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JACE: Editorial

JACE seeks to publish papers that cover the broad spectrum of activity encompassed by adult and continuing education, and it also aims for wide international coverage. It is pleasing, therefore, that in this issue we begin with a paper by Ahmad and colleagues from Malaysia that considers the goals and challenges for adult education in that country, and which reports on the evaluation of two government programmes in computer literacy and civic development for rural communities.

There follows the first paper that the journal has published that uses Belarus as a context. This article, by Golovatch and Vanderplank, considers the self-attributions that learners make in explaining the reasons for their success or failure in learning English as a Foreign Language. A very high proportion of adult learning is concerned with the acquisition of a second language, but as a field of research endeavour its out - put lies on the margins of what we find in journals of post-compulsory education. As is immediately evident from the article, concerns in language learning mirror those found in other parts of the adult learning domain. As in other countries with similar demographies and economies, Germany has big challenges to face as the age profile of its workforce changes. It is notable, therefore, in Schmidt’s study of behaviour with respect to continuing education in that country that older employees form a heterogeneous population and that differences between older and younger people are by no means clear. The implication is that there exist differentiated groups of older adults for whom different strategies are needed. In Heiskanen’s study, work is also the focus, but her paper from Finland looks at the way within the public sector that an educational programme can provide a multi-professional and multi-disciplinary forum for participants to exchange ideas. It is argued that in today’s net worked society professional work and knowledge production necessitate transgressions of organisational boundaries and there is a need for construction of new spaces to which professionals can bring not only their aspirations and problems, but also the context of their work.

The two following papers consider aspects of distance learning. Firstly, Stephens and colleagues from Ireland consider the experiences of both adult learners and tutors on an externally assessed distance learning degree programme. Bokova and colleagues present a different focus in their policy-based study, considering the geo graphically adjoined countries of Bulgaria and Greece, and comparing the development of distance education in the two systems.

This issue is completed by two papers from England. Over the years, University Continuing Education (UCE) in the UK has been subject to considerable constraints, and in Bennett and Ryley’s article they trace some of the stressors on this provision since the early 1990s. Using a case study from one English university they then consider the process of change and the theoretical principles that underpin the accommodation of UCE provision within a credit-based qualifications framework, and relate this to the European-wide Bologna process.

This issue ends with another article from England, and in this case from the local authority sector. Armstrong describes the processes of inspection that have been used by government as one means of seeking to improve the adult education sector. She argues that the Common Inspection Framework may not be sufficient for either evaluating the quality of teaching and learning or for ensuring that all the significant factors affecting quality are addressed in the leadership and management of continuous improvement.