By Linden West (HOF 2020), Professor Emeritus
I want to draw, in this blog, on a lifetime’s passion for what feminist sociologist Liz Stanley called auto/biographical inquiry, and the myriad ways in which the stories people tell can be interpreted, including in dialogue with them. “Biographical” means the search to understand particular moments in the here and now, including education, in the context of a whole life. “Auto,” bringing the researcher’s presence and subjectivity to bear on what amounts to the deeply relational, intersubjective, often unconscious drama we call research. When two or more gather together, the struggle for openness, trust, and meaning in storytelling and interpretation begins.
The auto/biographical “turn” in adult education represented a reaction against superficial survey research on “why people learn”: boxes ticked on whether motivation was primarily personal or vocational. Forgetting, of course, that why we learn and desire a specific career can be deeply personal and familial. But then we have lived through times where vocational and economic motivation have been culturally valued, while the more personal and certainly liberal and expansive spirit once characterizing adult learning, in locations like the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, has weakened. We once shared an idea of adult education as a laboratory for cultivating democratic learning, participatory citizenship, and inclusive, progressive politics, but this has dissipated, and education at all levels in a world of precarity is focused on “the economy, stupid!”
And the complexity of the human subjects at the heart of learning and research easily gets lost in the primacy of the quantitative gaze, the seductions of measurement, and evidence-based mantras. It was Max Weber who urged us towards understanding rather than simple measurement, but this aspiration can get sidelined in the worship of quantification. And although there are now many studies drawing on auto/biography, auto-ethnography, and qualitative perspectives, in the eyes of the powerful, governments and the academy, they really do not count. The loss of the human subject in social science and educational research remains a live issue if we really want to understand why people learn in depth and what this means on more of their own terms.
Doing auto/biographical research, drawing on the developing stories people tell, over time, demands care and attentiveness, and a relational, safe, transitional space for developing and interpreting stories. Attentiveness, respectfulness, and non-judgmentalism matter, alongside time, curiosity, and reflexivity towards what emerges. A giving of the researcher’s whole self to the process is one way of framing it: bodily awareness, spirit, mind, and an empathic imagination. And a quality of presence to help build trust and a shared interest in lives, most of all among those, maybe a majority, who feel themselves inconsequential. Auto/biography celebrates the ordinary, the mundane, the particular and the everyday: it is in the particular, in Umberto Echo’s famous phrase, that we find the universals of human struggle, vulnerability, lostness, desire, resistance, courage and the incarnation of new ways of seeing.
We then more easily appreciate the importance of love and generosity in a learning life, when that life has been overwhelmed by abuse. We appreciate the power of self- and other-recognition in reading a good novel, where we discover a character much like ourselves who keeps on keeping on against difficult odds, and we are able to introject some of their resilience. Processes of projection, identification, and introjection are at work in the complex relational ecology we call adult education. We might celebrate the apparently small gesture of a teacher in higher education, who intuitively knows the importance of calling someone by their name, and celebrating their stuttering contribution in a seminar. Small gestures are important and empowering in learning lives, when we listen to the stories people tell.
Of course, we require a living code of ethics – treading lightly because we can tread on dreams. The metaphor of Pandora’s Jar (which, in fact, is what it was) reminds us to be careful, remembering that research, even longitudinal research, offers no long-term supportive structure like psychotherapy. On the other hand, and most often the case, it is astonishing how research can be therapeutic, because someone listens, bears witness, and gives credence to what may have seemed inconsequential. Such understanding is a co-creation, requiring, care-fully and reflexively, the use of our own lives, at times, to illuminate those of others, and vice-versa. We may never have known the nightmare of forced migration, or a constant experience of humiliation and degradation at school. But every one of us, at some time or other, knows what it’s like to feel disdained and disregarded, and these intersubjective synergies can be drawn on to deepen, dialogically, our understanding of the other and self.
It helps to be part of a strong research community, to develop interpretation and avoid projecting onto others what really belongs to us. A community made up of other seekers, where truth and integrity matter, and everything is reflexively questioned in the company of generous colleagues. Communities like the European Society for Research on the Education of Adults Life History and Biography Research Network, which has involved diverse people working together from different traditions, ranging from highly abstract and empirically exhaustive traditions in the German-speaking world, to the more artistic, imaginative, relational, and eclectic epistemology of auto/biography in countries like Italy. Dialogue between these different ways of seeing matters.
