Education and identity of adult educators

Abstract

Adult education and learning has because of its wide extensiveness and variability huge difficulties with its identity. Difficulties appear in all three spheres of identity: professional identity of adult education; societal identity of the field; and personal identity with the profession. In our contribution we list and describe difficulties in all three identity areas. Insufficient identity is a great obstacle for continuing education and further training of those who work or wish to work in adult education or they are obliged to carry out such education. They are all named ‘adult educators’ but their roles and tasks in education are different. Contents and ways of realization of programs have to be adapted to that. We recommend: modular programs for different target groups should be created from a wide list of contents; more sophisticated methods of marketing and recruiting should be used for the better realization of programs; programs should enable participants to get publicly recognized certificates and in this way current program of pedagogical-andragogical education which does not follow enough above-named difficulties of identity should be replaced; successful programs should be distributed all over Slovenia and performed in cooperation with another providers.