ESREA: The Biography and Life History Network Conference
Geneva, 7 –9 March 2002
Biographies as Collective Experience?
Barbara Merrill, Department of Continuing Education, University of Warwick
In discussing the sociological imagination C Wright Mills argued that it;
enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two
within society…No social study that does not come back to the problems of
biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed
its intellectual journey (1959:12).
Biographical research has increased in popularity amongst European adult educators
as a means of understanding learning experiences within the context of educational
biographies. Biographies give voice to adult learners enabling them to construct and
give subjective meaning to their life experiences (Schutz, 1932). Life histories or
biographies as currently used by social science researchers focus on an individualised
way of understanding life experiences and the social world. Yet in constructing a
biography a person relates 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. It also argues for the use of
biographical methods as a means of highlighting the collective experiences of people’s
lives by locating biographies within a socio-economic and political context from the
perspective of radical adult education. Such an approach identifies the everyday
struggles of ordinary people, reveals the nature of inequality in society and thus has
the potential to promote transformative action within communities. Biographies
importantly illustrate the dialectics of human agency and structure. Viewed from this
perspective it offers a radical approach to research.
To illustrate biographies as collective this paper draws on the life stories of people
from two research projects. One was funded by the Scottish Executive, entitled
‘Education for All?’ It focused on adults who have traditionally been excluded from
further education (FE – post compulsory institutions), undertaken by Glasgow
Caledonian University and the University of Warwick. The study was set within the
context of social inclusion and lifelong learning policies in Scotland. The second was
funded by the European Union through the TSER 5th Framework programme and
focused on the access of non-traditional adults to higher education in eight European
countries.
Using Biographies
Biographical methods are widely used in adult education (Alheit, Bron, Dominicé,
West etc) although less so in relation to popular adult education (exception of
colleagues at the University of Barcelona) where the focus of study is on collectivities,
communities and transformative education. Biographies yield a wealth of powerful
data, often personal – or so it appears on the surface. Biographies are collective in
terms of life experiences (class, gender, ethnicity), yet researchers rarely make the
connection between the individual and the collective, the private and the public. How
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can biographies be used in a way which relates individual experiences to collective
ones, located within a framework of radical adult education? Biographical research
also offers a tool for critiquing structural inequalities and, in relation to adult
education, the inadequacies and contradictions of lifelong learning and social inclusion
policies.
Sociological discourse has increasingly focused on individualism and individual
identities influenced by the hegemony of postmodernism and the subsequent demise of
meta-narratives and the project of modernity. Class is largely now viewed as irrelevant
in sociology – what Crompton (1993) refers to as the sociological equivalent of the
new individualism, visible in postmodern theory (Skeggs, 1991). Outside academic
discourse the education sector as a whole in the UK has been subject to increasing
marketisation and individualisation. Collective community issues have become
redefined as individual ones requiring individuals to map out their individual life
projects, coping strategies and to take responsibility for their own learning:
Assisting individuals in their search for meaning and in the development of
their survival skills contributes to the privatisation of adult education, which is
by no means incompatible with its instrumentalisation and marketisation
(Finger and Asún, 2001: 119).
Adult education and education generally, according to Usher and Edwards (1994), is
concerned with postmodernism. The humanistic and radical adult education ideal of
individual and collective transformation and emancipation through learning is now
challenged by postmodernism.
The voices of adults in this study, particularly in the Scottish one, however, were
collective. Learning was understood not only in terms of individual experience but
also as a group activity within the locality of a community. Biographical research has
the potential to move beyond individual analysis and highlight the collectivities and
communities of learning in a transformative mode in a similar way to participatory
action research. Such an approach could contribute to the radical adult education
agenda of promoting liberation and emancipation. This is not dissimilar to feminism as
biographical methods are used by feminists as a way of enabling the voices of women
to be heard. For Reinharz:
Biographical work has always been an important part of the women’s
movement because it draws women out of obscurity, repairs the historical
record, and provides an opportunity for the woman reader and writer to
identify with the subject (1992: 128).
