From Narration to Poiesis: The Local Museum as a Shared Space for Life-based and Art-based Learning

This chapter illustrates an innovative alliance between university and museum, to create a space for transformative practices in adult education. The ‘poïetic pedagogy’ implemented in the Life(St)Art project , based on self-narration, art, and active conversations, challenges common frames of adult learning and offers new thoughts on the relationship of adults to art, namely by celebrating the power of art to inspire and creatively engage adults in learning. The common idea of an individual learner as a ‘consumer of culture’ who visits an exposition or reads a book to accumulate information and ‘knowledge’ is here contrasted by the image of adult learners as complex and relational human beings who strive to answer difficult and dilemmatic questions about identity and meaning: Who am I? What should I do? What is the meaning of life? These questions, embodied and enacted in art creations, illuminate a kind of learning that is not cumulative or individual and can produce a leap in awareness, mutual recognition, and deliberate action.