The developments of higher education during the last 50 years, namely the expansion, diversification (Schofer & Meyer, 2005) and heterogenisation of student populations due to facilitated access for under-represented social groups (Hadjar & Becker, 2009) motivate research on non-traditional pathways to higher education. While some institutions remain elite, the system as a whole is a mass-based one (Scott, 2001), opening up opportunities for groups who previously never entered university.  This paper is concerned with one of these groups - adult students who are also called mature or nontraditional. These students have either delayed their entrance to higher education or already have former experience with the university (either successful or unsuccessful one).

There have been numerous European-level initiatives to encourage national governments to take action to increase access to HE of traditionally under-represented groups (Brooks, 2020; Pérez Cañado, 2015). This paper aims specifically to examine the biographies of non-traditional students who study for educational degrees in the Czech republic. In this country´s context, nontraditional students are defined as having at least 26 years old and at least one year gap in their formal education.

In the presented analysis the conceptual framework builds on a theory called biographical work, which is used for understanding non-traditional (under)graduates’ identity formation and transformation (Thunborg & Bron, 2019). The narrative is „not only a method for fostering learning or a research methodology, but it is also a way to conceptualize the learning process“ itself (Clark & Rossiter, 2008, p. 61) The narrative is also how we craft our sense of self and therefore our identity: the "personal stories are not merely a way of telling someone (or oneself) about one’s life; they are the means by which identities may be fashioned” (Rosenwald & Ochberg, 1992, p. 1).  Therefore in studying narratives of adult students returning to university studies, we can learn how higher education contributed to or constrained nontraditional students´ identity formation and transformation (Bron &Thunborg, 2017) and how they reflect on their learning and educational experiences in the new context of higher education: and those are also the main research questions of this paper.

Life history enables researchers to record and understand everything essential that the participants have experienced in the course of a specially delimited phase of their life (Erben, 1998; Roberts, 2002). This research applies a particular approach in life history – the retrospective life history (Cohen et al., 2000). The life history design results in narratives, in this case in narratives of adult learners in higher education. Firstly, the narrative data were organized in accordance with Polkinghorne (1995), who stated that the goal of the organizational phase is to refine the research question and separate irrelevant or redundant information from that which will be analyzed, sometimes referred to as narrative smoothing. More concretely, the most important step in the analysis of the narratives was the schematic representation made for every life story. Each story was represented as a picture reflecting the informant’s educational trajectory. This step was important for recognizing the diverse identities hidden in the narratives. It also enabled an analysis of the role of agency and structure in the stories.The results of the narrative analysis for the whole sample of nontraditional students (30 informants) will be presented in this paper.

The starting point for the analysis was the narrative representation of the students’ previous educational experience. It provided rich data on identity processes and learning in narratives of adult learners. The releaved patterns of integrating and disintegrating phases of identity struggles were motivating for further analysis into the narratives of non-traditional students in regard to their narrative learning. The focus was on subjective meaning: how students made sense of their experiences over the life course in relation with their previous educational experiences and their current higher education studies. The results confirmed that for many adult students, the transition into HE from the world of work and family responsibilities is an intense experience as it challenges their sense of themselves (Brunton & Buckley, 2020). The present study additionally showed that non-traditional students are dealing with three main identities in their narratives as well as with their interaction (integration or desintegration): student identity, work identity, and familial identity. Findings also showed in which patterns the non-traditional students construct their oral narratives about their educational experiences and how they reflect the learning process they undertook via these narratives.

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