Research, Teaching and Learning: making connections in the education of adultsPapers from the 28th Annual SCUTREAConference
Connecting the personal and the social: using auto/biography for interdisciplinary research and learning about experience
Nod Miller, University of East London, UK
Linden West, University of Kent, UK
In this paper we address the theme of making connections in the education of adults in that we explore how the use of an auto/biographical methodology can help us to connect individual and social-structural features of experience as well as psychological and sociological frames of analysis. We describe and analyse a collaborative experiment in which we have been engaged over the last year; this experiment has involved making recordings of structured conversations with one another and applying to the resulting text interpretative frameworks derived from psychoanalysis, sociology, feminism and anthropology, in order to develop a shared thematic analysis and to explore the intersection in individual lives between culture and psyche.
Auto/biography in postmodernity
We recognise that our interest in linking intimate, micro-cultural and social-structural frames of reference connects us with a much larger and developing postmodern conversation about identities, about the nature of subjectivity, about what might constitute the basis of human agency in fast-changing times, and about the contemporary direction of education and learning. Interest in the use of auto/biographical research methods and life histories has developed rapidly in the study of adult learning and in some social scientific disciplines. Feminists and oral historians, in particular, have sought in recent years to give greater space and significance to personal and intimate life. This is partly a matter, as Evans (1993) has written, of establishing that culture and psyche are part of the same piece. History can be seen to weave its way into the most intimate aspects of human relationships.
The current preoccupation with auto/biography may be understood as an aspect of living and learning in the paradoxical postmodern moment. Story-telling, as part of composing an identity within a fragmenting culture, seems to have become essential at a time when the grand narratives may have proved insufficient, but also when local and familial templates have fractured. As tradition loses hold, as male linear biographical certainties — of school, work and retirement — disintegrate, individuals must choose, whether they wish to or not, among a range of options, as well as constructing more of their own meanings and lifestyles without traditional frames of reference. Where, at the collective level, things stayed more or less constant from generation to generation, and where the meanings attached to rites of passage, such as those marking the transition from adolescence to adulthood, were culturally ingrained, psychic reorganisations could be relatively easily accomplished. In present times, in contrast, self and identity have to be constructed and reconstructed without clear parameters or inter-generational templates as part of a reflexive project of self (Giddens, 1991).
The current interest in auto/biographical approaches amongst university-based adult educators in the UK (apparent in successive collections of SCUTREA papers since 1993) may be seen as a response to the state of flux in the field of adult continuing education, with many departments changing their titles, foci and locations (or having these changes thrust upon them), as some of the concerns of adult education move from margins to mainstream in educational policy. Given the unstable working conditions of many scholars in the field, perhaps it is not too surprising that many of us are seeking to understand our own histories, identities and locations at present.
There are also personal reasons for our own engagement in this enterprise. When we began our collaborative explorations, we were both in the midst of personal transitions; we had both recently changed jobs and were dealing with the consequent dislocations and challenges, and trying to make sense of our current positions and to plan our future trajectories.
Our collective auto/biographical methodology
About a year ago we decided that we wanted to work together on a project to link psychological and social processes, personal experience and social structures, academic enquiry and more intimate meaning-making. We held several meetings where we took turns to ask questions of one another about aspects of our life histories. We taped the resulting conversations, which were transcribed. Each of us listened to the tapes and read the transcripts in order to identify themes for further analysis. Our conversations ranged widely and included reference to our respective family histories and our feelings about these histories, the identities we constructed for ourselves and the reference groups to which we belonged, critical incidents in our educational histories, significant influences (both textual and interpersonal) on our intellectual development, and our favoured metaphors for making sense of our places in the world as well as our styles of approach to life and work. Some extracts from these conversations are included in this paper.
We have been talking to each other about adult learning for over a decade, and in recent years, in diverse projects, we have both mined our subjectivities extensively for research purposes. About five years ago we identified a common interest in the use of auto/biographical approaches in research, teaching and learning. Linden had read one of Nod’s pieces of auto/biographical writing (Miller 1993) and wrote to her with feedback highlighting instances of empathy and similarity of educational experience, and identifying absences or silences in the text. In particular, Linden felt that Nod’s use of a predominantly sociological framework precluded the possibility of dealing with some intrapersonal or psychological processes:
I noticed that your self in the story was primarily a social and historical self, as I suppose it’s likely to be, given you are a sociologist. I wondered about your psychological self, though ... you said little about personal hangups, your own emotional struggles ... and how these had affected your development as a learner and researcher.
