Investigating students' learning biographies can help to understand the interdependence of education, learning and biography (Merrill & Alheit, 2004). More attention paid to the study of learning biographies and to understanding human learning is also one of the leading suggestions for the future of education by OECD (2023, p. 11). This paper connects these two issues, learning biographies and a better understanding of the process of learning, as it aims to explore what patterns can be found in how we learn from telling stories about our educational biographies. The paper views the research interview as a storytelling setting and achieves its aim by analysing data from 29 biographical narrative interviews. The participants were recruited as a part of a project on non-traditional students at Czech universities, i.e. students who were at least 26 years old and had a one-year break in their educational trajectory before coming to higher education. Those students were enrolled in education degree programmes, including i.e. teacher education programmes, social pedagogy, special pedagogy, and andragogy.

Those adults are considered non-traditional students in the Czech education system because of their previous educational trajectory that was not direct from upper-secondary to tertiary education (Novotný et al., 2019). However, a non-traditional student is a general term for under-represented groups in higher education. The term can designate diverse groups of individuals who do not fit the traditional student mould. The definitions of non-traditional students vary across educational systems. They may concern students who are older, have a family, work full-time, or have other commitments or backgrounds that prevent them from participating in higher education in the same way as traditional students. The definition can include first-generation students, disadvantaged or international students etc. What connects all the definitions is that this concept was created in connection to the diversification of the student community, which is one of the manifestations of the de-standardisation of life trajectories, in this case, those leading to higher education.

For example, the differences between younger and older students in higher education are caused not so much by their age differences but by their different educational and professional trajectories and the fact that "adults have more experiences, adults have different kinds of experiences, and adult experiences are organised differently" (Kidd, 1973, p. 46). This study, therefore, concentrates on the previous life trajectories to investigate how they learn from the biographical experiences gained during them as they bring this knowledge to their new higher educational experiences. Those individual life trajectories in social space can also be framed as biographies.

To study learning biographies, this paper adopts a biographical learning framework. Alheit (1995) asserted that we learn authentically when we involve our biographies; from this point, scholars refer to this phenomenon as biographical learning. Biographical learning helps understand the processes in which people are involved when forming their lives through storytelling (Alheit & Dausien, 2000). However, it has not yet been clearly stated how exactly this biographical learning takes place, what its parts and outcomes are, and how it can be identified in the narratives. Therefore, the research questions addressed in this study were formulated as follows: 1. How do adults learn when storytelling their educational trajectories? and 2. What do they learn when they are storytelling their educational trajectories? 

Interviews were based on the biographic narrative interview method (BNIM) that was developed mainly by Schütze (1992, 2008), Rosenthal (2003, 2005) and Wengraf (2011). The traditional BNIM consists of three sub-sessions (Burke, 2014). The interview scheme used in this study was in line with Rosenthal’s conceptualisation (2004): the interview started with a period of main narration with the initial narrative question; this was followed by a questioning period beginning with internal narrative questions and continuing with external narrative questions. In the first phase, the respondents were asked a broad initial narrative question (inspired by Lieblich et al., 1998; Rosenthal, 2004) that started as follows: “Please imagine that you would like to write a book about your educational trajectory”. In the second phase, they were asked questions from their previous narration, i.e. from what they just said. In the last phase, the interviewer asked pre-prepared questions to clarify aspects that were not mentioned. The biographical narrative interviews lasted from one to two hours. As this study is concerned with the narrative analysis of this data, the respondents will be subsequently designated as “narrators” and have been assigned pseudonyms from mythology. Following Horsdal’s (2011) conception of the main focus of narrative analysis, the underlying presumption was that this specific type of analysis enables researchers to understand how the narrator tries to make sense of lived experiences through narration. The first step of the analysis was the process of theoretical sensitising. As this study deals with biographical learning, I considered biographicity, narrativity, and learning. With the help of the learning theories (Bruner, 1990; Jarvis, 2006), learning from storytelling can be translated as (A) the transformation of biographical experiences or (B) the narrative (re)construction of the self. Within the analysis, this distinction was reflected in the attention paid to both the content (A) and the structural level (B) of the narrative. In the last step, the data analysis was devided into two corresponding and interrelated levels of structure and content to analyse the biographical learning in the data further. These two levels correspond to the two main types of narrative analysis (Lieblich et al. 1998) and to the biographicity (content) and narrativity (structure) of biographical learning. In the whole analysis I also employed word-by-word coding, structural description (Alheit, 1994; Schütze, 1984) and abductive reasoning (Bron & Thunborg, 2017).

This paper shows that the study of narrated biographies in higher education research by applying learning theories to live accounts can help understand how, whether, and what people learn from their previous educational biographies when coming to higher education. In the setting of a biographical narrative interview, the narrators in this research presented meaningful biographical experiences that were crucial for developing their educational trajectories. Those experiences were, in their nature, either educational, familial, or work-life-related. Investigating students’ educational biographies helps understand the interdependence of education and biography (Merrill & Alheit, 2004). The narrators gave meaning to their experiences when they placed them in a meaningful order in their life stories and interpreted them. However, this study explored that the narrators do not present the experiences separately, one after another. The narrative analysis revealed that those experiences are intertwined. In adding another experience, the narrators discover new, previously unseen meanings. Therefore, it is possible to talk about the learning process in the narration itself. This paper revealed three qualitatively different types of learning that go on in narration: learning by analogy, learning by authority, and learning by audit. The results of this study suggest that the use of stories can be beneficial for enhancing learning for (not only mature) students in higher education institutions “it is only in more exceptional circumstances that we engage deliberately in narrative construction in order to learn from it.”(Goodson et al.,2010). However, there are some records of programmes that focus on the autobiographical work of adults in education (Alterio & McDrury, 2003; Dominicé, 2000; Van Houten, 1998; Rossiter & Clark, 2010). The study results have implications for both higher education research and practice. They suggest that narrative pedagogy could be employed more as a teaching method to make learning more personal and connected to biographies.

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