A LEARNING JOURNEY. A NARRATIVE-AUTOETHNOGRAPHICAL REFLECTION

A LEARNING JOURNEY. A NARRATIVE-AUTOETHNOGRAPHICAL REFLECTION

ABSTRACT: This essay is based on autoethnography and reflects on experience, meaningful moments, positive turning points in the author's learning journey as a scholar, university teacher and adult educator. Becoming and being somebody has been a long, lifelong, and emotional process. The author asked this question: what does the learning journey mean and why is it meaningful for her? The essay shows how the author reflected on the experience, and used a personal diary, memos, and notes. For the reflective writing, the author based themself here on a narrative and autoethnographic approach, having in mind concentrating more on peak, positive and meaningful rather than negative experience. The final writing process was a kind of retelling that involves re-reading the diary and rewriting this essay in the form of a personal narrative. To make the essay coherent the author relied upon the structure of the narrative.

Introduction

The present moment is a time of big and small narratives. There are world views which require and presuppose stories. There are standpoints which attempt to overcome the narrative. However, sometimes only a narrative or a concrete story can describe or represent the existential. In other cases, when an appropriate theory is being applied, other forms of expression or means of representation can be used instead of a narrative. Stories differ from other forms of representing experience, like for instance, concepts or theories, in their time aspect, but also in being particular, concrete, and experiential. Unlike in theories, the separate, unique, and random acquires meaning in stories.

Writing this essay, I was looking in the literature for epistemological assumptions related to learning and experience, autoethnography, narrative identity and positioning. I asked myself a question: what does my learning journey mean and why is it meaningful for me? It is a challenge to answer such a question if you do not have empirical evidence. As Peter Raggat states, this kind of question may be impossible to answer satisfactorily. To write this essay and answer this question, I used my notes and reflected on my experience, analysed inductively several meaningful parts from my autoethnographic diary and looked for the stories. I coded narratives and extracted from them several stories with the idea to write this essay in the form of a narrative.

In writing the autoethnography, the researcher is at the centre and we write about ourselves, and our experiences in interaction with others. Autoethnographical writing and reflexive learning processes do not take place inside the individual but depend on interaction and communication with others and relations to a social context, therefore I had several conversations with my colleagues and reflected on my personal and professional experience. Learning through one's life history is therefore interactive and socially constructed, on the one hand, but it also follows its own "individual logic" that is generated by the specific, biographically layered structure of experience.

Self-reflection is a narrative act or narrative exercise where the researcher reflects on some aspects of experience. Experience is formed by existential diversity. Also, telling oneself about oneself is like making up a story about who and what we are, what's happened, and why we're doing what we are doing.

I also used selected academic papers and relevant books that helped me to be in dialogue with myself and readers of this essay. I rely on the narrative and autoethnographic approach and employ self-reflective writing about my personal journey, professional experiences and challenges as a scholar, adult educator, and university teacher.

A narrative, a scientific theory or theoretical conceptions are complementary ways of grasping and experiencing the world, where one attempts to "time" the world, while the others seek to "space" it. The narrative gives a ready and simple means for dealing with uncertain outcomes and anticipation.

Events, time, places, people, and relations have their own place, meaning and synergy in the context of a narrative as one possible story as well as in the context of learning and experiencing.