When Linden’s book on the auto/biographical experiences of adult learners (West 1996) was published, Nod read and responded to his text. She was particularly intrigued by the material which dealt with Linden’s own life history, not least because it revealed that she and Linden had a shared identity as working-class children who became upwardly mobile as a result of being selected for grammar school on the basis of the 11-plus examination, or, in shorthand, as ‘working-class kids made good’. In one of our recorded conversations, Nod acknowledged that
... until I read that early part of your book, I had assumed that you were much more distant from me in terms of your class of origin than actually turns out to be the case. That’s partly to do with your mode of speaking, I think ... since you have talked about your student interests in drama and the debating society, your accent makes a whole lot more sense, but I had assumed you were much posher than it turns out you are.
From Nod’s point of view this was an important reminder of an enduring tendency she recognises in her own behaviour: despite her many years spent in higher education and the consequent loss of the pronounced West Midlands vowel sounds of her youth, she still responds negatively to what she thinks of as posh or affected modes of speech, and is quick to frame (often erroneous) assumptions about others’ life histories on the basis of the way they sound.
Shared chronology and contrasting class fractions
We set out timelines which enabled us to establish a number of common historical and cultural referents in our life histories. We recognised some shared objects and events (for example, the Coronation, school milk, outside toilets, the ambience of council houses in the 1950s) and we cited a number of the same texts (for example, Hoggart 1958; Jackson and Marsden 1962; Williams 1988) among those which aided our understanding of the tensions of school and family life experience. We are of the same generation, although we have noted that the three years which separate us in chronological terms had strong significance in relation to our subcultural experience as undergraduates. We were both students at (then) new universities during the 1960s, but a marked shift in student culture from the middle to late years of that decade is reflected in our varying values and patterns of behaviour during that period and to our current emotional reaction to cultural artefacts such as music from that time.
Having established some similarities in terms of the class position of our respective families of origin, we explored some of the minutiae of our youthful experiences of social class as far as we could reconstruct them in the present, and unpacked the events, stories, sounds and smells, characters and feelings in our histories. As we plotted more precisely our separate locations in the culture and social structure of Britain in the 1950s, we recognised some significant differences between the class fractions to which we belonged and in our relationships with our parents. Nod said:
Since both of my parents had left school at the minimum leaving age and neither of them enjoyed any sort of success in that regard, never having had the opportunities, I got very quickly to a stage it seemed where I surpassed all the things they might have hoped for, so ... I wasn’t carrying the sort of weight that I see a lot of my friends’ children carry in the way of living up to expectations.
Linden pointed to a difference between our earlier (and perhaps present) selves:
... in class terms, in terms of your educational trajectory, almost everything you did was going to be better than [your parents’ expectations] anyway, so there was no pressure, this is the way I read it. This ... intrigued me because my position in class terms was quite different. I do think in some way we’re very much on a border point here between culture and psychology, because I was thinking: what was it about my parents’ position that meant I had to carry what was experienced as a lot of their ambition in me, at least my mother’s? Everything I did in a sense was beyond what they’d achieved in formal education terms, but I guess we are really here into the territory of the psyche as well as culture; culture as in Jackson and Marsden’s [1962] sunken middle-class sense: you’ve got to make up for the loss of middle-class status. Psyche in the sense of my mother in particular feeling very empty and needing a child's achievements which would provide some compensation for that. So objectively we are ... people who are not a million light years from each other in social class terms, and yet we seem to be talking about something quite different in psychological terms.
Nod recognised her reluctance to resort to explanations based on psychological difference, but acknowledged the need for such a paradigm in this instance:
Although I try to find every other explanation than ones to do with psyche, I guess I would have to accept that in this case psyche is probably what we’re talking about. There is something about the minutiae of social relationships, and the way they impact on personality and life scripts and so on, that has given us somewhat different trajectories; or perhaps not so much the trajectories themselves but the way we view them I suppose, because by any kind of objective measure I would have thought your life history would be seen as one of success. But clearly that’s not the way that you’ve perceived it, or not the way you’ve perceived it at significant moments.
