Life-wide learning

We all live in our own worlds – our life-world – which Schutz and Luckmann (1974: 21) define as ‘that reality the wide-awake, normal, mature person finds given straightforwardly in the natural attitude’. Fundamentally, it is the sense of feeling at home in the world, when our internal sense of reality is in harmony with our perception of the external reality at any given moment in time. Living in harmony, we relate to people in our immediate environment with the assumption that their perceptions of reality are the same as ours: this enables interaction and common speech patterns in such a way as to generate a sense of inter-subjectivity – it is something that we share as a result of our primary socialisation. Our secondary socialisation, however, is the process of becoming members of different groupings that are part of our life-world. Fundamentally there is a shared culture between those with whom interaction occurs in the immediate life-world. It is such that we can take the world for granted and we can do so as a result of our previous learning and memorisation of past events which we have internalised.