From Andragogy to Artificial Intelligence: Tracing the Evolution of Adult Education Through Scholarly Journals Published by AAACE

 

 

By Lilian H. Hill (HOF 2018)

 

In adult and continuing education, scholarly journals provide a unique lens through which to examine how ideas develop over time, revealing not only what educators and researchers have studied, but also whose voices have been amplified, whose perspectives have been overlooked, and how the field has responded to changing social realities. A review of publications in adult and continuing education journals demonstrates that the field has undergone significant intellectual transformation over the past several decades.

 

Looking Beyond Familiar Names

Introductory adult education texts in the U.S. foreground a relatively small group of influential scholars, including Eduard Lindeman, Malcolm Knowles, David Kolb, Jack Mezirow, Sharan Merriam, and Stephen Brookfield. While these individuals made foundational contributions to the field, relying on a handful of familiar citations creates an impression that adult education scholarship is static. Instead, adult education is a rich and evolving field shaped by hundreds of scholars, practitioners, and community leaders across the globe.

 

An illustration of this diversity is the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame, which over the past thirty years has recognized nearly 500 leaders from over 40 countries for their contributions to adult and continuing education. The Hall of Fame includes researchers, practitioners, policy leaders, and innovators whose work spans community development, literacy, workforce education, transformative learning, lifelong learning, higher education, and social justice. The work of the Hall of Fame is ongoing with a new inductees honored each year.

 

Hall of Fame members have contributed directly to the scholarly literature. Foundational scholars include Malcolm Knowles (1996), Phyllis Cunningham (1996), Jack Mezirow (2003), Sharan Merriam (2003), Thomas Sork (2008), Stephen Brookfield (2009), John Dirkx (2013), and Patricia Cranton (2014). They published influential work, helping shape major areas of inquiry including andragogy, transformative learning, critical reflection, adult development, and lifelong learning. The date in brackets that follows scholars’ names represents the year they were inducted. Induction tends to occur when scholars are well-established, and sometimes years later. For example, Eduard Lindeman was inducted posthumously in 2002, yet his well-known publication, The Meaning of Adult Education, was released in 1926.

 

Journals as Windows into the Field

Journals demonstrate how knowledge production changes over time. Academic journals reveal the questions that scholars considered important, theoretical frameworks that gained prominence, and social issues that influenced research. They reflect shifting priorities, emerging debates, and growing recognition of previously marginalized voices. By examining publication trends, it becomes possible to trace the evolution of adult education as both a scholarly discipline and a social practice. This blog post focuses on publications of the American Association of Adult and Continuing Education (AAACE): Adult Education Quarterly, Adult Learning, and Journal of Transformative Education.

 

 

Mid-Twentieth Century: Education for Democracy and Community Development

During the 1950s - 1970s, adult education scholars focused heavily on program development, community education, civic participation, and democratic engagement. Adult education was viewed as a practical endeavor that could strengthen communities and support social progress. Research emphasized effective teaching strategies for adult learners. Theories such as andragogy, experiential learning, and humanistic education gained prominence, reflecting a strong interest in understanding how adults learn and how educators could facilitate that learning more effectively. Broader social movements, including civil rights activism, labor organizing, and community development efforts, influenced the field. Adult education was closely connected to social purpose, citizenship, and collective improvement.

 

The 1980s and 1990s: Critical Reflection and Theory Development

The 1980s and 1990s marked a significant shift in adult education scholarship. Rather than focusing primarily on instructional methods, scholars began exploring deeper questions about power, inequality, and social structures. This era saw the emergence and expansion of transformative learning theory alongside growing influence from critical theory, feminist scholarship, and critical pedagogy. Researchers began asking important questions about who participates in adult education, who benefits whose knowledge is considered legitimate, and how learning experiences shape identity and power? The field moved beyond questions of how adults learn to examine why education matters and whom it serves. Adult education became increasingly concerned with issues of justice, equity, and social transformation.

