Let’s now look for examples and practices around those particularly bridging institutional connectivity between HE and Adult Community Education. We can also work together to create examples for our own context and making those adaptable to other contexts.

Particular thanks to the ÌÇÐÄ´«Ã½ team for facilitating & offering us the platform for interaction.

Thanks for your feedback, Turuwark. I don’t know how that would be possible. My fieldwork experiences in China’s adult education and learning told me that there was a gap between these two parties or even three or four. That is why I thought if it would be necessary or possible to connect them.

Fusheng Jua, I agree with you that closer collaboration among HE institutions/academic researchers, donors and adult literacy/learning implementers. But, how is this possible? Does anyone of you have experience with this regard? How can we bring this tripartite collaboration??

In order for higher education institutions invest on producing adult educators and thereby broader the vision of adult literacy/adult education, the prevailing assumption about adult literacy/education has to be changed. Much work is needed with this regard! In addition to this, we can enhance the roles of higher education institutions by providing capacity-building opportunities, especially for developing countries.

Regarding the second issue, as you mentioned, the donors require tangible evidences to invest on adult literacy. This necessitates the need for more empirical studies on the contributions of adult literacy. I think case studies are more appropriate to identify success stories and then to convince donors.

In having joint undertaking language of research become an issue. This also came once in the discussion of this e-Forum. In majority cases English is used for research; research in national/local languages is not still a common practice. Since we have been talking about collective works, engagement of micro-macro stakeholders, and wider dissemination or usage of the research reports, potentiality of use of both mainstream language and national/local languages in undertaking research may be explored. It has cost implications, but might be cost effective from ‘return to investment’ perspective.

Focusing on community engagement has the potential of linking higher educations with communities. Staff and students need to form partnership so that they work together (develop goals and aims). In addition, higher educations train adult educators and facilitators by working jointly with program developer and policy makers

One idea for institutional arrangement can be establishing a tripartite agreement among HEs, donor/Govt and literacy implementing organizations. This would blend academic knowledge, financial and physical resources and lessons learned from practices. This arrangement would facilititate adult learning in resource constrained situation particularly in South Asia and sub-Saharan context.

What we now need to look for institutional arrangement for programmatic partnership to contribute to practical insights by and from the fields in the HE courses and also enhancing capacity of the adult educators to work in teams of HE professionals/Researchers.

Ideas for setting these sorts of institutional arrangement and collective financing are welcome.