From biography to learning: travelling in time via the narration of adult learners in higher education
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The present study investigates the narratives of biographical learning trajectories given by an under-represented and thus vulnerable group within higher education (HE) - the non-traditional students. This group is operationalised as adult learners who enter HE when they are at least 26 years old and had a break in their educational trajectory (Novotný et al., 2019). In 2019, we (in a broader research project) conducted 29 biographical narrative interviews with non-traditional students from Czech universities. This paper addresses two questions from the conference call: “How are adult lives and learning changing under the pressure of global challenges? Are there now new learning spaces, and how do learners respond to them?” This paper argues that to find out about the new ones, we have to know what the learning spaces are, how they develop over time, and how adults learn from space and time. The present study uses biographical learning as the conceptual framework to accomplish this aim. The biographical learning perspective is understood as the “study of the relationships that exist between learning and biography, the influence of biography on learning processes and practices, and biography as a mode of learning” (Tedder & Biesta 2007, p. 3).In the methodological framework, the paper combines the structural approach with the functional dimension to narrative analysis. The emerging results show that time gives meaning to learning experiences, as it creates links between them in the life story. |
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