 

The Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame inducted its first 78 scholars in 1996. The Hall had been in development for several years, and the induction recognized adult educators who were active in previous decades. Scholars who contributed to the literature who were inducted that year included Phyllis Cunningham, Cyril Houle, Alan Knox, and K. Patricia Cross. Authors inducted in the remainder of the decade include Peter Jarvis (1997), Myles Horton (1998), Donna Queeny (1998), and Dorothy Enderis (1998).

 

The Early 2000s: Globalization and Lifelong Learning

As globalization accelerated, adult education became increasingly international and interdisciplinary. Researchers explored cross-cultural perspectives and examined how global economic, political, and social changes influenced learning. Governments, international organizations, and educational institutions increasingly promoted lifelong learning as essential for workforce development, economic competitiveness, and adaptation to rapid social change.

 

At the same time, scholars debated competing visions of education. Was adult education primarily an economic tool designed to increase productivity and employability? Or was it a means of promoting social justice, civic engagement, and personal growth? This tension between economic and social purposes remains a defining feature of contemporary adult education discourse. Hall of Fame members who contributed to that debate included Ronald Cervero (2003), Stephen Brookfield (2009), Patricia Cranton (2014), John Dirkx (2018), and Laura Bierema (2022).

 

The 2010s: Equity, Identity, and Technology

During the 2010s, adult education scholarship increasingly focused on issues of equity, inclusion, identity, and culture. Researchers examined how race, gender, social class, disability, and other dimensions of identity influence educational experiences and outcomes. The field responded to major global challenges, including migration, economic instability, and public health crises. Greater attention was given to amplifying marginalized voices and understanding how systemic inequalities shape access to learning opportunities. Technology emerged as another major area of inquiry. Scholars investigated online learning, digital access, and the ways technology influences participation, engagement, and educational outcomes. Research increasingly blended theoretical analysis with practical applications, reflecting the growing need to address real-world challenges facing educators and learners. Hall of Fame Members active during this time included Stephen Brookfield (2009), Juanita Johnson-Bailey (2009), Elizabeth Tisdell (2014), John Dirkx (2018), Simone Conceição (2018), Paulette Isaac-Savage (2019), and Edward Taylor (2024).

 

The 2020s and Beyond: Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Challenges

The current decade is generating new questions for adult education scholars. Digital, media, and artificial intelligence literacy, and the ethical implications of emerging technologies have become prominent topics of discussion. Adult educators are learning to teach adults about addressing misinformation and disinformation, digital inequity, workforce disruption, and the changing nature of knowledge production. At the same time, foundational literacy skills remain important concerns. Ongoing focus on social justice, global interconnectedness, and lifelong learning continue to shape research and practice. Hall of Fame authors publishing in this decade include Chad Hoggan (2025), Lisa Baumgartner (2024), Lisa Merriweather (2024), and Laura Bierema (2022). There are more adult educators still to be recognized in this decade. Future scholarship will likely explore how artificial intelligence, data-driven systems, and evolving digital environments influence learning, teaching, and participation in society.

 

Lessons from the Evolution of Adult Education

Adult education has evolved from a largely practice-oriented field to one that is theoretically sophisticated, critically reflective, globally connected, and increasingly interdisciplinary. Throughout its history, the field has maintained an ongoing dialogue with society. Changes in scholarship have often mirrored broader social, political, economic, and technological developments. New ideas have emerged in response to changing contexts, while longstanding debates about purpose, access, equity, and power continue to resurface in new forms. The challenge for contemporary scholars is to engage with the broader and continually expanding body of literature that reflects the diversity, complexity, and global nature of adult learning and education.

 

Understanding this intellectual evolution helps educators and researchers situate their own work within a larger scholarly tradition. It highlights the diversity of voices that have contributed to the field and encourages engagement with both foundational theories and contemporary scholarship. Most importantly, the history of adult education reminds us that the field is not defined by a handful of influential thinkers. Rather, it is a living, evolving conversation shaped by generations of scholars, practitioners, and learners working to understand and improve the role of education in adult life.

