Focus on learners: A search for identity and meaning in autobiographical practices

The chapter focuses on the capacity of adults to shape their lives and give a meaning to experience and learning. Adaptation, flexibility, and key abilities - the main points of adult education practices and policies in Europe - are too oriented toward the future and the market and oblivious of individual trajectories. Good learning occasions entail other competences: reflexivity, agency, and critical thinking. They sustain adults in becoming strategic actors in the institutional and social world, making sense of it, and finding their own way to adaptation. Autobiographic education leads learners toward understanding, recognition, and strategic positioning. Moreover, it builds a more complex - lifelong and lifewide - idea of learning and knowledge, connecting different contexts and levels, private/public, formal/informal, conscious/unconscious and composing different parts of life, different identities.