In the present article, focus will be placed on how to learn through ‘unlearning’, and on the benefits of making visible relations that would otherwise be taken for granted.  I will view learning from a poststructuralist point of view and show how we can draw from poststructural theory and make use of CBW as a method in order to reveal ways of understanding ourselves and others (Davies, et al 2006a). It is argued that learning in relation to becoming able to work and live in a globalised world, calls for a collective approach, and developing? tools to become aware of structures that are taken for granted and the roles we play. This involves a conscious relationship between the learner and the surrounding world/culture. The individual experiences and the collective understanding of the memory stories told and written and analysed in the CBW process, are not only a path to explore our ways of being, and deconstruct existing patterns of meaning, but also to jointly rebuild alternative approaches to our lives. CBW helps us become aware of differences, and thus other possibilities, developing an ability to critically discuss questions concerning emancipation, justice and equity, opening up for changes (Wihlborg, 2009, p 122, Wihlborg, forthcoming). Learning about ourselves through our own memories and by the use of CBW in teaching and learning situations in higher education, we will be able to show how our ‘selves’ have been caught up in the discursive nets within which we became constituted and positioned, and within which we have also positioned ourselves.

Poststructural theory challenges the Enlightenment notion of the autonomous individual as the subject of education, and instead suggests multiple interpretations of life as text, where differences are necessarily rather the principle (cf, Deleuze, 1983; Derrida, 1978; Davies et al., 2006ab; Foucault, 1980; Peters and Wain, 2003). Learning is here also treated as a process, not as a fixed content that can be memorised and then stored in our memory and experienced as the/an ultimate truth.  The focus will be on how we ‘shape and constitute’ our identities, forming understandings of ourselves.

In CBW, narratives are used in the form of ‘memory stories’ based on our lived experiences. A memory story could be, for example, the telling of an event of becoming someone, to be recognised as someone. These experiences are then contextually explored. We start with the assumption that our lived experiences are constructed by the force of socially and culturally embedded influences in relation to our understandings of ourselves and others. We explore, reveal and open up for other views of understandings, experience the other and the construction of ‘selving’. How do we learn to be(come) a subject? In the analysis and interpretative stages in the CBW approach/practice, we make use of a dual strategy, exploring the chosen memory stories to better understand the process of subjectification. This procedure will be exemplified below with the story “Becoming recognised as a sailor”.

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