 

The auto/biographical imagination and the shifting sands of adult learning

 

By Linden West (HOF 2020), Professor Emeritus

I want to draw, in this blog, on a lifetime’s passion for what feminist sociologist Liz Stanley called auto/biographical inquiry, and the myriad ways in which the stories people tell can be interpreted, including in dialogue with them. “Biographical” means the search to understand particular moments in the here and now, including education, in the context of a whole life. “Auto,” bringing the researcher’s presence and subjectivity to bear on what amounts to the deeply relational, intersubjective, often unconscious drama we call research. When two or more gather together, the struggle for openness, trust, and meaning in storytelling and interpretation begins.

The auto/biographical “turn” in adult education represented a reaction against superficial survey research on “why people learn”: boxes ticked on whether motivation was primarily personal or vocational. Forgetting, of course, that why we learn and desire a specific career can be deeply personal and familial. But then we have lived through times where vocational and economic motivation have been culturally valued, while the more personal and certainly liberal and expansive spirit once characterizing adult learning, in locations  like the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, has weakened. We once shared an idea of adult education as a laboratory for cultivating democratic learning, participatory citizenship, and inclusive, progressive politics, but this has dissipated, and education at all levels in a world of precarity is focused on “the economy, stupid!”

And the complexity of the human subjects at the heart of learning and research easily gets lost in the primacy of the quantitative gaze, the seductions of measurement, and evidence-based mantras. It was Max Weber who urged us towards understanding rather than simple measurement, but this aspiration can get sidelined in the worship of quantification. And although there are now many studies drawing on auto/biography, auto-ethnography, and qualitative perspectives, in the eyes of the powerful, governments and the academy, they really do not count. The loss of the human subject in social science and educational research remains a live issue if we really want to understand why people learn in depth and what this means on more of their own terms.

Doing auto/biographical research, drawing on the developing stories people tell, over time, demands care and attentiveness, and a relational, safe, transitional space for developing and interpreting stories. Attentiveness, respectfulness, and non-judgmentalism matter, alongside time, curiosity, and reflexivity towards what emerges. A giving of the researcher’s whole self to the process is one way of framing it: bodily awareness, spirit, mind, and an empathic imagination. And a quality of presence to help build trust and a shared interest in lives, most of all among those, maybe a majority, who feel themselves inconsequential. Auto/biography celebrates the ordinary, the mundane, the particular and the everyday: it is in the particular, in Umberto Echo’s famous phrase, that we find the universals of human struggle, vulnerability, lostness, desire, resistance, courage and the incarnation of new ways of seeing.

We then more easily appreciate the importance of love and generosity in a learning life, when that life has been overwhelmed by abuse. We appreciate the power of self- and other-recognition in reading a good novel, where we discover a character much like ourselves who keeps on keeping on against difficult odds, and we are able to introject some of their resilience. Processes of projection, identification, and introjection are at work in the complex relational ecology we call adult education. We might celebrate the apparently small gesture of a teacher in higher education, who intuitively knows the importance of calling someone by their name, and celebrating their stuttering contribution in a seminar. Small gestures are important and empowering in learning lives, when we listen to the stories people tell.

Of course, we require a living code of ethics – treading lightly because we can tread on dreams. The metaphor of Pandora’s Jar (which, in fact, is what it was) reminds us to be careful, remembering that research, even longitudinal research, offers no long-term supportive structure like psychotherapy. On the other hand, and most often the case, it is astonishing how research can be therapeutic, because someone listens, bears witness, and gives credence to what may have seemed inconsequential. Such understanding is a co-creation, requiring, care-fully and reflexively, the use of our own lives, at times, to illuminate those of others, and vice-versa. We may never have known the nightmare of forced migration, or a constant experience of humiliation and degradation at school. But every one of us, at some time or other, knows what it’s like to feel disdained and disregarded, and these intersubjective synergies can be drawn on to deepen, dialogically, our understanding of the other and self.

