Learning through autobiography: The crisis of faith, health, and vocation in the experience of American writers

This is a study of the relationship between autobiography and self-directed learning. Autobiography, as “self life-writing,” is an endeavor to create retrospective text in which the author and the object of study are one and the same. Self-directed learning is an endeavor to understand both what motivates a person to learn and how it is he or she undertakes the learning process. The two are interrelated.; Six autobiographies form the core of this study. An author who both reflects upon and interrogates past experience wrote each autobiography. These reflections and interrogations were then brought together in the form of a written text. The books I used can be categorized as follows. Two deal with learning that transpired through participation in a religious pilgrimage. These are Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life by Patricia Hampl and The Gate Behind the Wall: A Pilgrimage to Jerusalem by Samuel Heilman. Two deal with learning that transpired through the experience of illness. These are An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison and A Whole New Life: An Illness and a Healing by Reynolds Price. Two deal with the learning that transpired through the experience of career change. These are The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found by Don Snyder and A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned by Jane Tompkins.; The results of this study highlight the importance of autobiographical learning to the field of adult education over the course of a life. Each author extracted a story from his or her particular situation. It was a story that helped them understand the past in light of the present in order to live for the future. Through the process of writing and learning, the authors experienced a transformation that left them different persons. Each author changed his or her world to word in order to act upon it.