ESREA: The Biography and Life History Network
Conference: 7 – 9 March, 2002
Abstract: Biographies as Collective Experience?
Barbara Merrill, Department of Continuing Education, University of Warwick, UK
Tel: + 44 (0)24 76523787
Email: Barbara.Merrill@warwick.ac.uk
Biographies, as used by researchers in adult education and other social science
disciplines, focus on an individualised way of understanding life experiences and the
social world. Individuals construct and narrate their life stories linking past, present
and anticipated future experiences. Yet in constructing a life history a person relates
their biography to significant others and social contexts; a biography is, therefore,
never fully individual. This paper is an exploration in connecting individual adult
learners life experiences to collective ones. Biographical methods have been
employed by feminists, for example, as a way of enabling the voices of women to be
heard. As Reinharz argues feminist life histories ‘assist in a fundamental sociological
task - illuminating the connections between biography, history and social structure’
(1992: 131). Biographies are a powerful tool in illustrating the dialectics of human
agency and social structure.
To develop a collective approach to biographies this paper will draw on two research
studies of adult learners in UK further education colleges (post-compulsory education
institutions) and a European project focusing on non-traditional adult students in
higher education. The life histories from these studies will be used to argue for the use
of biographical methods as a means of highlighting the collective experiences of
people’s lives by locating biographies within socio-economic, educational, and
political contexts. Such an approach identifies the everyday struggles of ordinary
people, reveals the nature of inequality in society and the hopes and aspirations of
learners in using learning as a means to transform their lives. Individual biographies
also highlight the collectiveness and intersections of gender, class, ethnicity etc. In
narrating about and reflecting upon their past lives participants talked in gendered and
classed ways about how experiences of schooling, family, employment or
unemployment impacted upon their present lives in terms of attitudes towards and
participation or not in learning and learner identities. Importantly biographies enables
the voices of learners to be heard, placing them central to the research process as they
reflect, interpret, give meaning to and construct past events and experiences within a
social context. Such experiences at the micro level are helpful in identifying policies
and practices at the meso and macro levels to improve the learning experiences of
adults in adult education institutions. The ‘turn’ to biographical methods in the study
of European adult education needs to take into account the individual and subjective
meanings of learning but also, importantly, locate these within a wider structural
context of communities and society. Doing so will enhance our understanding of, for
some adult learners, the struggles and inequalities which they experience in becoming
a learner and developing a learner identity as they move between their private and
public lives.