Comparing national adult education policies on a global level. An exploration of patterns of difference and similarity in international policy contexts by method of lexicometric analysis

ABSTRACT

The article sets out to compare national adult education policies on a global level and explores patterns of difference and similarity by presenting empirical findings of a lexicometric analysis. The data bases are national reports published in the context of the UNESCO-conference CONFINTEA VI. They were analysed on the background of the question, if differences in the understanding of adult education can be identified depending on EU or non-EU membership of the analysed countries. Theoretically, the enquiry refers to the framing of world polity and empirically, it employs the quantitative procedures of lexicometric analysis developed in linguistics, which enable to analyse huge amounts of text with regard to macrostructures of discourses by calculating word frequencies, keywords and collocations. The empirical analysis shows differences in understandings of adult education depending on EU membership. It becomes obvious that even if the reports were published in the context of and oriented to demands of UNESCO, patterns of difference between EU and non-EU states can be found in the discourse as regards frequency, keyness and collocation analyses.

KEYWORDS:

• Lexicometric analysis
• adult education policy
• EU
• UNESCO
• CONFINTEA VI

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Breyer

Lisa Breyer, M.A. is research associate and doctoral candidate at the University of Cologne (adult and continuing education). Her research focuses on lifelong learning, European adult education policy as well as the relation between research and policy.

Michael Schemmann

Prof. Dr. Michael Schemmann is professor of adult and continuing education at the University of Cologne. His research interests concern structural developments in continuing education, research on organisations of adult education and internationally comparative adult education research.