Improving Learning through the Lifecourse

Learning Lives

Gert Biesta, John Field, Phil Hodkinson, Flora J. Macleod, Ivor F. Goodson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136809767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Adult learning matters. There is now widespread agreement that modern countries depend on the creativity, skills and knowledge of the entire population for their prosperity. Many people talk of our future well-being in terms of a 'knowledge economy' or a 'learning society' in which every person's ability to develop new capabilities will provide them with resources that will help them and the wider community to adapt and thrive. While in theory this makes lifelong learning into an exciting prospect, in practice this broad agenda is often reduced to a narrowly economic conception.

This book reports on one of the largest research projects into lifelong learning conducted in recent years. Through over 500 in-depth interviews with a cohort of about 120 adults who were followed for three years, the Learning Lives project has built up a detailed understanding of what learning means and does in the lives of adults. The project has generated insights in how learning has changed over time and across generations, what the connections are with the changing world of work, what differences learning makes for life chances, how we can learn from life and for life, and how people's prospects of learning can be improved. Combining life history and life-course research with analysis of longitudinal survey data, this book provides important insights into the learning biographies and trajectories of adults.

The book shows that learning means and does much more in people's lives than is often acknowledged by current education policy and politics. In doing so, it is an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in the role and potential of learning through the lifecourse.

Part I

What are the issues?

Chapter 1

Learning, identity and
agency in the lifecourse

This book is about the learning that goes on throughout adult life. Part of that learning is highly structured and takes place in taught courses of various kinds. Such courses might be held at a college, an adult education centre or a training facility, or they might be organised in the workplace or the offices of a voluntary organisation. Some are organised at a distance, so that people can study at home, at work or on the bus. A great deal of learning, however, takes place in what is often called ‘the university of life’. We learn by doing something in a new way, by speaking to others, by reading something, or by watching other people. Increasingly people use new technologies to support their learning, whether it is highly formal and structured, or very informal and unplanned.

Adult learning has been widely studied from many perspectives. It is right that this is so, since adult learning is becoming increasingly important for a number of economic, social and policy reasons. We have set out in this book to look specifically at the role of learning throughout the lifecourse, focusing particularly on the role learning plays in the ways in which people make sense of and engage with changes in their lives. We look at the connections between learning and people’s identity (who we think we are), as well as the ways that learning relates to agency (the ways in which people aim to shape their lives), always taking a lifecourse perspective on learning and its many contexts and purposes.

Our evidence is drawn from the Learning Lives project, a three-year, longitudinal, mixed-methods study into the learning biographies and trajectories of adults. In the remainder of this chapter we set out the wider scene, introduce the project, explain its design and methodology, and provide a brief overview of our findings. In the chapters that follow we present and discuss our findings in more details. Finally, as we are concerned with identifying the practical and policy implications of our research, we propose what we hope are innovative and creative ways in which people can be supported in learning throughout the lifecourse.

The changing landscape of lifelong learning

Adult learning matters. There is now widespread agreement that modern countries like Britain depend largely on the creativity, skills and knowledge of the entire population, rather than on dwindling resources such as raw materials or a supply of people willing to work for very low wages. Many people talk of our future well-being in terms of a ‘knowledge economy’ and a ‘learning society’, in which every person’s ability to develop new capabilities will provide them, and the wider community, with resources that will help them adapt and thrive. In practice, though, this broad agenda for learning is too easily reduced to a narrowly economic conception. As Peter Jarvis puts it: ‘The lifelong learning society has become part of the current economic and political discourse of global capitalism, which positions people as human resources to be developed through lifelong learning, or discarded and retrained if their job is redundant’ (Jarvis 2000, quoted in Grace 2004: 398). Or in the words of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair: ‘Education is the best economic policy we have’ (Blair 1998, quoted in Martin 2002: 567).

Things do not have to be this way. Policy makers have, in the recent past, shown themselves willing to embrace a broad and generous view of learning in adult life. In 1972 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) published a landmark report on lifelong education. This report, entitled Learning to be, is remarkable because of the strength and breath of its vision about the significance of education throughout the lifecourse. The authors of the report speak about ‘the fundamental solidarity of governments and of people’, about a ‘belief in democracy, conceived of as implying each man’s right to realize his own potential and to share in the building of his own future’, about ‘the complete fulfilment of man, in all the richness of his personality’, and argue that ‘only an over-all, lifelong education can produce the kind of complete man the need for whom is increasing with the continually more stringent constraints tearing the individual asunder’ (Faure et al. 1972: v–vi). The authors see the ultimate aim of education as ‘to enable man to be himself, to “become himself”’ (Faure et al. 1972: xxxi; emphasis in original). For this, they argue that we need to learn ‘how to build up a continually evolving body of knowledge all through life – “learn to be”‘ (Faure et al. 1972: vi).