Emphasis is often given to listening, stillness, empathy, curiosity, and non-judgmentalism, and careful recording and transcription of an encounter. There is space and time for reflection, shared comment, awareness of our own associations in what we hear, and feedback at all stages, especially when a study is longitudinal. The whole slowly becomes more than the sum of the parts in a dialogical, iterative, narrative space.
A brief case study of the power and potential of auto/biography will help here. The story of someone called Mathew, a migrant, who fled a war zone, death within his family, and crossed dangerous seas. Eventually ending up in London, then taking an Access to Higher Education program at a local community college. Lost, lonely, and alienated as the noise of anti-migration campaigns and populist politicians invaded his psyche. But then two teachers took a particular interest when he stopped attending class. They liked Mathew and made contact to learn that he had been forced to report to a detention center more and more frequently as a way of keeping tabs on “dangerous people” like him. The teachers began a campaign to get him citizenship and to support him in the classroom. “Good parents they were to me,” as Mathew put it. He progressed to higher education, where his proficiency in four languages and cultural sensitivities enabled him to become an advocate for diverse others. Eventually, he worked in public health, where his languages and knowledge of different cultures, including the importance of spirituality in healing, came to matter.
I met him with a colleague who was also a migrant. She intuitively understood some of his struggles and later offered to help with his academic writing and listened to and reflected with him on his tendency to self-deprecate. Pushing the boundaries of research may be into a kind of counseling, some might say. I’m not sure, but Mathew deeply valued his time with us and loved engaging in thinking about his experiences. Later, much later, I used Mathew as a case study of migration and how this touched deep and complicated aspects of my own family history. A hotel housing migrants was the target in 2025 of violent protests in the struggling “post-industrial” city where I was born. I came to think of my own great-grandfather, John West, who fled Ireland in 1842 during the Great Famine. He lived about 200 meters from where the protest took place. Family histories overlap across time, and empathy is strengthened through a deeper appreciation of what migration truly entails. And the power of the auto/biographical imagination in research.
I was helped by an ESREA Life History and Biography Network Writing Retreat in Liguria, Italy, in 2025. Freema Elbaz-Luwisch, Emeritus Professor at Haifa University, led a workshop on dancing with ancestors, in her case, two grandmothers who died tragically young. Her father’s mother died of diabetes in Vienna in 1909. Her mother’s mother - born in what was then Russia, now Ukraine – in a time and place where anti-Semitism could be virulent, and life lived on a perpetual cultural edge. But they were alive and young in the imaginative dance in a church on a sunny Italian Spring Day. An extraordinary moment, where we all joined in and were encouraged to connect with our own ancestors. Dancing in a place called once upon a time and reimagining lives trans-generationally. I was moved to pen a letter from John, my great-grandad, to me. A letter on the trials he went through – in a kind of narrative imagination – including the intense racism he experienced in mid-Victorian Britain. He never gave his place of birth on his marriage certificate, just the country of Ireland, and he was reluctant to provide more detail, given the ubiquitous racist disdain for all things Irish. He just wanted to get it over, he wrote. Narrative rather than narrower historical truth, but no less important for that.
Whatever, auto/biography represents a fundamental methodological and imaginative challenge to the conventional scientific idea of keeping messy subjectivity and intersubjectivity at bay, because it gets in the way of “science.” Such scienticism, as we might call it, risks narrowing our understanding of learners and learning, recognition, human motivation, and the relational, intersubjective dynamics of truly transformative learning. It constrains our understanding of how new ways of seeing and human agency, lifewide as well as lifelong, get forged between people, and with the symbolic world.
As we celebrate 30 years of the Hall of Fame, what experiences, relationships, or moments in your professional journey have most shaped your contribution to adult and continuing education, and what lessons would you like to pass on to future generations? We invite Hall of Fame members and the global adult education community to share reflections, stories, and insights as part of this anniversary series.
IACEHOF 30th Anniversary Celebration
The Hall of Fame is more than a recognition—it is a living record of the people and ideas that have shaped adult and continuing education globally
