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