It helps to be part of a strong research community, to develop interpretation and avoid projecting onto others what really belongs to us. A community made up of other seekers, where truth and integrity matter, and everything is reflexively questioned in the company of generous colleagues. Communities like the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults Life History and Biography Research Network, which has involved diverse people working together from different traditions, ranging from highly abstract and empirically exhaustive traditions in the German-speaking world, to the more artistic, imaginative, relational, and eclectic epistemology of auto/biography in countries like Italy. Dialogue between these different ways of seeing matters.

Emphasis is often given to listening, stillness, empathy, curiosity, and non-judgmentalism, and careful recording and transcription of an encounter. There is space and time for reflection, shared comment, awareness of our own associations in what we hear, and feedback at all stages, especially when a study is longitudinal. The whole slowly becomes more than the sum of the parts in a dialogical, iterative, narrative space.  

A brief case study of the power and potential of auto/biography will help here. The story of someone called Mathew, a migrant, who fled a war zone, death within his family, and crossed dangerous seas. Eventually ending up in London, then taking an Access to Higher Education program at a local community college. Lost, lonely, and alienated as the noise of anti-migration campaigns and populist politicians invaded his psyche. But then two teachers took a particular interest when he stopped attending class. They liked Mathew and made contact to learn that he had been forced to report to a detention center more and more frequently as a way of keeping tabs on “dangerous people” like him. The teachers began a campaign to get him citizenship and to support him in the classroom. “Good parents they were to me,” as Mathew put it. He progressed to higher education, where his proficiency in four languages and cultural sensitivities enabled him to become an advocate for diverse others. Eventually, he worked in public health, where his languages and knowledge of different cultures, including the importance of spirituality in healing, came to matter.

I met him with a colleague who was also a migrant. She intuitively understood some of his struggles and later offered to help with his academic writing and listened to and reflected with him on his tendency to self-deprecate. Pushing the boundaries of research may be into a kind of counseling, some might say. I’m not sure, but Mathew deeply valued his time with us and loved engaging in thinking about his experiences. Later, much later, I used Mathew as a case study of migration and how this touched deep and complicated aspects of my own family history. A hotel housing migrants was the target in 2025 of violent protests in the struggling “post-industrial” city where I was born. I came to think of my own great-grandfather, John West, who fled Ireland in 1842 during the Great Famine. He lived about 200 meters from where the protest took place. Family histories overlap across time, and empathy is strengthened through a deeper appreciation of what migration truly entails. And the power of the auto/biographical imagination in research.

I was helped by an ESREA Life History and Biography Network Writing Retreat in Liguria, Italy, in 2025. Freema Elbaz-Luwisch, Emeritus Professor at Haifa University, led a workshop on dancing with ancestors, in her case, two grandmothers who died tragically young. Her father’s mother died of diabetes in Vienna in 1909. Her mother’s mother - born in what was then Russia, now Ukraine – in a time and place where anti-Semitism could be virulent, and life lived on a perpetual cultural edge.  But they were alive and young in the imaginative dance in a church on a sunny Italian Spring Day. An extraordinary moment, where we all joined in and were encouraged to connect with our own ancestors. Dancing in a place called once upon a time and reimagining lives trans-generationally. I was moved to pen a letter from John, my great-grandad, to me. A letter on the trials he went through – in a kind of narrative imagination – including the intense racism he experienced in mid-Victorian Britain. He never gave his place of birth on his marriage certificate, just the country of Ireland, and he was reluctant to provide more detail, given the ubiquitous racist disdain for all things Irish. He just wanted to get it over, he wrote. Narrative rather than narrower historical truth, but no less important for that.

Whatever, auto/biography represents a fundamental methodological and imaginative challenge to the conventional scientific idea of keeping messy subjectivity and intersubjectivity at bay, because it gets in the way of “science.” Such scienticism, as we might call it, risks narrowing our understanding of learners and learning, recognition, human motivation, and the relational, intersubjective dynamics of truly transformative learning. It constrains our understanding of how new ways of seeing and human agency, lifewide as well as lifelong, get forged between people, and with the symbolic world. 