Research is used to change women’s lives. Reinharz maintains that feminist life
histories ‘assist in a fundamental sociological task – illuminating the connections
between biography, history and social structure’ (1992:131). Even before feminists
talked about the ‘personal as political’ C Wright Mills reminded us of ‘the personal
troubles of milieu’ and the ‘public issues of social structure’(1959:14). More recently
Skeggs, in her study of working class women learners in further education colleges,
stresses that while the structural aspects of class constrain women’s lives agency is
used to act upon the constraints:
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In this research the women are not the originators of their identities but are
located in temporal processes of subjective construction. There are limitations
on how they can be. Within these constraints they deploy many constructive
and creative strategies to generate a sense of themselves with value ((1997:
162).
Symbolic interactionists, such as Denzin, Becker and Schutz, used biographical
methods to look at how ‘subjects give subjective meaning to their life experiences’
(Schutz, 1932).
Biographies enable the voices of participants to be heard, placing them central to the
research process as they reflect upon, interpret, give meaning to and construct past
events and experiences within a social context. In narrating about and reflecting upon
their past lives women and men in these two studies talked in gendered, classed and
raced 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:
The narrated life story represents the biographer’s overall construction of his or
her past and anticipated life…The stories that are selected by the biographer to
present his life history cannot be regarded as a series of isolated experiences,
laid down in chronological order…; individual experiences are always
embedded in a coherent, meaningful context, a biographical construct…The
present perspective determines what the subject considers biographically
relevant, how she or he develops thematic and temporal links between various
experiences, and how past, present, or anticipated future realities influence the
personal interpretation of the meaning of life (Rosenthal, 1993: 62, 63).
Biographies allow researchers to comprehend the interaction of agency and structure
in peoples’ lives in shaping identities. However, biographies are wider than the
individual as Alheit points out:
An autobiographical recourse necessarily touches upon the social identity
aspect. We do not simply learn from biographical stories just for ourselves and
our life-worlds; we gain insights into culture, society and history (1992: 199).
Such research contributes to our understanding of the micro social world. It also
enables us to comprehend society from the macro level through the collectivities of
life stories.
People told stories of struggle, living on the margins of society at or below the poverty
line, often in conjunction with personal crises and problems. The postmodernist claim
that class is no longer relevant holds no credence in these narratives. Subjectively
people biographically located themselves as working class. Although their biographies
illustrated, as postmodernists argue, fragmented lives the fragmentation arose from
their socio-economic location and inequalities of capitalism. Although the discourse
of class is now largely absent in academic debate it is still visible in people’s daily
lives:
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To abandon class as a theoretical tool does not mean that it does not exist any
more; only that some theorists do not value it…Retreatists either ignore class
or argue that class is ‘an increasingly redundant issue (Skeggs, 1997: 6, 7).
For some education was viewed as a possible way of improving their lives; for women
as an escape from domesticity and for men as a route out of years of unemployment.
The intersections of class and gender are dominant themes in their biographies.
Feminists advocate that biographical research equalises the power relationship
between the researcher and the researched. The interview is informal in style: more
like a conversation. Participants in both studies were informed of the purpose of the
research and they were keen for their voices to be heard by policy makers so that the
barriers to learning for people in similar socio-economic situations can be broken
down. Such interviewing offers an egalitarian approach to research by acknowledging
the subjectivity of both interviewer and interviewee. Although as Seidman (1991)
argues that even when the interviewing approach is democratic the researcher is still
exploiting the researched. There is perhaps a potential way out of this exploitative
interviewer/interviewee relationship by drawing on the principles and practice of
feminism and radical adult education. As cited earlier feminists use research to engage
in action for social, economic and political change. Similarly, the radical adult
education tradition in the UK focuses on education for social purpose and social
change as ‘it attempts wherever possible, to forge a direct link between education and
social action’ (Martin, 1999:5). Researchers withdraw from the individuals and groups
they are researching, with a few exceptions, once the research is complete.
Biographical researchers may share transcripts and even research findings with
participants but rarely do they return to work with participants collaboratively once the
funding has finished. Individuals participating in biographical research often remark
that they found reflecting upon their life and telling their story helpful in terms of selfidentity and self-development - perhaps even therapeutic – although for some it can
throw up disturbing memories and awareness of their helplessness against the
structural constraints of society. Dominicé argues that biographies benefit adult
educators as well as the people sharing their story:
Life history reflection can foster the dialectic between the personal and the
social aspects of learning. The rationale for educational biography pays
attention to both learner empowerment through the inquiry process (an instance
of the personal) and learner collaboration with educators and peers to produce,
share, and interpret educational biographies (an instance of the situational)
(2000: xvi).
