Assistant Professor at University of Belgrade, researcher at the Institute for Pedagogy and Andragogy, project coordinator in the Adult Education Society (Serbia)
Nominated by: Adult Education Society
Maja Maksimović is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Pedagogy and Andragogy, University of Belgrade, researcher at the Institute for Pedagogy and Andragogy, and project coordinator in the Adult Education Society.
Adult Education Society is the main national organization in this field in Serbia. It has organized many lobby and advocacy activities, conducted numerous national and European projects, delivered hundreds of trainings and organized many activities for promotion of ALE.
Maja Maksimović has a Bachelor, Master’s and PhD in adult education and thus in depth knowledge of the field. Additional to teaching adult education at University of Belgrade, she was a guest professor at the Goldsmith University of London and University of Kaiserslautern, and visiting scholar at the University of Coimbra, Portugal.
She does research in several areas of adult education and learning, such as European educational policy and comparative education, philosophy and critical discourses of ALE, intercultural and civic education. As a consultant she has worked with organisations including OSCE, UNESCO, UIL, USAiD, GIZ, DVV International, KulturKontakt, ICAE, etc.
Furthermore, she has been engaged in numerous EU and non-EU projects with an expertise in adult education in EU accession countries. She is a member of InSEA (International Society for Education through Art), BASOPED (Balkan Society for Pedagogy and Education), and ESREA (in the year 2016 I edited an ESREA publication Contemporary Issues and Perspectives on Gender Research in Adult Education). She is also a deputy Editor of adult education journal Andragogical Studies, and author of numerous publications in scholarly journal, but also in online adult education magazines such as ELM.
As an EAEA board member I’ve been concerned about unequal participation of South and Eastern European countries in European educational spaces due to financial constraints, which requires new ways of cooperation and networking. I am motivated by the desire to apply my varied experience in the area of adult education to support links between research, practice, and policy. I am committed to the popularization of educational paradigms that are based on the human rights approach, personal development and social cohesion.