Learning Stories of Our Own

Telling one's life story can be a powerful and transformative learning experience. Every adult learner has the right to tell the story of their life--or significant parts of it. And sometimes the only permission they need is to be asked. In many ways the most challenging and rewarding teaching experience each of us has had as university professors involves a course entitled "The Adult Learner." This is a core course in the Master's Degree in Adult Education Program at the University of Southern Maine. According to the university catalogue, a major goal of the course is "To achieve a greater understanding of the needs, expectations, and abilities of adult learners." This is indeed a tall order, especially considering the robust and ever-expanding literature that exists about adult learners and learning. In addition to a standard mix of teaching and learning techniques--brief lectures, readings, discussions, videos, and student-facilitated modules--a key strategy we have employed in this course has been to assign an autobiographical project. The primary question students are challenged to answer in what we have come to call their Learning Autobiography is, "How did I grow to become the adult learner that I am today?" Our theory is that if graduate students search the roots of their own unique characteristics as learners, they will achieve a richer understanding and appreciation of adult learners in general. As one way of explaining this assignment, we liberally quote Ralph Waldo Emerson: "He [sic] learns that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds" (cited in Wacks, 1987, p. 50). Autobiography is an ancient genre that dates back at least as far as St. Augustine's Confessions. Numerous contemporary authors have praised the virtues of autobiography as a tool for learning and personal growth, specifically one which can introduce the process of "re-membering" (Myerhoff, 1992), achieve a second and deeper "reading" of one's own personal experiences (Gusdorf, 1980), help people to create a sense of order, wholeness, and healing (Brady, 1990, 1999), and facilitate self-validation (Atkinson, 1995). Autobiography is a way human beings have tried to summarize and integrate the various story lines of their life, seek to understand them, and learn to accept theses stories as uniquely theirs. As the writer and Jungian analyst Florida Scott-Maxwell has written, "You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality" (Scott-Maxwell, 1968, p. 42). In this assigned activity, we provide a wide degree of freedom regarding how students choose to organize their story and confront the realities, both fierce and gentle, which constitute their learning autobiography Some people choose to construct their narrative chronologically, beginning with important experiences in their childhood (e.g., learning to read, memorable events in grade school, etc.) and subsequently move along to key learning moments in adolescence and adulthood. Others organize their autobiographies on the basis of one or more major themes. For example, individuals may have had an especially powerful set of learning experiences in athletics and choose to tell stories about how their involvement with individual and/or team sports has helped to contribute to their current condition as an adult learner. For others, key themes in their learning story may be the role of books, travel, or relationships with mentors. We encourage creativity and taking risks in this assignment. Inserting poems, written recently or at some earlier time in their life, is one way students have captured a crucial nuance in a learning story Drawings and photographs also help to "illuminate" these autobiographies. We invite our students to experiment with styles of narration. While some people prefer writing in the style of a personal essay, others construct their learning stories as series of journal entries or letters. …