Learning to be is also remarkable because its views stand in such sharp contrast to the policies and practices that dominate the ‘new educational order’ (Field 2006) of lifelong learning today. Exactly 25 years after the publication of Learning to be the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) issued its own report on lifelong learning, Lifelong learning for all (OECD 1997). In contrast to Learning to Be, the OECD emphasised the economic rationale for lifelong learning. It presented the idea of ‘lifelong learning for all’ as the guiding principle for policy strategies ‘that will respond directly to the need to improve the capacity of individuals, families, workplaces and communities to continuously adapt and renew’ (OECD 1997: 3). According to Lifelong learning for all, the disappearance of many unskilled jobs, the more rapid turnover of products and services, and the fact that people change jobs more often than previously, all point to the need for ‘more frequent renewal of knowledge and skills’ (OECD 1997: 13). Lifelong learning ‘from early childhood education to active learning in retirement’ will thus be ‘an important factor in promoting employment and economic development’ (OECD 1997: 13).

What these documents show is that in about 25 years the focus of the discourse on lifelong learning appears to have shifted from ‘learning to be’ to ‘learning to be productive and employable’ (Biesta 2006; see also Boshier 1998, Field 2006). It appears to have shifted from lifelong learning as a means for personal development and social progress to lifelong learning as a means for economic growth and global competitiveness.

This is not merely a matter of definition but can have a real impact on the opportunities for people to engage in different forms of learning throughout their lives. Think, for example, of the way in which learning for personal development has been reclassified as ‘leisure learning’ and how, as a result, the opportunities to obtain public funding for such forms of learning have significantly decreased. The shift from ‘learning to be’ to ‘learning to be productive and employable’ can thus be read as a struggle over the definition of what counts as lifelong learning and, more importantly, about what counts as worthwhile lifelong learning.

The parameters of the current landscape of lifelong learning are also important from the perspective of research. Prevailing policy definitions of what counts as good or worthwhile learning tend to steer research agendas into particular directions so that other conceptions and practices of lifelong learning run the risk of disappearing from the radar. Thus much research tends to focus on lifelong learning as it occurs in institutional settings such as schools, colleges, community centres or the workplace, and on the evaluation of specific lifelong learning policies and practices. There is, however, much more to lifelong learning than this. The ambition of the Learning Lives project has precisely been to take a wider perspective on learning through the lifecourse, focusing on individual biographies and trajectories in order to gain an understanding of what learning – understood in the widest possible sense – ‘means’ and ‘does’ in the lives of adults.

The Learning Lives project: learning, identity
and agency in the lifecourse

The Learning Lives project was announced in the autumn of 2003 as part of the third phase of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP), a large programme of educational research managed by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The project started in 2004 and finished in 2008. The overall aim of the project was to deepen understanding of the complexities of learning in the lifecourse whilst identifying, implementing and evaluating strategies for sustained positive impact upon learning opportunities, dispositions and practices, and upon the empowerment of adults. For this we were particularly interested in the interrelationships between learning, identity and agency in the lifecourse. To meet this aim we adopted a relatively complex, large-scale research design that combined life-history research, interpretative lifecourse research and quantitative survey research. The project was conducted in a partnership of researchers from four UK universities: Exeter, Brighton, Leeds and Stirling.

Researching learning, identity and agency in the
lifecourse

The main focus of the Learning Lives project was on the interrelationships between learning, identity and agency in the lifecourse. On the one hand we sought to understand how identity (including one’s identity as a learner) and agency (seen as the ability to exert control over one’s life) impact upon learning dispositions, practices and achievements. On the other hand we sought to understand how different forms and practices of learning and different learning achievements impact upon individual identities (including learner identities), on individuals’ senses of agency and on their actual capacity to exert control over their lives.

We examined the meaning, significance and impact of a range of formal, informal, tacit and incidental learning events in the lives of adults. More importantly, we did so against the background of their unfolding lives as we aimed to understand the transformations in learning dispositions, practices and achievements that were triggered by changes occurring in the lifecourse. The unit of analysis in our project was therefore the learning biography (see Dominicé 2000).

For the purposes of the project we saw learning as having to do with the ways in which individuals respond to events in their lives, often in order to gain control over aspects of their lives (see Alheit 1994; Ranson et al. 1996; Antikainen et al. 1996; Biesta 2004). Such responses might take a number of quite different forms, ranging from adaptive to more active, creative or generative forms of learning. To understand learning in this way implies that it is seen as contextually situated (individuals interacting with and participating in their social and cultural milieu) and as having a history (both the individual’s life history and the history of the practices and institutions in and through which learning takes place).

The events to which individuals respond and which may – but not necessarily always do – involve learning may be structured transitions or they may be changes of a more incidental nature, including critical incidents such as redeployment or illness. Many such events stimulate encounters with new formal and informal learning opportunities. They can also result in forms of tacit learning of which individuals sometimes only become aware (long) after the event. Learning also occurs, however, in relation to the routines of everyday life, where ‘turning points’ (Strauss 1962) are not immediately discernible.

