Previous
Back to contents
Next
I think that, as adult educators, we are familiar in our work life with stories of learners growing in both skill and knowledge, as well as in their capacities to engage more fully with self and others through participation in adult education. But I am not sure that we have found ways of allowing such stories to be claimed as valid scholarly knowledge. Autoethnography and writing as a mode of inquiry So I decided to present an autobiographical story as the centrepiece of this paper to raise some issues around the complex process of the emotional process of adult learning. The story is an ‘insider story’ (Dirkx, 2006b), written out of my habit of using writing as an approach to reflective practice (Bolton, 2005, 2006) and as a mode of inquiry (Richardson, 1997; Richardson and St Pierre, 2005). It seeks to be what Speedy calls a ‘parcel of knowledge-in-context’ (2005, p.63) which embodies the experience of working as a facilitator of adult learning, and being in turn changed by that experience. At this level, it might achieve what Ellis and Bochner (2000, p.744) suggest that personal narratives can do; [they] create the effect of reality, showing characters embedded in the complexities of lived moments of struggle, resisting the intrusions of chaos, disconnection, fragmentation, marginalisation, and incoherence, trying to preserve or restore the continuity and coherence of life’s unity in the face of unexpected blows of fate that call one’s meanings and values into question. But it is not a straightforwardly autobiographical story. Stanley (1992, p.14), in the context of feminist approaches to research, coined the term ‘the auto/ biographical I’ to refer to the way in which there is no simplistic, innocent self at work in writing subjectively, the individual is always closely articulated with others. The genre of autoethnography is a growing resource that uses self-stories and life writing to ‘display[s] multiple layers of consciousness connecting the personal to the cultural’ (Ellis and Bochner, 2000, p.739). Such writing typically ‘feature[s] concrete action, emotion, embodiment, self-consciousness, and introspection portrayed in dialogue, scenes, characterisation, and plot’ (Ellis. 2004, p.xix). However, rather than seeing these genres ‘as ways of retreating into personal, inner subjectivity,’ they are an important resource for understanding culture that we can adopt ‘as means to establish and stabilise intersubjectivity’ (Roth, 2005, p.15).
14