António Fragoso

The transition of mature students to higher education: Challenging traditional concepts?

Abstract The Bologna Process, recently implemented in Portugal, has brought many changes to higher education institutions. One of these changes refers to a law that enables mature students (23 years and older) to gain special access to higher education, taking into account their professional experience and other biographical elements. The numbers of non-traditional students are therefore increasing in our country, making our academic population more diverse. We designed a research project to investigate the special circumstances of non-traditional students in our institutions and to provide recommendations that should improve their academic lives. In this article, we describe survey results, focus-group interviews and life histories and use them to understand the transition of mature students into higher education. Our results include interpretations of the factors that students view as barriers to their participation in higher education, the importance of peer support, and reflections on life histories that provide greater insight into the transitional process. Although several barriers were identified by mature students, there is also a positive impact from transition. It is clear that transition today is no longer punctual or linear either in time or space. We should therefore challenge traditional views of the transition concept, in which students are considered to be a problem to higher education institutions, because this diverts attention away from the responsibilities of those institutions towards facilitating change.

Adult education in transition: three cases and periods compared

The focus of this article is the development of adult education. As Kjell Rubenson maintains, adult education has gone through three eras of development: the humanistic, the strong economic period and a softer version of the economic period. Based on this model, we examine whether the development of adult education has similarities across countries and time. The development of adult education is analysed in relation to political and social development in two countries and one region: Portugal, Norway and the region of Andalusia in Spain. We discuss similarities, differences, important aspects and concepts to pinpoint some key factors that have strong influence on the development of adult education in the region and the two countries.

Older Adults as Active Learners in the Community

In the context of lifelong learning, adult education has been abandoning some of its historical and dearer principles of action and theory. Vocational training and similar dimensions concerned with the workers’ adaption to the labour market seem to constitute the dominant focus of contemporary adult education. The situation of older learners is even more complex.

The Involvement of Women in Training

This text is based on research conducted in the small village of Cachopo, located in the mountainous northern Algarve region of southern Portugal, between 1998 and 2002. Some additional field work was carried out between 2002 and 2010. The personal interviews the authors conducted allowed them to explore older data through the lens of new theoretical frameworks. This project produced new insights and new meanings.

A Tramp Shining

The introduction of the concept of learning at the centre of the educational processes seemed from the first to be a very positive issue (Faure, 1986; Guimaraes, 2011). But the first thing that Lifelong Learning (LLL) policies and practices did was to transfer the responsibility of learning to individuals “who, in the last instance, are responsible for pursuing their own learning” (CEC, 2000, p. 5). In a certain way this means that a right is considered a commodity and, as Gomes and Lucio-Villegas point out, though it “promoted the expansion of education and training opportunities [it] has not yet guaranteed equal access for all” (2009, p. 75).

Iniciativa Novas Oportunidades e "NOL+": dois estudos de caso no Algarve (Portugal)

The programme “New Opportunities” has been a bench mark within adult education in Portugal, introducing processes of recognition and validation of prior learning and experience to allow school certification and professional qualifying of the adults. In some adult centres the partnership New Opportunities to Read (NOL) was created aiming to improve the population’s level of literacy. We have selected two case studies to analyse the practices developed within that partnership. We gathered information through document analysis and semi-structured interviews with the centre’s directors and coordinators. Our findings show that the programme NOL improved the access to information and cultural activities, promoting literacy development and civic participation. In both centres, learning is understood as an everyday event associated with participation in collective life. We can further conclude that literacy practices, in those cases, promoted conscientization in its Freirian sense.