Both time and context played a central role in what we aimed to achieve. Context is important because we hold that learning is about more than cognitive processes happening inside the mind. In our view learning is inextricably related to doing and being, which is why we needed to approach what and how people learn through an understanding of the contexts in which and, more importantly, the practices through which they learn (see Hodkinson et al. 2007, 2008a). Since learning always involves the reworking of earlier experiences and because in many cases people engage in learning in order to bring about future change, learning also needs to be understood in its temporal dimension. In our project, the temporal perspective is essential for two further reasons: first because of our interest in the interrelationships between learning and life (the learning biography); and second because the contexts in and through which people learn are themselves not static but subject to change and transformation (for examples in the way in which available opportunities for learning change over time see Antikainen et al. 1996; Gorard and Rees 2002). This, in turn, means that contexts matter at two levels: the immediate contexts in and through which adults learn, and the changing contexts that form the ‘backdrop’ of their learning biographies.

There were, therefore, three challenges for our research. How can we investigate learning over time? How can we investigate the contexts of such learning? And how can we investigate the temporality of such contexts? We addressed these challenges through a combination of two forms of longitudinal research: life-history research and lifecourse research. The retrospective understanding of the learning biography is the main aim of life-history research while the real time ‘tracking’ of the ways in which learning biographies are ‘lived’ and evolve over time is the main object of longitudinal lifecourse research.

Several studies have utilised these approaches for understanding the learning of (young) adults from a temporal point of view. Most of them, however, have either used a retrospective or a real-time approach, but not a combination of both (examples of the first are Antikainen et al. 1996; Gorard and Rees 2002; examples of the latter are Hodkinson et al. 1996; Ball et al. 2000). The reason for combining the two approaches was not only that it increases the time span available for investigation. It was also because each approach can add depth to the interpretation of data generated through the other approach. Each, in other words, is a potential source for contextualising and interpreting the findings of the other (see below).

Project design

In the project we combined life-history research with two different forms of lifecourse research: longitudinal interpretative lifecourse research and quantitative survey research. The first two approaches used interviews for data collection. Over a period of 36 months we conducted 528 interviews with 117 people, 59 male and 58 female, aged between 25 and 84 at first interview. Most interviews lasted for about two hours. The average number of interviews per individual was four to five (for more information, see the methodological appendix at the end of this book). Rather than conducting our own survey we analysed data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), an annual panel survey of each adult member of a nationally representative sample of 5,500 British households first recruited in 1991, contained about 10,000 individuals (Institute for Social and Economic Research 2010).

We used the BHPS to develop an understanding of patterns of formal part-time education and training during adulthood (our dependent variable). Our independent variables were age, gender, cohort (generation group), place (UK nation-state), social class, occupational status, household tenure, disability (objective and subjective), employment status, income status, marital status, parenthood and family status. We used a number of variables to study family background and inter-generational influences. The longitudinal structure of the BHPS made it possible to follow individuals over time and develop an understanding of changes in the patterns and predictors of participation and non-participation in formal education and training. The analytical advantages of using longitudinal data were the ability to study patterns, trends and dynamics of participation by focusing on individual change over time; study transitions between states of participation and non-participation, what triggered the change including the timing of a change of state in relation to other transitions and events; study individual specific effects on patterns of participation; and study the effects of events (natural interventions and imposed interventions such as policy change).

In the interviews, we focused initially on the life history. We started by asking participants the question: ‘Can you tell me about your life?’ Subsequent interviews increasingly focused on ongoing events in the lives of participants. Interviewers took an open approach, asking for clarification and elaboration, with progressive focusing on key project interests and themes. In the final interview participants were asked about their experiences of taking part in the project. All interviews were recorded, transcribed and checked by the interviewer. Transcripts were made available to the participants but they were not required to read or check them. Building on our experience with the analysis of large, qualitative data sets (Hodkinson et al. 2005; James and Biesta 2007), we developed an approach that suited the logistics and objectives of the project. After each interview interviewers wrote short memos capturing salient experiences and early interpretations. Over time these developed into substantive records of ongoing analysis. We used two approaches for systematic data analysis in an iterative relationship. Thematic analysis focused on larger numbers of cases around particular themes, using both theoretically driven analysis and data-driven analysis. Biographical analysis focused on the in-depth analysis of individuals and resulted in the construction of detailed individual case studies.

We were guided by the research ethics code of the British Educational Research Association. We ensured that participants understood the nature of the research and that they were aware that they could withdraw from the project at any time. We asked for signed consent for participation and separate signed consent for making transcripts available for future research. Participants used self-chosen pseudonyms except where they decided to use their own names. We omitted sensitive data where we judged that publication might be harmful to participants and anonymised background data in order to protect participants from possible recognition. In those cases where we felt that relationships were developing beyond research relationships we made participants aware of opportunities for help and support.

Methodology: combining life-history and interpretative
lifecourse research

It may seem that life history and lifecourse research can easily be c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series editor's foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 What are the issues?
• Part 2 What does the research tell us?
• Part 3 What are the overall implications?
• Methodological appendix
• Bibliography
• Index