Dominicé, Pierre. (2000). Learning from Our Lives: Using Educational Biographies with Adults. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass Inc.
Pp. xxiii + 206
$28 ISBN 0-7879-1031-7
Reviewed by Olga L. O'Hearn
Norfolk State University
May 22, 2002
(This review is also available in Spanish.)
Pierre Dominicé contributes to the world of adult education with the introduction of the expression educational biography and a step-by-step explanation of how to use this approach as a tool to understand adults' learning process as they look back at their lives and reflect on their experiences as learners. The purpose of Learning from Our Lives is to provide "a detailed exploration of the reasons for, a rationale for, using educational biography approaches in adult education" (p. xviii). Adult learners, adult educators, and those in the health professions, in politics, and religious studies can benefit from the experience of writing or reading an educational biography, as it is not just an individual's story but the story of society as well, it gives an insight on how adults learn, what they learn, and what motivates them to learn.
Based on this author's work with about one hundred adults who submitted their educational biographies as a requisite for one of the courses taught at the University of Geneva, this book comes out as an essential guide to those who wish to incorporate the life history approach in their field of study or work. The examples he uses, although not abundant, are representative of the diverse group that forms adult learners.
The book reinforces what is most stressed by Cyril O. Houle (1988) in The Inquiring Mind: the majority of the learning that takes place in adulthood is actually self-directed learning.
Dominicé believes that writing an educational biography empowers individuals to reflect on how they have learned from life experiences; at the same time it allows adults to enhance their critical thinking, to continually search for meaning, to work towards a collaborative interpretation of their learning, and to pay attention to situational influences.
The book begins with multiple descriptions of the term educational biography, and a brief introduction to three of the cases studied in his research: Beatrice, the woman who has trained to be, among other things, a masseuse, a gardener, and a cook in a circus, and is therefore categorized as a patchworker; Mary, who emigrated to Europe from an underdeveloped country and thinks of her life as a palimpsest; and Mark, the man who entered the university at the age of forty. It provides the reader with an explanation of how the author integrates oral and written narratives based on his students' lives in the course on educational biographies he teaches in Switzerland. The course is taught as a seminar and it takes place in two consecutive semesters, which means that the students know each other fairly well before their educational biographies are read and discussed in class. The seminar is divided into seven phases: delivering information about the seminar, introducing the seminar, initiating small groups, delivering oral narratives, preparing written narratives, delivering commentaries, and evaluating the process. The first two phases are crucial to the success of the seminar because the students choose the issue they wish to research, and they commit to use discretion when handling the information provided through the seminar. This commitment is materialized in the form of a contract. Working in groups of six to eight students gives everybody the opportunity to discuss and expand their own work based on the observations made by their peers. Delivering oral narratives and writing those narratives are phases that complement each other, yet Dominicé prefers that the students present it in that order because there are some questions that may arise during the oral presentation, and those can be expanded in the written version. During the commentary phase, students interpret one narrative and present an analysis following a format provided by the instructor. In order to evaluate the process, the last phase of Dominicé's seminar, the participants are required to write a report that summarizes the group's reaction and comments toward the educational biographies presented in class.
By reflecting on how they learned in the past, adults can learn how to learn more effectively. This is not limited to students of adult and continuing education but it could also open new venues for professionals working with adult learners, psychologists, psychotherapists, and psychoanalysts, professionals returning to school to enhance their skills or to acquire new ones, and others who feel their education was missing something.
Dominicé ends this book with some implications of being an adult educator and the different stages teachers go through in their life cycle. Just like their students, adult educators should make an effort to interpret their own life stories in order to be aware of the factors that play a role in the process of adult learning.
The strengths of this book include a thorough detail of what an educational biography is, as well as a guide on how to write based on one's life experiences. It gives good examples of the narratives presented in the author's seminar and allows the reader to identify with the struggles and obstacles mentioned by the subjects of Dominicé's study.
Among the weaknesses, the book contains numerous grammatical and spelling errors that make the reading difficult at times. An appendix with a copy of one or two of the complete narratives, maintaining the privacy of the writer, could be added to a later edition.
This book should definitely be part of the required reading material for those in the area of adult education. I would recommend it to adult educators who would like to incorporate the educational biography approach in their teaching, and to adult learning students looking for better ways to understand how they, as adults and learners, develop through the learning process. Most of his work and research has taken place in Switzerland, yet the approach he presents and the examples he uses could be found anywhere else in the world. For that, it is not limited to one country, region, race, or culture. The methodology is the same whether we are dealing with people from the Andes or the Sahara, or those living in New York City or Tokyo. What changes is the individual story, and it must certainly change because when a life story is told it is centered on one individual's experience.
Although a great number of autobiographies have been written by men, perhaps because of the secondary role women have played in society throughout history, increasingly more books using the biographical style written by women have surfaced in the past two decades. Among those, Elizabeth Burgos (1996) with the publication of My Name is Rigoberta Menchú and this is How my Conscious was Born, Malika Belkaïd (1998) and her study of the first Algerian women accepted at the teachers' training school in France, and Benedita da Silva: An Afro-Brazilian Woman's Story of Politics and Love by Medea Benjamin, Maisa Mandonca, and Benedita da Silva (1997). Dominicé insists on a distinction between the way men and women think, write, and learn. Their role in society enables men to keep personal and professional lives separate, while women's situation includes their intertwined definition of woman, wife, mother, daughter, and professional. Men dominate the world of work and academia; women must struggle to find their righteous place. Education, and reflecting on how they learn has given women the power to claim that place.
As a student of adult education, I find this book an interesting and helpful source of information to keep at hand when stressing the importance of life experiences into one's individual and unique learning process. "We are not educated until we give meaning to our education – in some ways we are not educated until we can educate ourselves.". (p. 80)
References
Benjamin, M., Mendonca, M., and da Silva, B. (1997). Benedita da Silva: An Afro-Brazilian Woman's Story of Politics and Love. Oakland, The Institute for Food and Development Policy.
Burgos, E. (1996). Me llamo Rigoberta Manchú y Así me Nació la Memoria. México, D. F. Siglo XXI.
Houle, C. O. (1988). The Inquiring Mind. 3rd ed. Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press.
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