However, biographies need to be taken one step further and move beyond learner
empowerment of the individual to empowerment of groups and communities of
learners. As Weil maintains qualitative research and, biographies in particular, ‘has the
capacity to enrich –and to re-define- theory and practice related to adults learning
(1989: 81). By starting with the ‘really useful knowledge’ (Johnson, 1988) of learners
life experiences, adult educators, within a framework of radical adult education, can
work with collectivities of learners to transform lives and communities. This approach
would combine biographical research with participatory action research. In Finger
and Asún’s words:
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…adult education’s main future research agenda will be concerned with the
linkages between learning, power and organisational change (2001: 179).
Experience is essential as a means of making sense narratively and symbolically the
life struggle over material conditions (Brah, 1992). Biographies locate
individual/group actions within the context of structure; illustrating the constraints of
structure on people’s lives:
The intent of the biographical project is to uncover the social, economic,
cultural, structural and historical forces that shape, distort and otherwise alter
problematic lived experiences (Bertaux, 1981:4).
The relationship between private and public worlds are revealed whereby people
experience “an inner world of thought and experience and to an outer world of events
and experiences” (Denzin, 1986:66). For Denzin ‘the joining and recording of these
two structures of experience in a personal document’ (1989:28) is the hallmark of the
biographical method.
For Alheit the importance of the method is that:
The real challenge for any emancipatory adult education is to provide
biographical coaching…’Coaching’ in this context involves the joint discovery
by teacher and learner of biographical opportunities for shaping social,
occupational and political existence more autonomously. Coaching also means
exerting a particular influence on the ‘social ecology’ of learning – i.e. in
practical terms, the framework of social conditions – in order that individuals’
hidden possibilities are brought to the surface and developed, and that unlived
lives can be lived instead. The task is eminently political and yet very concrete.
(Alheit, 1995: 68).
Connecting agency and structure at an individual level is evident in biographical
methods – the task is to extend this to a group/collective level. There are some
exceptions to this as the Centre for Research in the Education of Adults (CREA),
University of Barcelona, recognise the potential of the role that narratives play in
identifying the collectivity of people’s lives in communities. Using biographies from
both the Scottish and EU studies the following section looks at how these stories
share common experiences of the lifeworld through similar past and present socioeconomic location in society.
Context
Many participants in the Scottish study lived in working class areas of Glasgow and
Edinburgh. Their reality is the lived experiences of the inequalities of capitalism,
compounded by the demise of the welfare state and the rise of individualism under the
Thatcher years. Traditional (male) manual jobs have gone yet the areas remain
dominated by traditional working class culture and attitudes. Roles are segregated by
gender with domesticity being the domain of women. Men continue to be the
dominant partner despite the loss, for some, of economic power. When many left
school jobs had been abundant. Now in their 30s and 40s the men found themselves
unemployed without skills and qualifications. For some this had led to personal
difficulties; divorce, alcoholism, imprisonment.
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Both participants/ non-participants in learning, identified a range of negative issues,
structural, personal and institutional, which either made learning a struggle or
prevented them from engaging. UK participants in the EU study classified themselves
as working class, a significant number of whom were single mothers.
Impact of earlier life experiences
Life expectations were shaped by class and gender and these continue to be, for some,
a significant deterrent to participation. For a minority in the HE study, race also
impacted upon their identity. In analysing the narratives individual stories became
collective ones. The following sections illustrate this by reference to some, but not all
aspects of the participants’ lives. Parental and peer pressure encouraged young people
to leave school at 15 or 16 to earn a wage. Often for men this meant going into
apprenticeships or manual labour and for women in local factories until they got
married and had children (Sharpe, 1994). For parents the bringing in of another wage
to the family was more important than future educational goals. For girls education
was also viewed as a waste as parents regarded domesticity as their destiny:
I thought I was just like an ordinary working class woman who would go and
get a job. The thought of doing anything else at that time just didn’t enter my
head. And I wanted to be earning too. I wanted the money, but I never thought
about college or anything like that (FE).
I started school in 1969. Girls went to school, just did it and then got married.
You know had a little job then got married so there’s no encouragement
whatsoever…it was just the norm. Women just got married and had children
and that was it (HE).
