differentiation of full-time occupations in adult education.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants