Reflexivity, learning identities and adult basic skills in the United Kingdom

Abstract

This paper reports on the findings of a small qualitative research project that examined the experiences of a group of adult learners attending a basic skills programme in the English Midlands during the late 1990s. It explores patterns of participation on such programmes and illustrates that early life course experiences can shape changing dispositions towards learning and forms of (dis)engagement from formal provision. The concept of reflexivity is used to help describe the differing contributions that structural and agential processes make to this patterning of engagement with learning. Such an approach is posited as a development of the concepts of learning identity and learning career that have recently been used to understand participation in education.

Basic skills and transitions to adulthood

“…She also notes that other modes may be identified. One of us has demonstrated elsewhere how distinctive forms of actor's reflexive self-talk are used to give meaning to, and in the process activate, the constraints and enablements of the social contexts in which they find themselves with regard to learning identities and participation in formal literacy classes (Cieslik, 2005).…”

Learning, literacy and identity: ‘I don’t think I’m a failure any more’

“…These findings show that by participating in more engaging and positive experiences of learning within caring social environments the learners had begun to narrate a different sense of identity that had evolved in the face of events and reflections on those events (Cieslik, 2006). Within the programmes most of the learners had been recognized as competent, learnt how to engage with others, shared the resources commonly used to communicate and gone about their activities in ways that had given them 'an increasing sense of identity as a master practitioner' (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 111).…”

Community-based learning and research: partnerships, power and learning

“…This power dimension is particularly foregrounded when working with people whose previous experiences have told them that they cannot easily learn new things. These experiences have been mainly derived from poor experiences of compulsory schooling and/or unhappy childhoods that, as many studies have found (see Barton et al, 2007;Cieslik, 2006;Tett, 2014;Worthman, 2008), have left them with not only low literacy skills but also low self-confidence.…”