J 7.2
Adult learners differ from their younger counterparts because their rich life experiences. One way to integrate these experiences is by constructing personal narratives in collaboration with others.
Indeed, reflecting and analysing students’ life histories and biographical experiences can distinguish itself from more formal academic learning because it involves an emotional journey of self inquiry (Dominice 2000).
PG students do not often have the opportunity to explore their lived experience during their time at the universities, in particular, those who are on part-time research based programmes. This is partly due to a lack of theoretical attention to the role of adult’ life histories and emotions in learning, and partly due to the lack of willingness from academic tutors to engage in the exploration of the emotional landscapes of the students and of their own.
Drawing on authors such as MacMurray and Heron’s theorisation of what it means to be a person, and how persons engage in the process of learning, I want to argue that rather than subordinating learners’ emotions to rational thinking and discourse, there must be an integrated and wholistic view of learner as a person. A whole-person approach regards the affect to be the vehicle for understanding and perceiving meaning and reality.
The research itself was a narrative inquiry. The main part of the paper is reflection on my own experience as a tutor working with a small group of MA students who shared and explored their individual learning biographies in both group settings and in their writing. The experience included students’ interaction and conversations during group work on this project, my conversations with individual students outside the group work, as well as students’ writing of learning biography. By discussing students’ reflection on this process, I argue that in writing their life histories and biographical experience of learning, postgraduate students engaged in intense emotions, both as the narrator and the listener, and as the author and the co-author. When the complex emotions were attended to, analysed and integrated in the course of group work, they provided an avenue for discovery of personal meaning and developing implicit theories of learning.
A further and closer look at emotional and personal dynamic in the process, I argue the key to a group space that was conducive for students’ deeper reflection is qualities such as openness, safeness, and trust. It became clear that to enable such qualities, it was imperative for the tutor to also be willing to explore and embrace her own emotions. There is no doubt that the tendency exists for the tutor to avoid confronting with students’ emotions as well as her own for self preservation or for fear of self exposing. Nevertheless, the tutor cannot be a voyeur or detached facilitator. She must be an active participant in the emotional landscape of self inquiry, and by doing so, the tutor will also learn.
Conclusion: Learning involves the whole person, so one must go beyond a restricted and unholistic intellectual focus. (Heron 1991:223). Narrating and writing personal learning biography gives PG students the opportunity to explore the affect, re-conceptualise learning, construct their implicit theories of learning, as well as re-align their learning trajectory. It enables them to make sense of personal life experience as well as academic studies and to link learning (in its broadest sense) to personhood.
Dominice, P. (2000) Learning from lives – Using educational biographies with adults, Jossey-Bass
Heron, J. (1991) Feeling and personhood , London: Sage

MacMurray, J. (1961) Reasons and emotion , London: Faber & Faber