Historically, adult education has been connected with learning for personal development and empowerment and for social inclusiveness and democratic understanding and activity (see Aspin and Chapman, 2001). In the last twenty years in the UK, however, there has been a shift in the policy discourse away from adult education in favour of lifelong learning and towards a notion of lifelong learning that emphasises learning for economic progress and development (Biesta 2006a). Associated with this shift has been an increasing use of a ‘new language of learning’ (Biesta 2004, 2006b) which promotes conceptualisation of education as an economic transaction in which education becomes a commodity, a ‘thing’ for consumption. This inevitably has implications for the quality of the relationships that can develop between those who learn and those who teach. It is evident that there is a struggle over the definition of learning: a struggle over what counts as (worthwhile) learning and a struggle over who is allowed to define what (worthwhile) learning is. In this context one important task for adult education researchers is to highlight the significance of the broad range of learning processes and practices that occur in the lives of adults so as to show that there is more to learning than what is acknowledged in the economic definitions of lifelong learning. Doing this has been one of the main ambitions of the Learning Lives project (www.learninglives.org), a 3-year longitudinal study into the learning biographies of 150 adults of 25 and older. The project gave the participants an opportunity to tell stories about their earlier lives and it also enabled the researchers to monitor changes in the participants’ lives during the course of the project and to discuss such changes with them. Unsurprisingly, we found that some people were more adept at engaging in processes of telling stories about their lives than others and this suggested that the potential for their learning from such processes also varies. Drawing on literature on narrative in the human and social sciences (Polkinghorne 1988; Bruner 1990; Czarniawska 2004) and with the emerging body of work on narrative learning in adult education (Rossiter 1999; Rossiter and Clark 2007) we analysed the life stories of the participants. Our analysis revealed that in a significant number of cases, they had come to some kind of understanding about their lives and themselves and we found that this learning had had an impact on the ways in which they led their lives. We became particularly interested in the role of life stories and life storying in such learning processes and in the relationship between the ‘narrative quality’ of such stories and their learning potential. Our findings suggest that the rise of the ‘learning economy’ (Biesta 2006a, 2006b) has not completely displaced learning processes that are significant for people’s agency and in our conclusions we reflect upon the importance of the conditions under which narrative learning might contribute to those dimensions of lifelong learning that have come under pressure as a result of the rise of the learning economy. We also address practical issues concerning whether and how narrative learning might relate to established provision in adult education, we consider the role of teachers in such learning and what the implications might be for the training of teachers in this role.

Participants in the Learning Lives project were interviewed up to eight times over a period of two and a half years as the central stratagem of a life history methodology (Alheit and Dausien 2002; Goodson 2001; Tedder and Biesta 2007; West et al. 2007). The participants were given opportunities to talk about themselves, their lives and their learning, both retrospectively and in relation to events that occurred in their lives throughout the duration of the project. All the interviews were transcribed for analysis and interpretation. The project used both quantitative and qualitative data collection methods and the concept of biographical learning emerged as a useful instrument for members of the qualitative team to explore the relation of learning with identity and agency.

We have found that some people (though not all) are effective ‘narrative learners’. By narrative learning we mean that learning can take place as a result of articulating stories from one’s life, through the process of talking about and reflecting on life experiences, in other words from the very narration of one’s biography; and can take place as a result of presenting stories from one’s life, by having stories with content and structure, by having a narrative which says something about what and how you have learned. Narrative and narration are not simply a vehicle for such learning processes but can be understood as a ‘site’ for learning. It is important to acknowledge, however, that these learning processes are far more individualistic – and hence less political – than the learning processes that occurred in the context of liberal and critical traditions of adult education. Not only does this raise important questions about the quality of such learning processes; it also raises important questions about the ‘quality’ of the agency that is achieved through narrative learning.