(How) can adult education organisations foster the teaching staffs’ professionalism by professional learning communities?: Empirical exploration of the implementability of a cooperative human resources development concept in adult education

Abstract

This paper (published in the journal Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation (GIO)) focuses on the human resources development concept of professional learning communities (PLCs), which is based on collegial-cooperative learning and has been tested and researched for its effectiveness in schools in particular. Although adult education is now the largest education sector in Germany, e.g. measured by the number of organisations and employees, such in-service human resources measures “near the job” have hardly been used so far. This is remarkable insofar as teaching staff members in adult education do not go through standardised qualification programmes and are predominantly freelance/part-time, so that adult education organisations can hardly exert any formal influence on “their” teaching staff, although they make a considerable contribution to achieving the organisational goal (“good adult education”). Against this background, the paper explores PLC-implementability from the perspective of adult education leading and teaching staff members in order to explore the basic implementation interest of relevant actors on the one hand and to generate field-specific knowledge for the development of a PLC-implementation concept on the other hand. Our analysis is based on structured guided interviews (N = 23), which we analysed deductively and inductively using qualitative content analysis. The results show predominantly positive perceptions of PLC-implementability in the field of adult education. Furthermore, they indicate (among other aspects) a high relevance of cooperation-related beliefs for the teaching staffs’ basic PLC-participation motivation and a central key function of the management staff members, which we discuss in conclusion, especially with regard to consequences for the general organisational conditions of cooperation.