 

As we celebrate 30 years of the Hall of Fame, what experiences, relationships, or moments in your professional journey have most shaped your contribution to adult and continuing education, and what lessons would you like to pass on to future generations? We invite Hall of Fame members and the global adult education community to share reflections, stories, and insights as part of this anniversary series.

IACEHOF 30th Anniversary Celebration 

The Hall of Fame is more than a recognition—it is a living record of the people and ideas that have shaped adult and continuing education globally

 

 

Mission Possible: Renewing Adult and Continuing Education Futures

 

By Professor Don Olcott, Jr., FRSA (HOF 2024)

 

Good Morning, Mr. Phelps: The world has seen some very turbulent times for adult and continuing education during the past decade. Political populism, public and employer disillusionment, increasing educational costs, and competing interests across institutions and sectors have created an uncertain future. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is for you and your PMF (Possible Mission Force) to seek out courageous and inspiring adult and continuing educators to bring forward new strategies, ideas, and best practices for sustaining a thriving and innovative future for adult and continuing education. If you or any members of your PMF team are captured, you and your team will be disavowed, and your Mission Impossible 8 complimentary theater tickets will be revoked – just kidding!

 

Leadership is Essential

Is the future of adult and continuing education secure and guaranteed? A rhetorical question, indeed. There are no guarantees for the future. Today, many educational leaders are advocating “future proofing” education against unanticipated change, geopolitical shifts, global crises, and natural disasters, and new normals (plural) that may or may not define future societal eras or Zeitgeists (Gast, 2022).

The problem with this conceptual approach is that it is reactive rather than building institution response scenarios that are agile, flexible, and responsive to any “new normal” or crisis. Visionary and creative leadership will make this happen, including reframing the possibilities ahead for adult and continuing education.

 

Adult and Continuing Educators are the Possible Mission Force (PMF)

We all need a touch of humor (thus the opening dialogue above) to help us navigate the challenges of the future. Regrettably, Tom Cruise may not ultimately save us from ourselves any more than artificial intelligence (AI) will be the panacea for all things educational. As adult and continuing educators, we must embrace the challenge and re-engage in the conversation to foster collaboration about what we can do to strengthen and expand the role of adult and continuing education for future generations.

 

State of the Profession

The OECD 2023 Report on Trends in Adult Learning provided a snapshot of current trends in adult learning. It is beyond the scope of this commentary to provide a detailed analysis. Here are some highlights from the report.

 

• Participation in many countries appears to be falling; more alarming is that overall participation is declining despite the gap between socio-economic groups narrowing.
• Formal education is playing a diminishing role in adult learning. The focus is increasingly on non-formal job training-related programs.  Countries with strong participation in formal adult learning programs tend to have higher non-formal learning engagement. Tertiary qualifications dominate formal education.
• Over 40% of non-formal job-related learning lasts one day or less. Unemployed adults tend to attend longer programs, given time availability and the need to develop meaningful employment skills.
• Improving job performance and employability is the main motivation for engaging in adult learning programs. Lack of time, family obligations, and cost remain primary barriers to participation.
• Participation tends to be highest when available in the workplace and supported by employers.
• Policy misalignment, where compliance with Lifelong Learning skill development is fragmenting the possible mission impacts of training 

 

Strategies for Success: Sharing the Experience

I want to invite my IACE Hall of Fame global colleagues to share their own ideas on how to renew and empower the profession for future generations of learners. Here are a few strategies of mine. They may stimulate some of your own ideas.

 

Storytelling

Do we tell our adult and continuing education story clearly to our multiple publics and stakeholders? Interestingly, in my own research (Olcott, 2024) recently on the future of open universities, I discovered some perplexing trends.

Governments, employers, and prospective students view open universities much the same way. The diversity, and by extension, capabilities of open universities to be innovative and unique got lost in translation despite distinguished leaders such as Sir John Daniel (2019) and experienced leaders such as Professors Alan Tait and Ross Paul (2019) noting the vast diversity. 

Telling our story better means articulating our value, our creativity, and our commitment to serving adult learners. The adult and continuing education profession inherently reflects a steadfast optimism built on empowerment, creativity, and commitment to human learning. Indeed, this is a noble endeavor, but there are many competing stories that remind us all that we must tell our story often and consistently better than the rest.      