Many left school one day and started work the next. Boys also experienced cultural
constraints:
I went to see the careers teacher and he sort of steered the kids from the council
estate away from university and towards the steel works. At the same time at
home I used to go and talk to my parents and say ‘look I’ve done this at
school…I got really good marks for English’ and they weren’t really
interested. Then I said about going to university and it was ‘university’ what
are you talking about? Your grand-dad was in the steel works, father was in the
steel works and that’s where you are going to go (HE).
As Finn explains:
The attraction of leaving school enhanced after the war by vastly improved
material prospects for the young working class…early leaving was eminently
sensible in the context of full employment where education was of little
relevance to their actual destinies (Finn, 1987: 43).
Another male stated that anyone who went to college in his area was considered a
‘cissy’. Working class culture developed antithetical attitudes to education and middle
class institutions such as schools (Willis, 1977). These factors contributed to a fear
amongst some that learning would culturally distance them from family and friends.
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Many had negative experiences of school which as an adult undermined their
confidence of returning to learn:
Well if I think back on it the reasons I am apprehensive to go to college or a
classroom situation must be based on past fears or experiences. I don’t seem to
do too well in the classroom situation (FE).
One African-Caribbean woman remembered experiences of racism from teachers:
…at that time they were using rulers on you if you didn’t behave. We were the
first lot of blacks in the school and the first lot of blacks in the area so it was
horrible. I just hated that school (HE).
Returning to Learn: Push and Pull Factors
Engagement in learning often involves the complex interaction of several factors. One
important motive was self-development, particularly for women. Women followed
similar life histories of entering unskilled work after leaving school until they married
and had children. Time spent in the home looking after children prompted women to
reflect upon their lives and their identity. Wanting to learn for self-development and a
change in identity so that they view themselves as a person rather than somebody’s
wife or mother were critical factors in starting courses at a college:
Well I know for me just being in the house with the wee ones – its like you
have no one to talk to – well you have them, but no adults. You could go a bit
mad. It’s good to get out of the house and to do things. To keep your brain
active. It’s not good to be stuck in the house all the time.
The isolation of being in a house with young children was a common motivating factor
for wanting to do something different such as learning ‘to get back into civilisation’.
For the women, some of whom are single parents, studying is enjoyable but a struggle
as they have to juggle multiple roles.
Biographies reveal the importance of critical incidents, such as divorce, bereavement
or redundancy which act as a turning point. Some had been thinking about doing some
sort of learning, often for a few years, but never got round to doing anything until the
experience of a critical incident pushed them into learning. For example, divorce
encouraged one woman; ‘I really didn’t go out much when I was married so then I
kind of had to force myself to start to go out’. The following example illustrates that
while a critical incident may act as the trigger there are often other underlying factors;
in this case issues to do with gender, self-development and identity. For one woman,
now completing an HNC in computing, the death of a grandfather who she had been
looking after forced her to ‘get out’ and do something. Once she started learning she
was ‘hooked’, progressing onto higher level courses. She reflected:
so I just got on with it but then grandpa died and there was just this big hole in
my days and I thought I have got to do something. I found the house quite
isolating I suppose you would say. My husband went to work and came home
but I had nothing to talk about my day. None of the other folk I knew then had
babies by then. I was the first so I felt quite alone…I saw an advert in the paper
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for cooking classes here and I thought I’d give it a go. It said that there would
be a crèche for the wee one so I thought that would be good for him too.
One man (a single parent) found divorce an enabling factor:
I’ve done all this, what am I going to do now? The marriage has broken up.
There’s no challenge anymore and then the idea of university. I thought why
not go for it. I’d been thinking about it through the winter and then the
opportunity came up for the Access course… and I went and did it. So it’s been
quite fortuitous the way it’s all come about.
Sometimes it is a configuration of circumstances that allows for the shift from nonparticipant to participant and vice versa - allowing for the exercise of human agency.
Gender plays an important part in these shifts. For women the availability of childcare
combined with the chance meeting of a friend, together with a subtle shift in
dispositions or attitudes to learning may open up the possibility for participation. It is
the combination of changes in the relationship between agency and structure that
provides what Strauss describes as ‘turning points’ which encourages a person to ‘take
stock, to re-evaluate, revise, re-see and re-judge’ (Bloomer, 1999). Other research on
adults in higher education also supports the role of critical incidents as a motivating
factor (West, 1996, Merrill, 1999). As Denzin argues the biographical method is
defined as “the studied use and collection of life documents that describe turning-point
moments in an individual’s life” (1989:69). The biographical method needs to be
taken further to enable individuals to see that individual experiences are also collective
and shared ones in a similar way that feminists advocated that the personal is political.
