ABSTRACT
We live and learn. Like so many popular sayings, this one seems to be stating the obvious. Yet, like most clichés, there is a reason why we all take it for granted that this is what we humans do. As individuals, we value our ability to learn productively from such everyday experiences as going about our work, caring for our family, encountering friends and neighbours, experiencing illness, enjoying sports and hobbies, or sitting around relaxing. And this capacity matters. Later in this article, I suggest that our capacity for learning from our lives is also a major influence on who we are (our ‘identity’) and how we live with others. More immediately, it can help us earn a living, avoid injury, make and repair things, plan ahead and deal with life’s crises. At a wider level, it helps to shape our social relationships and our economic position. There have been many attempts to grasp the nature of the ways in which we learn from life. This
chapter will focus on a selection of these ideas. It starts by considering the very notion of life as a permanent process of learning, which requires constant reflection on all the institutions and practices in which we engage. These ideas have helped to shape public policies on lifelong learning, and emerge from radically new conditions of everyday life. They are therefore important in establishing the context of our lives in the contemporary world, as well as underlining the importance that continuous learning has in late modern societies. I then go on to consider theories of narrative learning and of experiential and biographical learning, all of which seek to understand the relationship between learning and life. While these can be seen as educational responses to motivational psychology, I will argue here that our learning needs to be understood in socio-cultural terms, as an outcome of everyday life as it is lived in constant interaction with specific socio-economic conditions, and as experienced through each individual’s interpretations of and actions on those conditions. The chapter frames these issues in terms and concepts drawn from the work of Pierre Bourdieu. It then concludes with suggestions for policy and practice based on the preceding analysis.
