Una seconda "chance" in età adulta. Prospettive formative ed esistenziali tra lifelong learning e cura di sé

This study concerns the strategy of lifelong and life wide learning as a form of "taking care of oneself". I assume, as Beck and Bauman say, that nowadays we live in a "risk society" and in a "liquid" society. In this context, the world has become more complex and the future more unpredictable in comparison with only few decades ago. The former collective agents (workers, women, social movements in general) seem to have vanished and the prospect of a public solution to the problems posed by the new/post modernity is very slim. It is the individual who has to undertake responsibility for his/her own future. There are at least two ways of considering lifelong learning: the first focuses on personal ability to purchase the skills, the competences, the capabilities required by the market, and become a "lifelong learner" in order to continuously respond to market-place challenges and remain employable. Somehow the person has always got to learn and can never consider himself/herself a complete professional, citizen, individual but is obliged to follow adaptive strategies just to stay afloat. The second way tries to see the "positive" side of an epoch of uncertainty: if social roles and status have become less solid, it should be possible, in adult life, to have the opportunity to seek for an autonomous form of satisfactory life, where lifelong learning links with experience and original, personal ways of elaborating experience. In this perspective, lifelong learning is a construct that has to give account of the situated, historical, economical, political role that education experiences play at the individual level but also in the individual's social context. I investigate the link between "necessity and possibility" in the process of "Bildung" of subjectivities. There are social, structural and cultural bonds that strongly condition access to education and to the opportunity to find one's place into society and there must be some possibility to overcome those bonds. What are the resources that individuals can count on to express their aptitudes and yearnings? What is the role of gender differences in such a need? I can say that lifelong learning may be only one of many different strategies to respond to deep and latent needs concerning identity, membership, self-planning, gender. As no dominion disposals are given without some resistance disposals, I look at experiences of existential re-definition that take place through a fracture, a crisis, a withdrawal, and lead to a new equilibrium, where the people experiencing them look for a "second chance" in their lives. I de-construct the idea of "second chance" pointing up notions of falling, risk, gain and loss, crisis and opportunity, freedom of choice. Also, the courage to look for something considered "second best" - or the courage to quit aiming for a first place in a competitive and individualistic society is to be valued. In the concept of "second chance" there is a redeeming dimension: the idea that learning throughout one's life does not mean to accumulate knowledge, skills, competencies in a linear and adaptive process, but - on the contrary - can be an evolutionary process similar to that found in nature, expressed by the concept of "exaptation". By the term "exaptation" I refer to the ability of individuals to learn, develop and self construct using in a creative form what they already possess. Maybe this is a particular kind of wisdom. It is also necessary to re-think the role of education in individual life stories, the different weight and the different meaning that people give to it depending on the moments in which they come into contact with educational systems. The role of those responsible for educational processes must also change: there is a need for a more circular way of defining educational requirements and knowledge. And so, the research, moving from a critical theory of society and from a Foucoultian perspective (with regards to the categories of power, resistance and freedom), makes use of the method devised in Italy by Riccardo Massa and by the Clinic of Education, because it allows investigation of the latent and hidden dimensions of everyday actions and beliefs while simultaneously constructing new forms of knowledge and self-knowledge. The research participants are individuals who have decided to give themselves a "second chance": they are adult students in Bicocca and many of them have abandoned previous studies, some have changed their lifestyles and have experienced a personal crisis. In this research, narrative and auto/biographical pedagogy play a substantial role: this approach, as a matter of fact, in the last fifteen years has gained full recognition in many context (Denzin & Lincoln; West; Josso; Ferrarotti; Pineau; Demetrio; Formenti; Gonzàlez Monteagudo, etc) and has proved to be a powerful research method in its own right for understanding subjectivity and making subjective experiences more visible and intelligible. Above all, this approach, with the aim of critiquing hierarchical models, has important implications for the change of roles. It is a way of acquiring knowledge and a social action, that promotes self-directed learning and the appropriation of one's own education. For these reasons I selected a small group of adults (aged 34 and up) who have decided to give themselves a "second chance", taking possession of their own lives, and by so doing taking care of themselves. I investigated together with these people their life history and the roots of the "turning point". To carry out this research I used face-to-face instruments, such as open and in-depth interviews, into a clinic perspective. The Clinic of Education as a method that brings to light the hidden dimensions of actions and decisions, in other words the symbolic, cognitive, emotional and procedural latencies related to education, is the theoretical frame in which the research is inscribed.