 

Micro-Credentials:  Strategic Game Changer or Tactical Diversion

Micro-credentials are not new. Short-term adult education and continuing education training programs have been around for decades, particularly evident in vocational-technical professions and the military (McGreal & Olcott, 2022). Micro-credentials are unique today because of the rigor applied to assessing knowledge and skills, with skills/competencies validated and certified. 

 

Remember the days when we attended a one-day seminar on Saturday and received a certificate of completion or attendance. This was not validation of new skills and knowledge, and these short-term, less rigorous activities could not be stackable into formal qualifications. This renewed focus on assessment provides the conduit to validating non-formal training and educational activities and in-turn leverages the stackability and conversion of non-formal learning normative units or value to be applied to existing or new formal qualifications.

I try to articulate to institutional leaders that micro-credentials can be a strategic tool as well as a tactical training approach for program delivery. Educational organizations are often criticized for trying to be all things to all people and often doing some of this very poorly. Conversely, the strategic integration of micro-credentials can, in fact, change the fundamental mission and architecture of an institution in ways that are catalysts for better serving our diverse stakeholders. An example of this is our approach to lifelong learning.      

 

Lifelong Learning (LLL) – Walking the talk

Indeed, it is mindboggling trying to scan the range of keynotes, organizational documents, and formal publications on lifelong learning for the 21^st century. What is even more amazing is that nearly all of these are predicated on a fundamental strategy that lifelong learning really means some type of magical transformation that happens ONLY after a student gets a first degree. The assumption suggests that a degree in Shakespearean tragedies is much more valuable than a micro-credential in hospitality management that leads to a workplace internship and employment.

If we return to the idea that micro-credentials can be a strategic approach for organizations, this suggests that skills development and employment become central priorities. This, in and of itself, has significant implications for how organizations are funded, structured, staffed, and marketed, and for which credentials and qualifications (degrees, certificates, micro-credentials) can be combined. 

Lifelong learning in its purest form means that learning occurs across the lifespan and that an 18-year-old can start with micro-credentials first and then return for a degree later. It means no imposed chronology of credentials: you get a degree first, then lifelong learning begins. As it stands, we advocate lifelong learning as long as it fits within traditional organizational structures that have stood for decades but are clearly not serving the needs of students, employers, and societies. Reframing this misalignment between education and society is perhaps the greatest challenge we face in the next fifty years, particularly the challenges facing students and employers in the developing world. 

 

Summary – We are the Champions!

All of us are adult and continuing education’s Possible Mission Force (PMF). I’ve shared a few of my own strategies to renew our commitment to the future. We must tell our story and better communicate our value. Micro-credentials are strategic as well as for tactical program delivery. And finally, a true lifelong learning model is flexible and offers the maximum options for engaging in a synthesis of formal and non-formal educational activities based on the learner's needs, not the mandates of the system.    

What are your strategies for sustaining and nurturing the future of adult and continuing education, including the broader framework of lifelong learning? 

 

References

Daniel, J. S. (2019). Open universities: Old concepts and contemporary challenges. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 20(4). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v20i3.4035

Gast, A.  (2022).  Four ways universities can future-proof education. World Economic Forum.  https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/01/four-ways-universities-can-future-proof-education/ 

McGreal, R., & Olcott, D. J. (2022). A strategic reset: Micro-credentials for higher education leaders. Smart Learning Environment, 9. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40561-022-00190-1

OECD.  (2023). Trends in adult learning. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/trends-in-adult-learning_ec0624a6-en.html

Olcott, Jr., D. (2024). Open universities: Reinventing, repurposing, and reimagining innovative futures. Journal of Open, Distance, and Digital Education (JODDE), 1(2), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.25619/ntkvsz26  

Paul, R. & Tait, A. (2019). Special issue editorial: Open universities: Past, present and future. International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 20(4). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v20i4.4575

 

 

