Znaczenia edukacji ustawicznej w percepcji studentów – refleksje z badań

Abstract

The aim of the article was to show the importance of lifelong learning and to identify the place it occupies in the life of adults wishing to study at universities; their way of defining lifelong learning, emotions associated with introducing this concept into their lives, and specific actions performed by them (therefore, more or less conscious implementation of lifelong learning by adults). The studies in question were of quantitative and qualitative nature. The first stage involved asking a group of adults two open questions related to lifelong learning and their realization of the idea. The second stage, based on a qualitative analysis of the documents, involved an attempt to find traces of the conception of lifelong learning in materials of autobiographical nature (students’ projects entitled "Biographical map of life" and "My educational biography"). In this dimension, the authoress attached particular importance to metaphorical references of lifelong learning, to the ways of assigning meanings to it, as well as to fragments of narratives in which subjects locate lifelong education in some specific space of their lives. The results were alarming, since they had revealed that almost half of the surveyed adults – both male and female pedagogy students – possessed only intuitive theoretical knowledge about the importance of lifelong learning, even though many of them were successfully implementing this notion in their lives. This fact seems to be very important from the perspective of adult education, because it seems to set next tasks, not only for adult education theorists, educators or those working with adults, but also for all those who work with other people in the educational area.