Integrating Higher Education in Middle Adulthood. Paths to Empowerment: Struggle and Self-accomplishment
Congresso Internacional
26,27 e 28 de Junho - local: IE-UL Lisboa
Integrating Higher Education in Middle Adulthood.
Paths to Empowerment: Struggle and Self-accomplishment
Vera Diogo, Maria José Araújo, Hugo Monteiro, Teresa Martins
Abstract
This article is based on an on-going study case that is being carried out at an Higher Education School in Portugal. The study is focused in undergraduate students who were older than 23 years when they enrolled in higher education and the data used was collected from semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions.
Higher education students face a number of challenges in contemporaneous post-industrial and semi-peripheral societies. In Portugal, the uncertainties of a labour market characterised by high unemployment rates and budget cuts that reduced investment in science, research and education have caused difficulties to both students and teachers. The problems and challenges are even greater for individuals in middle adulthood who re-enter the education system after an absence of several of years. Once integrated, adding to the difficulties faced by the common students (how to use academic knowledge and how to master a scientific language), these students also have to deal with the problem of understanding how to use their own experience. As Mezirow (1997) mentioned: A defining condition of being human is that we have to understand the meaning of our experience. Facilitating such understanding is the cardinal goal of adult education. To be able to fully integrate in the educative community and to identify themselves as higher education students, middle adulthood students have to find ways to incorporate their previous meaningful experiences in the learning activities they are now involved in (Stryker, 1980; Pinto, 1991).
One aspect that seems to have a huge impact on the decision of these adults to enroll in higher education as well as in the way they interact in the academic context is a former participation in social movements (feminist, associative, cultural, trade unions, etc.). All the representations and relationships they have built, the messages they have exchanged, the forms of mediation they have engaged in before offer themselves as potential indicators of the educational value of intergenerational relationships and of the personal, professional and community impact of a process of adult education.
This paper discusses some intermediate results of this study of “elder students”, namely their demographic and socio-economic characterization; their perceptions of higher education, among which we target the consequences of integrating higher education on their personal, social and professional development; the processes of their integration as “not so young” adults. With respect to the integration processes, we highlight the indicators stated above, discussing the impact caused by adult students on the educative community through civic participation, academic engagement, group formation and general sociability. Furthermore, we explore these students’ current learning strategies and their plans for future improvement, and well as their expectations of the impact of completing an academic degree to their lives, their children’s school life and their families’ lives as a whole.
Keywords: Adult Education, Transformative Learning, Experience, Community