Inclusive Data for Global Impact – Shaping the Future of Adult Learning Evaluation

The 2024 Hall of Fame Induction Conference in Florence hosted a significant working group discussion on the Marrakech Framework for Action (MFA), the outcome document of the 7^th International Conference on Adult Learning and Education held in Morocco in June 2022 (CONFINTEA 7), and its monitoring and data collection mechanisms. Facilitated by Working Group 1 (WG1) Mentor Arne Carlsen (IACEHOF 2017), chaired by UIL Director Isabell Kempf, and with critical contributions from Nicolas Jonas of the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL), the session explored strategies for developing inclusive and context-sensitive data frameworks to support global monitoring of Adult Learning and Education (ALE) through GRALE—the Global Report on Adult Learning and Education.

 

This working group focused on addressing the pressing need to broaden the scope of actors involved in data collection, moving beyond traditional government-led structures. As ALE is increasingly shaped by a diverse network of public and non-public entities, current monitoring strategies often fall short in capturing the full breadth of ALE activities, particularly those led by civil society organizations (CSOs) and private providers. The group’s objective was clear: to develop actionable recommendations for a more inclusive and effective data monitoring system.

 

Before the in-person meeting in Florence, a preparatory webinar set the stage by identifying best practices for engaging non-state actors. This pre-conference engagement ensured participants came prepared to dive deep into the complexities of global ALE data systems.

 

Key Challenges Identified

• Incomplete Data Coverage: ALE programmes run by CSOs and private providers are often not reflected in government reports, resulting in a fragmented picture of learning opportunities.
• Institutional Capacity Gaps: Many national monitoring systems face limitations in technical capacity, human resources, and infrastructure, hindering their ability to collect and validate comprehensive data.
• Misaligned Frameworks: Global monitoring tools like GRALE must account for diverse regional priorities and localized mechanisms—a difficult but crucial task.

 

The Role of Non-State Actors

Non-state stakeholders—especially CSOs and private companies—play an instrumental role in ALE delivery and innovation. Their involvement in data collection is not only logical but essential, as these actors often reach marginalized populations typically excluded from mainstream statistics. Participants discussed how their inclusion would improve both the reach and quality of data.

 

Recommendations for Capacity Building and Collaboration

Participants underscored the importance of joint initiatives that bring together governments, private sector organizations, and civil society. Cross-sector partnerships can create capacity-building programmes that develop data literacy and establish consistent methodologies. Moreover, participants called for ongoing, multi-level dialogue—national, regional, and global—to ensure monitoring systems remain relevant, inclusive, and widely adopted.

 

Exploring Alternative Data Sources

A forward-looking suggestion involved leveraging unconventional yet promising data sources, such as LinkedIn analytics or company-based human resource databases. While non-traditional, these sources could help fill data gaps, particularly regarding employment and skill development trends. Transparency and communication were deemed essential for securing buy-in from all involved parties.

 

Workshop Recommendations

The working group put forth several actionable strategies:

• Implement capacity-building activities to promote collaboration between government agencies and CSOs.
• Develop a global communication strategy to disseminate the goals and findings of GRALE 6.
• Maintain open dialogue with key stakeholders to align global monitoring tools with local and regional priorities.

 

Outcomes and Future Directions

As a direct result of the working group, partnerships were strengthened with key international actors, including ICAE, AONTAS, and DVV International. These enhanced collaborations are expected to play a pivotal role in advancing the implementation of GRALE 6. In parallel, UIL plans to integrate the workshop’s feedback to refine its monitoring framework.

 

Capacity-building activities led by UNESCO field offices are also in the pipeline, aimed at supporting more inclusive and context-sensitive data collection processes tailored to regional needs.

 

Beyond the technical outcomes, the session highlighted the essential role of data in shaping global agendas for ALE. ALE’s potential to address pressing global challenges—ranging from digital transitions and climate change to aging populations—can only be fully realized when monitoring frameworks capture the full diversity of learning environments and actors.

 

By prioritizing inclusion and collaboration, WG1 set a new global standard for evaluating lifelong learning.