SERVICES AND REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The purpose of this contribution is to discuss what roles the different economic sectors, and in particular services activities (the tertiary sector) play in regional development, understood as growth in production, incomes and employment in weakly developedregions. This question is approached in two ways. The contribution first contains a – primarily theoretical – re-examination of the so-called economic base model, which states that services play a passive role in regional development. The discussion leads to substantial modifications of the model. The second approach is more empirical. It will take as its point of departure the proposition – often heard, but rarely examined – that since service activities are more concentrated in big cities than other activities and in recent decades have shown higher growth rates than other economic activities, it follows that the economic development is now pulled towards big city regions. Examined by way of a statistical analysisin Denmark and France, this proposition could not be verified

Museums and galleries as performative sites for lifelong learning: constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of audience positions in museum and gallery education

In recent years community-based voluntary adult education has been under increasing pressure from neo-liberal discourses concerning the problems and benefits of globalization. Learning in museums traditionally connects to ‘soft’ humanist ideals of lifelong learning such as popular enlightenment, personal development and active citizenship, similar to those of the Scandinavian tradition of youth and adult education. However, even museum and gallery education has difficulties in resisting the introduction of discourses that, through new and subtle techniques of power, act in favour of individualized and marked-oriented constraints. In this article I take a critical constructivist approach to studying audience positions in lifelong learning as it is found in contemporary museum and gallery education. I use examples both from my own research in gallery education and from the case-studies of lifelong learning in museums and galleries reported at the homepage of the European consortium Collect Share. I frame the discussion by using three key concepts: construction, deconstruction and reconstruction

Learning Theory and Adult Education

Today a majority of the participants in adult education are unskilled or unemployed adults who must combine acquiring a professional qualification with a change of identity and way of life. As a foundation of such education, staff and planners need a comprehensive learning theory that includes the cognitive, psychodynamic and social-societal dimensions of learning

Visual events and the friendly eye: modes of educating vision in new educational settings in Danish art galleries

New, experimental educational settings such as ‘art laboratories’, ‘digital workshops’ and ‘theme-based tours’ are important to the processes of change towards more inclusive practices, which have been initiated in many Danish art galleries. While traditional gallery education was constructed in order to stimulate the ‘disciplined eye’ or the ‘aesthetic eye’ of the visitors, this article aims to discuss the practices of looking encouraged by contemporary and experimental educational projects. The first part of the article develops a theoretical perspective on educational settings conceived as visual events, and it discusses how ‘the desiring eye’ of some constructivist approaches, along with traditional practices of looking, have contributed to the formation of the modern, autonomous individual. The second part of the article analyses two cases from Danish art galleries and, inspired by Mieke Bal, proposes the ‘friendly eye’ as a possible dialogical and collective practice of looking that can be stimulated in educational settings

The learning migration nexus: towards a conceptual understanding

Learning and identity formation are inescapable facets of the upheavals accompanying migration; movement across social space inevitably involves reflection, questioning and the need to learn new ways of being and new identities. Although migration is characterised by complexity and diversity, this paper suggests that we can identify key learning perspectives which illuminate the nexus between learning and migration. It argues for an approach which grounds learning in an understanding of socio-cultural space, and highlights the significance of policy discourses surrounding migration and integration. Within the conceptual framework suggested, the nature of learning is seen as multifaceted, and as having the potential to have both positive and negative outcomes for migrants