Family stories and football
We tried to capture some aspects of our family relationships, to articulate our feelings about those relationships and to speculate about their impact on our present selves and current work by telling each other stories about the past. One of Nod’s narratives went like this:
I formed the impression pretty early on in childhood that the domestic division of labour has a large amount of inequity associated with it, because ... my mother spent most of my early years not only nursing elderly relatives, not only managing the house which was old and inconvenient, but also providing services (washing, cleaning, cooking and so on) for my father and his brother Bill as well. My uncle never communicated with anybody else in the house by the way ... a lot of my childhood memories involve the pathological lack of communication between the various members of the household ... a vignette: my parents and Bill had evolved over the years a complex set of divisions of labour which seemed to be designed to ensure they didn’t have to communicate directly, so he looked after certain things and they dealt with others. Anyway, he paid the rental on the television, so hence it was like his property, which meant ... the rule that he operated with was that if he felt like changing channels or turning the volume up or down, he would do that without any reference to anybody else who was around, even if there was a room full of people ... So the usual pattern was he would watch ITV for most of the time so almost invariably at 10 o’clock in the evening they’d be watching News at 10 so the chimes of Big Ben would come up and my uncle would look over at my father — they always sat in the same positions in the living room — and say in grunts ... ‘what time is it Norman?’ and my father would look at his watch and say ‘about 10 o’clock Bill’ and Bill would turn back to the television and then after about two or three minutes he’d get up, take off his cardigan which he wore inside the house, put it over the back of the chair, take his jacket, which was his sort of outerwear, which was hanging over the back of his chair, put his jacket on and without a word would go out of the room and he’d go and have two pints in the pub which was two or three doors away from where they lived. Five minutes after Bill left, my father would get up and also go round to the pub, but apparently they would never drink in the same bar, you know, they’d drink in separate bars with different lots of people and they’d come back separately. But the ‘what time is it Norman?’ ‘About 10 o’clock Bill’ would be almost invariably the one exchange they would have for the day and that was the extent of the communication. Mum and Dad would moan vaguely about his strange ways and as I got older I’d say ‘well why don’t you say something about it?’ and they never had any answer to that. But that was just sort of the way it was. So I don’t know. I feel as though this sort of pattern of communication, or non-communication must be something which has propelled me towards being an expert or a student or scholar in the area of communication, but I’m not sure what the line is, or conscious of making decisions about it, but I’m sure there is something in it.
In contrast with the somewhat distant anthropological gaze which Nod trained on rituals of male interaction, Linden offered a participant observational insider perspective in which his pleasure at the male bonding which can be promoted through the shared tribal loyalties of football is apparent:
[My Dad and I] did communicate early on ... we had the same passionate interest in Port Vale — if a goal was scored I could hug him in a way that I couldn’t normally do, if you see what I mean, a social ritualised experience which can be very important particularly if there are no other ways of expressing those sorts of feelings. It’s strange because it’s only relatively recently that I’ve been able to come out about this and admit that not only am I a Stoke City supporter, but I’m also a Port Vale supporter. For years and years and years I was a passionate Stoke City supporter ... over the years I followed Stoke City with a very dear friend of mine from university who is also a sociologist ... and I realised I was going through some profound re-evaluation of self and identity, that I was beginning to rediscover Port Vale, i.e. my father, and you know [there’s a] kind of loss really involved in that ... So there is an anthropology and a psychology in my story.
Nod later returned to the theme of male rituals and commented on the way in which our contrasting stories of gender had provoked her to reframe some of her observations about affective dimensions of the communication patterns among the men in her family:
When I’ve looked at your accounts of your early history and mine I suppose I focus more on the similarities and well there’s clearly one major difference in terms of our structural position which is you’re a man and I’m a woman, and clearly that was one of the things I thought was interesting about the discussion we had last time: all that stuff about my seeing football as certainly something outside my world view ... I did find that discussion quite helpful in retrospect. It ... cast a bit of a different light on my brother’s relationship with my Dad. They’re both pretty uncommunicative in many ways, but I can see that there were these aspects of shared, gendered culture around football and perhaps going to the pub ... my brother will sometimes go for a drink with my dad in the pub, which is something I would never consider doing ... whereas he can do it and does it and I can see that ... they don’t have to talk very much ... it’s just having that shared presence - being in the same place doing sort of blokeish or manly things that somehow helps them perhaps transcend the class differences and cultural differences in their current lifestyles. Anyway, so yes, I’ve been aware of the gender difference....