Becoming a Lifelong Learner through Life Disruptions: Exploring Motivational Pathways in Second Chance Schools’ Students

Abstract

The aim of this article is to capture the generic process which shapes the reasons Second Chance Schools’ students set out for enrolling in them and for approaching lifelong learning. We theoretically frame motivations as having relational and temporal emergence and as embedded in their lifeworld experiences which have to be narratively reconstructed in order for the students to take life decisions. Through biographical interviews with adult students attending a Second Chance School in Greece, we identified the role of life-disrupting events in this process and their core dynamic in forming motivational pathways. We argue that life disruptions fuel four different kinds of biographical gestalts, within each of which students develop a peculiar narrative reasoning for their enrollment in Second Chance School. Stigma, emancipation, biographical suffering, and work improvement constitute four distinct biographical gestalts, in which specific life disruptions are tied up with how adult students construct their motivational orientation toward lifelong learning throughout their lives.