Linden West

Laura Formenti

Marianne Horsdal

This book derives from an intense collaboration among colleagues from various countries under the auspices of the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults (ESREA) Biography and Life History Network. As is described in the opening chapter, the Network has been meeting over many years, with an especial focus on processes of adult and lifelong learning, interrogated through the lens of auto/biographical and narrative studies. The Network brings together researchers from many and diverse countries across Europe - North, South, East and West - and the wider world, as evidenced in this present collection. Auto/biographical and nar-rative methods, we suggest, generate rich and deep insights into the lived experience of learners, and encourage many and varied connections in thinking about and interpreting them. This includes an interdisciplinary imagination, and challenge to an overly cognitivist, disembodied, and dis-connected view of learners and learning. This is the third publication emanating from the Network, alongside many and diverse research collaborations. What is so important about the work is how different language communities and academic traditions combine together to challenge the solipsism and isolationism that can too often bedevil academic writing, especially when English has become the dominant language of exchange and debate; and where writing can draw on a relatively narrow, Anglo-Saxon dominated literature. This book, and ESREA more generally, is a challenge to what easily confines the intellectual imagination. There are a number of people we would like to thank in helping us with the project and the 'challenging' processes of editing: not least Helen Reynolds who has been a tower of strength in working through, with us, various draft chapters and sensitively and carefully negotiating with particular authors around questions of meaning and English usage. And there is Roselina Peneva, who helped with the formatting alongside countless others who have assisted with the organisation of various conferences, of which this work is an important expression.

Connecting Stories, Bodies, Cultures and Ecologies

Embodied Narratives

"Second in a series of edited volumes resulting from conferences and seminars organized by the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults"--Preface.

European Perspectives

Using Biographical and Life History Approaches in the Study of Adult and Lifelong Learning

Alan Bainbridge

This book provides a unique and highly topical application of psychoanalytic theory to the broad context of education, including schools, universities, and adult learning. Education is understood as a crucial element in a lifelong project to gain more coherent and meaningful understanding of self and others. Psychoanalysis has taken the contingency, construction, and development of human subjectivity, as well as the difficulty of thinking, to be its prime preoccupation. Yet - at a time of increasing doubt and anxiety about the purposes and practice of education - psychoanalytic understanding, from various traditions, has never been more marginal in educational debate. The book seeks, in these terms, to bridge some of this gap: it is written for teachers, trainers, policy-makers, clinicians, researchers, and diverse academics who want to look beyond bland superficialities to deeper struggles for self and understanding. This includes unconscious processes in the relationships that constitue education as well as resistance to new ideas and practices.

Minding a Gap

Psychoanalysis and Education

Hazel Reid

In this volume, academics and researchers across disciplines including education, psychology and health studies come together to discuss personal, political and professional narratives of struggle, resilience and hope. Contributors draw from a rich body of auto/biographical research to examine the role of narrative and how it can be constructed to compose a life story, considering the roles of significant others, inspirational, educational and fictional characters, and those in myth and legend. The book discusses how personal narrative, often neglected in social and psychological enquiry, can be a valuable resource across a range of settings. Reference is made to the evolving role of narrative in education and health care, medicine and psychotherapy. This includes how particular narratives are hardwired into culture in ways that stifle personal and social understanding. Rather than providing a ‘how to’ guide, the book illustrates the range and power of narrative, including poetry, to re-awaken senses of self and agency in extremis. Each chapter draws on specific research, describing the context, explaining the methodology, and illuminating important findings. Discussing implications for research and practice, this book will be key reading for postgraduate and doctoral students in auto/biographical and narrative studies, and across a range of disciplines, including education, health and social care, politics, counselling and psychotherapy. It will be of interest to academics teaching research methods, and those developing biographical and auto/biographical narrative research.

A transdisciplinary approach to researching lives

Constructing Narratives of Continuity and Change

Winner of the AAACE Cyril O. Houle Award This book constructs a deepening, interdisciplinary understanding of adult learning and imaginatively reframes its transformative aspects. The authors explore the tension at the heart of current understanding of ‘transformative’ adult learning: that while it can be framed as both easy and imperative, personal transformation is in fact rooted in the context in which we live, our stories and relationships. At its core, transformation is never easy – nor always desirable – and the authors thus draw on interdisciplinary and auto/biographical inquiry to explore what it means to change our presuppositions and frames of meaning that guide our thinking. Using their linguistic, gendered, academic and cultural differences, the authors illuminate how the social, contextual, cultural, cognitive and psychological dimensions of transformation intertwine. In doing so, they emphasise the importance of transformation as a contingent struggle for meaning and recognition, social justice, fraternity, and the pursuit of truth. This engaging book will be of interest to students and scholars of transformative learning and education.

A Dialogue

Transforming Perspectives in Lifelong Learning and Adult Education

Jan Fook

Val Collington

Fiona Ross

Gillian Ruch

Critical reflection helps professionals to learn directly from their practice experience, so that they can improve their own work in an ongoing and flexible way – something essential in today’s complex and changing organisations. It allows change to be managed in a way which enables individuals to preserve a sense of what is fundamentally important to them as professionals. It is particularly important as it can also help make sense of some fundamental issues, and so also has implications for how we live our lives. However, more systematic research on critical reflection is needed to help us understand what works best for professionals in different settings. This timely work explores how critical reflection is researched, evaluated and used as a research method itself, with the aim of improving how it is taught and practised in a rigorous and transferable way. Developing a more comprehensive and multi-disciplinary view of the current state of critical reflection and the research directions which need to be taken, the book is divided into four parts. It: - Provides an overview of different perspectives on critical reflection and stimulates dialogue between them - Establishes some common platforms from which to develop further research directions - Identifies the major issues in evaluating critical reflection teaching, and main methods for doing so - Contributes to social science methodological innovations by exploring how methods based on critical reflection can be used for researching professional practice - Contains contributions from academics who are internationally known and highly experienced in different aspects of critical reflection. Researching Critical Reflection is an important reference for all students, practitioners, and researchers – including in the areas of education, management, health and social work – who engage with critical reflection to develop their practice.

Linden West

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