Redeemed From Time: Learning Through Autobiography

Abstract

Autobiography is an important means of facilitating adult learning and development. The process which is most associated with autobiography is memory. Memory is more than the recollection of past events; it is a critical element in the search for and construction of meaning in human experience in that it provides a "conscious consciousness of experience." A second role of autobiography in learning is cosmological. Human beings are capable of building order in their present-day lives by way of the remembered past. Autobiography also engages the imagination. It does not show individuals necessarily as they were or even as they are. Rather, it expresses what they believe themselves to have been and to be. Thus, the self ultimately is not something to be discovered through autobiography; it is in fact something to be imagined and constructed.