Returning to Learn: Problematical Experiences
Choosing to return to learn was not an easy option for the adults in both studies.
External, structural constraints often develop into major barriers. Financial issues are
one example. One woman who tried to go back to college full time was caught in the
penalties of the benefits system for not being married :
I went the first day…I thoroughly enjoyed it (college) and I came home and
my fiancé wasn’t working at the time and he said ‘there’s absolutely no way
we can afford this’. I’ve been to the welfare rights officer and I’ve been down
to the Social Security and there’s no way. Because we are two single people
living together we basically have to pay full rent…It was just a nightmare. We
were going to end up worse off than we were and I spent the whole night
crying my eyes out. I really did and I was very disappointed (FE).
Another (single parent) had to leave a course as her benefits were cut upon receiving a
college bursary. Those in university also struggle financially due to changes in the
grant, course fees and benefits system:
I was not given any information by the Grants Department at the university of
what finances are available. It wasn’t until Easter that I was notified that I was
in rent arrears and I had been given a repossession order and that was five
weeks before my exams (HE).
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Biographies powerfully reveal the contradictions within the UK Government’s
lifelong learning policies: those without economic power continue to be excluded from
access to learning. As a result adult education continues in the same vein as schooling
in reproducing unequal access and class inequalities.
Changing employment patterns have meant that women may be the sole wage earner
in households. One woman explains that although she would like to continue
studying, as the household breadwinner she is unable to:
I would love to do a bit more [at college] but I am the breadwinner in the
house. My man doesn’t work so I have to (FE).
For non-participant women the lack of free childcare was a major barrier to studying.
Tied in with this was a feeling of guilt about leaving a child: a cultural barrier which
assumes that women should look after children until at least school age. In this
situation many women experience mixed, and conflicting emotions about their role:
It took me ages to get used to staying in the house…I was 24 up in high rise
flats and it is very hard to get to know people …I got to the stage where there
was nothing else that could get tidied up…and I ended up that I was just bored,
really, really bored. At the same time we had hardly any money. It was just a
nightmare. It was a difficult time but it was a good time because I don’t regret
spending that time with her (FE).
As a result of these constraints many feel that participation in education is not an
option which is open to them.
I think that I would feel guilty leaving him with a childminder all the time.
Then there’s the expense of a childminder, or crèche, or whatever and then I
don’t know how I would cope with studying and all that. But then I would like
to do it. I think it is the childminding and the price of the childminders and
everything.
Childcare is provided free at some FE colleges but sometimes this is not enough help
financially:
But in the college I had a nursery place and they kept John for me to go to
college. You got your expenses as in your bus fares every month but even with
that it was too much because you’re still a lot of money to put out for dinners
and whatever. I couldn’t afford that off my benefit and try to buy John clothes
and run the house as well. I just felt that it was too much.
For some women participation was inhibited by lack of support from partners or
because of domestic violence. The pattern of males disliking ‘clever’ females is
continued into adulthood. Several women in the Scottish study had to leave college
when partners became violent towards them for participating in learning as a wage was
seen as more value.
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Improving employment prospects
Wanting to improve employment prospects was important, particularly for men. While
some expressed the hope that learning would lead to better employment they were also
not confident that it would do so because of other factors such as age or health
problems, or the recognition that achieving the appropriate level of qualifications
would be difficult. Several of the older men in their 40s and 50s had experienced a
series of manual jobs since leaving school at 15 or 16 with few or no qualifications
and were now unemployed as a result of the decline in traditional industries. This
group realised that the labour market had changed. They recognised that computing
skills are essential:
I wanted to learn this (computing) so as I could get it on my CV. A lot of the
jobs I went for – the application forms for Sainsbury’s and B & Q when I’ve
applied for jobs - they all have a wee bit on them ‘do you have any computer
skills or keyboarding skills?’. …So that’s why I’ve done this course because in
every job you go for they ask you if you can work a keyboard.
