Learning and knowing: Narratives, memory and biographical knowledge in interview interaction

Abstract

The qualitative research interview engages with experience of social reality in sites of social interaction. Research interview respondents provide insight in biographical interviews into the significance of critical change processes for their individual and collective learning. Auto/biographical narratives of learning, are emergent, evolving accounts produced in a learning space hedged in by the demands of the "reflexive project of the self" which throw the individual more than ever before in processes of lifelong or life-wide learning onto their biographical resources. These resources can be understood as representing individual learning processes which are capable of furthering the creation of new cultural and social structures of experience, new forms of biographical knowledge which emerge out of the precarious balancing-act between routines and learning transitions. Research interviews embedded in interaction and participant reflexivity, addressing the learning transitions told in talk, access the construction of knowledge as adults move on to new biographical spaces and position themselves anew.