Complexity in learning biographies: a dialogical approach

The paper develops a dialogical approach to biographical research on adult learning and education, based on a complex and systemic theory of learning. Biographical research uses stories to understand adult learning, but there might be ways to interpret stories that oversimplify them, and reinforce a general trend to value subjectivism, intrapsychic processes, and individualism in learning theories, leaving aside the role of matter, the body, and the context. Bateson's ecology of mind and logical levels of learning and communication, Maturana’s autopoiesis, Varela’s enactment and von Foerster’s imperatives will be used to show that learning is a co-evolutionary process, requiring new concepts to go beyond its most common representation as an individual, cognitive, and cumulative event. The paper challenges the dominant reductionist and empiricist paradigm of research in adult education and learning, to bring forward an embodied, relational, and dialogic approach to learning biographies, also inspired by new biographically oriented, cooperative, critical, dialogic, and art-based research methods.