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Biography and Education Biographical aspects are coming increasingly under the focus of teaching-learning and educational research in the context of international comparative studies and the debate over self-organised and self-guided learning. Different theoretical approaches are selected and current empirical findings in the area of biographical research are presented in this issue in order to shed light on the interrelationship between education and biography.
“Bildung” and Biography in Self-organized Learning If subjects of learning are related to the learners thinking and acting in past or future, learning gains a biographic dimension. The notion of “bildung” can be attributed to a learning process, when frames of interpretation get transformed and re-arranged. The councelling of learning in a learning environment opens spaces, where learning processes like this can come true. This interrelation is examined in the contribution with an analysis o…
Starting out with deliberations on the relationship between the course of life and the constructed biography of an individual, this article intends to elucidate the contexts of learning as they are treated in various (inter-)national studies, by focusing on the individual’s course of life. To clarify which methodological design is most appropriate to study processes of (lifelong) learning and education, it then seems necessary to highlight a particular methodological approach. This leads, ultim…
The following article focuses the mostly neglected relation between identity and learning by reconstructing foreign learning efforts by adults. In spite of educational policy's proclamation of (continuous) lifelong learning real learning processes are characterized by various discontinuities. Adults deal with these discontinuities by perceiving, describing and structuring them dependent on their self-images as learners. Interpretations of interviews with adult language learners supply evidence …
The article discusses the chances of using a gerontological data base (Interdisciplinary Longitudinal Study of Adulthood, German Acronym: ILSE) for analyses in educational biography research: Learning to age tends to be the central category of this analyses. The article comments on the current debate of aging and education and expounds the problems of politically driven activation of elders and the programmatic turn in the discussion. In a second step the article elaborates on what terms it is …
