The biographical experience of being a teacher as the essence shaping lifelong learning practices

Abstrakt

This text is an attempt to answer the question of how to construct educational experiences in the professional biography of adults and their location within the practices of lifelong learning. To this end, the author presents the results of research on the ways in which public school teachers give meaning to their own professional experiences. Next she tries to show that the issues revealed as a result of the analysis are an important horizon for understanding and learning about their everyday life. As a result of the analysis of teachers’ narratives, the author established three schemes for defining professional experiences, which in their essence reveal: lack of teachers’ influence on the quality of education in general (a), perceiving the school as an effective organisation operating on the market (b), closing professional identity within its teaching method and its improvement. Referring to the concept of “biographicity” by Peter Alheit, the author shows that individual biography is a dynamic construct constantly reconstructed in a specific time, in socio-cultural and political conditions or in relation to other people – that is, practices that we identify as lifelong learning. In the case of the interviewed teachers, an element of these practices is the issue of shaping the culture of subordination and with it the politicisation and marketisation of education as well as the instrumental treatment of oneself and students.