The DFG promoted Research Project “Precarious formations of Lifelong Learning” intends to empirically explore the change of individual educational formations over nearly a quarter century of biographical and historical time. Within the scope of recent social developments (Keyword: reflexive modernization, cf. Beck/Giddens/Lash 2003) individuals are now – more than ever before – expected to continu-ously adjust themselves to the permanently changing conditions of the modern society via learning and unlearning. Our main research interest is, whether and how individuals manage to integrate their manifold experience of life and lifelong learning into a coherent biographical account of their lifetime - and educational development. Given the individual necessity of a congruent self-consciousness and self-expression as an acting subject we furthermore want to investigate how experienced discontinuities become manifest within the individual formation of identity. Therefore we are interested in the impact of biographical experience and historical circum-stances onto structures of lifelong learning , especially within adulthood. Nevertheless, the reconstruction of formations of Lifelong learning, which we aim for, does not want to emphasize causalities but indicate an interrelationship between the self recon-structions of a person and her way of the interpretation of self and world and her action. On account of this it is important to differentiate between the (varying) forms of self-expression at the point of interview t1 and interview t2 (cf. Bude 1984). On the one hand the observation of lifelong learning cannot but start with subjective accounts of the matter, as for example with biographical narrations. On the other hand, however, all research on lifelong learning has to deal with the problem of the time dependency of subject-bound and respectively biographical information . This prob-lem calls for a particular methodic approach – such as longitudinal studies. Since ongoing biographical and historical changes and developments can only be assessed from a ex-post perspective through conventional cross-sectional studies (cf. Nohl 2006a: 281), this implies that all thusly available data is necessarily subject to obscuration through proc-esses of lifelong learning which have already taken place. For this reason our project observes the process of lifelong learning of one and the same person at two different points in time by using the research potency of qualitative longitudinal studies.

That is why our study represents something special within the domain of qualitative social research. Our sample consists of 60 semi-structured narrative interviews altogether on the topics learning and instruction within the individuals life history, which were conducted with 30 individuals for a first point in time at t1 (1983-1985) and for a second point in time at t2 (2005-2008). The data will be analyzed using the Documentary Method (cf. Bohnsack 2001; Nohl 2006b), which strongly emphasizes a comparative approach in qualitative social re-search. The research projects intention is to expose the correlation between the individual and collec-tive construction of formations of lifelong learning and the empirical reality. For this purpose we reconstruct and type individual “Bildungsgestalten” – viz. formations of Lifelong Learning” – by the means of intraindividual and interindividual comparison.

Based on a constructivist approach we strive to investigate collective constructions, while reconstructing individual reconstructions of formations of lifelong learning. The investigation of potential collective formations of lifelong learning hence enables us to explore the interre-lationship between those constructions and the empirical reality. First findings point out, that in opposition to the common discourse on lifelong learning, which conceptualizes lifelong learning primarily as a means of individual and social en-hancement and progression (cf. Alheit 2009), other phenomena prevail: Examining individual processes of lifelong learning over a time span of more than 20 years discloses not only phe-nomena of progression, expansion and enhancement but also phenomena of stagnation, con-traction and degradation (cf. Kade/Hof 2007: 15).