The symposium addresses the classification of current requirements and the need for educational staff in educational organisations to be trained as lifelong learners along the lifespan and to exercise a high level of responsibility and attentiveness towards the lifelong learning of their clientele, so that learners can maintain their joy of learning, motivation to learn and their general learning prerequisites life-wide and lifelong (Iredale 2018). In Europe, national education systems are responsible for teacher training and each university or teacher training institution has different methods depending on the legal and curricular requirements at its location. They differ in curricula and practice-based training components that vary in terms of time, organisation, and location, such as internships, mentoring, specific integrated modules, and "lifelong learning competence".

This also means that there is not only a lack of impact-oriented studies examining whether the lifelong learning competence of the pedagogical staff leads to improvements in the development of teaching (performance of the pupils) and/or spill over effects in the region in which the staff are trained, but also a lack of methods for recording and interweaving the perspectives of training and the training location.

The symposium will present the findings of a new kind of university teaching, in which a radical interweaving of theory and practice as well as a linking of professionalization of students and regional practice actors becomes the subject of organizational pedagogical professionalization and thus of a collective learning between university and its surrounding region.

Rooted in this context, this symposium tries to answer the question of how we can reflect on and discuss lifelong learning competence, in theory and in practice, from the organizational research in educational sciences at different educational levels (from kindergarten to higher education). We bring perspectives from three different countries (Austria, Germany and Kosovo), different educational levels, and different areas of research to create an open arena to learn from each other.

Keser Aschenberger, Filiz/Kil, Monika (2017): European Analysis Report: LIB(e)RO – Libraries as Intercultural Learning Spaces: Setting up an e-Learning Platform for Minor Refugees in Public Libraries. Aspects of socially inclusive continuing/adult education, Open access papers from Transdisciplinary Continuing Education Planning and Education Research Center, https://www.donau-uni.ac.at/imperia/md/content/department/wbbm/stabsbereich/publikationen/european-analysis-report-of-the-situation-of-the-minor-refugees-and-libraroes-for-project-libero.pdf Iredale, A. (2018). Teacher Education in Lifelong Learning. Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-65819-3