Many were resigned to the fact that they may never work again:
I don’t know about a job. I would think that with the hours I am putting in here
it’s going to take me an awful long time to really get up and running for
employment standards.
Instead he uses his computer skills to help him as chair of the local tenants association
to deal with the council. One unemployed male admitted that he was not looking for a
job, as he did not want to return to manual work and knew that ‘I need education to
enter into anything’. Some men felt that college would not be able to open up local
employment opportunities for them. This is also related to the construction of male
identity that centres around ‘real work’ (that is education is not ‘real work’). Many
associated learning with negative experiences of schooling: learning as an adult would
not be any different.
Women were more optimistic about returning to college as a means of getting a better
job as years at home looking after children, rather than unemployment, made them
determined to enhance their career and find a space for themselves. For another the
motivation was less clear cut, but she felt a need to take some measures which might
open more options for the future:
Well I feel it has given me more things to put on my CV for the future because
nobody knows what the future is going to bring and where you are going to be
in 5-10 years and I feel if I have got to go and look for another job you need
the qualifications and all the offices just now are computerised and everything
is on computers.
People in the EU study were hoping that gaining a degree would enable them to obtain
a more interesting and better paid. For many, particularly the single parents, it was
about ensuring financial security for themselves and their children.
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Using biographies radically?
The constraints of funding means that researchers leave the people they are
researching and their communities once the project is finished. Radical researchers
need to look for alternative ways. While many who use biographical methods share
interview transcripts with participants and, wherever possible feed back the research
results, as we did in these studies, there is no space for taking the research a step
further and using biographies as a means of engaging in social and political action.
People shared similar backgrounds, faced the same problems related to, for example,
poverty, unemployment, gender inequality yet many viewed these as individual
dilemmas. Their biographical experiences could provide the starting point for a
curriculum based on ‘really useful knowledge’ expressed through egalitarian
dialogical learning in a similar way to the approaches of Freire. Many people we spoke
to were learning in community-based contexts. Community-based learning can offer
such spaces. Importantly as Flecha argues ‘egalitarian educational practices must be
grounded in conceptions of solidarity’ (2000:20).
In attempting to understand the processes of participation in learning it is important to
look at the relationship between individuals and society. This debate centres around
the ways in which social structures are both created and act as constraints on
individuals or groups, that is, how much and in what ways do social structures
constrain human agency? Biographies can help in this process as they illustrate the
dialectical processes in people’s lives thus enabling people to take collective action
against the structures that oppress them. As Marx observed:
Men and women ‘make their own history, but not…under conditions they have
chosen for themselves; rather on terms immediately existing, given and handed
down to them’ (1852/1983: 287).
Skeggs examines the political purpose of her ethnographic study (which included
interviews) of working class women engaging in FE in a way and reflects the issues
raised in this study:
Providing explanations which linked the individual to structures not of their
making helped dislodge feelings of personal inadequacy. They had already
been classified as academic failures when I met them. Along with
unemployment this was experienced at an immediate intimate level. They
blamed themselves for the lack of jobs and their lack of interest in schooling.
The ability to put this into a wider perspective blocked their tendency to
victim-blame and take on responsibility for social structural problems…The
political consequences of epistemological battles hopefully should mean that
they may be pathologized less through representation; that they may be taken
more seriously (Skeggs, 1998:37-38).
The stories of people in this study illustrate how they were trying to transform their
lives through education, trying to gain more power and equality in both an individual
and collective sense within the constraints of the material conditions of capitalism.
Some people, who wanted to participate in learning, were able to overcome constraints
(exercise human agency) in a limited way but for others the constraints, economic,
social, or educational, were too strong. Others use agency to actively choose nonparticipation as it was not considered relevant to their lives at that particular moment.
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Their stories highlight the inadequacies of a lifelong learning policy based on
economic need rather than equality and social purpose.
For Denzin:
We must learn how to connect biographies and lived experiences, the
epiphanies of lives, to the groups and social relationships that surround and
shape persons (Denzin, 1989:82).
Radical adult educators need to develop approaches whereby biographies can be used
for social purpose and transformative learning within the context of community-based
learning.
For adult education generally the micro experiences as expressed through biographies
are helpful in identifying policies and practices at the meso and macro levels to
improve the learning experiences of adults in formal learning. The ‘turn’ to
biographical methods in European adult education research 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 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.
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