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Time and generation in the life histories of adult learners
Birkbeck Institute for Lifelong Learning
13 May 2005
Learning Lives - key questions
• What is the place of learning in different phases of people’s lives?
• How does identity influence learning, and vice versa?
• Do people have to be more agentic in order to learn?
Learning Lives - methods
• Emphasis on learning as an active construction of meaning
• Qualitative mixed methods (life history, life course)
• Quantitative (use of BHPS)
This paper - key issues
• Problematising the concept of age
• Seeing how age relates to identity
• Seeing how age relates to agency
• Considering how all this influences learning (and vice versa)
Approaches to age and time
• Chronological age/time
• Social time, with markers, rituals, continuities and discontinuities of lived (remembered) experience
• Historical time (especially ‘longue durée’)
The importance of generations
• Inherited definitions – common sense language
• Inherited definitions – Mannheim and the sociological tradition
• Recent empirical work (Kohli, Antikainen, Gaskell)
Generations and issues of method
• Is our ‘jargon’ familiar to all generations and understood similarly by them?
• Are the underlying concepts accepted and understood by them?
• Are there changing ‘folk wisdoms’ about learning which lead to significant generational differences?
Antikainen et al
• “a group of people born during the same time period and who are united by similar life experiences and a temporarily coherent cultural background”
Antikainen et all 1996, p. 34
Antikainen’s four cohorts
1. Cohort with little generation (born up to 1935)2. Cohort of educational growth and inequality (1936-45)3. Cohort of educational growth and welfare (1946-65)4. Young people (born 1966 on)
Each cohort shares common views of its own educational futures and each gives a different meaning to education (Antikainen et al 1996, 36-7, 51)
Antikainen’s four cohorts
• Excessive focus on formal education (though attitudes to informal learning are considered)
• Definition by a negative
• The fourth category is not analysed further
A Learning Life - Jeannie
• Glaswegian, mid-thirties, languages degree, call centre manager
• Father – schoolteacher from the Highlands
• Mother – book publisher, Irish Catholic
• A member of ‘Cohort 3’!
A Learning Life - Andy
• West of Scotland, mid-70s, National Service, craft-trained bricklayer, labour movement background
• Father – unskilled labourer
• Mother – barely mentioned
• A member of ‘Cohort 1’!
A Learning Life - Sue
• Glaswegian, 27, Ordinary Grades, personnel officer
• Mother – young single parent, studying at night, like a sister
• Grandmother – very significant influence (and like a mother)
• A member of ‘Cohort 4’!
A Learning Life - Jeannie
• University was the ‘normal biographical choice’: “All the way through to primary and to secondary again fairly uneventful, very studious and very well behaved… Did six years at [secondary] school and my sixth year I treated kind of a little bit of a holiday”
A Learning Life - Jeannie
• Mobility and flexibility and choice (sometimes deferred): “Once I graduated I just kind of bummed about for two years. I couldn’t really find anything that I wanted to do. I had a job in a shop at that point and then eventually round about twenty-five I started working for telephone banking”
A Learning Life - Jeannie
• Main experiences quoted: giving feedback to others, moving between jobs
• Main values discussed: working with people, curiosity, handing on skills
A Learning Life - Jeannie
• Civic engagement: taken on May Day rallies as child, student politics, active supporter of Labour until Iraq
• Main markers discussed: Thatcher, university, Labour Party family background
A Learning Life - Jeannie
• “May Day was an event we would go and … cause there’s always been that element of, this is just what you do, this is how you’re brought up”
• “You would go and you would sit in the middle of the road during the demonstration [at uni] and again it was just that it was there and you did it because that’s the way you were brought up”
A Learning Life - Andy
• Trade training under family pressure was a ‘normal biography’: “I come in and he said, when I left the school, and he says “Have you been and seen aboot a job”, I says “Ay, I’m starting on Monday”, he said “Where?”, I said “At [name] Pit”, he said “No yer no, ye’re getting a trade”, he says”.
A Learning Life - Andy
• Experience is highly valued: “All the education I got, I suppose, I think I got more education after I left the school than I ever did when I was at the school even though I wisnae a bad student but I wisnae the best by a long shot”.
A Learning Life - Andy
• Main experiences quoted: book-loving father, army service, apprenticeship, labour movement activity, cheap flights
• Main values: independence, physical strength, embodied skill, solidarity and ‘watching out for others’, doing the “right” thing
A Learning Life - Andy
• Civic engagement identified: senior lay office in Labour Party, lay union officer
• Main markers discussed: apprenticeship, military service, marriage, different workplace roles, “the grip”
A Learning Life - Sue
• Work was the ‘normal biographical choice’, and left school after prelims: “I sat my mother down and said that I really wanted to leave school and she said no and I said yes and what she agreed with me was that if I found a job I could leave school at Christmas . .. It was my choice, that was what I wanted to do”.
A Learning Life - Sue
• Life is an open sequence of changes and challenges: “I could have gone to uni and studied and probably never have ended up with the experience and the – just, just the life experience that it gave me” and “”Some of it (uni course) was very interesting, some of it I found a complete waste of time because sometimes you’re standing in front of a lecturer who’s been in HR ten years ago and you’re, like your theory’s great but that doesn’t work in an office environment”.
A Learning Life - Sue
• Main experiences cited: – family (mother’s help and example, grandmother’s illness and death, boyfriend troubles – “smelly boy”), work (secretary in tea company, visits Sri Lanka, IT company, games software company - mothering the boys, time out in the USA, call centre work, supervisor, HR officer), travel (Sri Lanka, time out in USA, UK-wide role) and networks. Also started PG Dip at Paisley, planning PG Dip at Glasgow Caledonian
• Main values identified: family, problem-solving, expertise, taking responsibility, sociability, facing and enjoying the new
A Learning Life - Sue
• Civic engagement identified: none
• Main markers discussed: primary to secondary, leaving school, changing jobs, old-fashioned gentlemen and computer nerds, grandmother’s death
A Learning Life - Sue
• “I think I’m as settled as you ever get here because every time you sit down something else happens”
• “I’m looking forward to going and doing the postgraduate diploma – really looking forward to it …I’ve missed uni, I have missed it, I haven’t missed it, oh God I’ve got to go to Unit tonight and I’ve had a busy day at work, but I have missed, I have definitely missed the learning part of it and the social part of it as well, actually it’s quite – I don’t know, it’s quite a social environment”
Reflecting on generation
• Generation matters and both senses are openly discussed without prompting
• Generation affects self-identities and helps shape orientations to learning
• People also use generation and time actively to stress belonging and to differentiate themselves and others
• Generation intermeshes with a range of other factors, including (more or less localised) opportunity structures