Adults’ motives for returning to study: the role of self-authoring

Abstract

The contemporary political and economic context has ensured that adults continually return to education in order to avoid both social and economic marginalization. Adults make and remake themselves through a process of self-authoring a reflexive process through which they make contextual decisions about their life. This article examines the self-authoring of a group of adult students as they explore their motives for returning to further education. These motives are examined within a Schutzian framework which focuses the discussion on the origin of motives in the past experiences or future imaged experiences of the research participants. The motives are revealed as complex and multi-dimensional and provide a snapshot of the way a group of adults engage in reflexive self-authoring in order to facilitate life changes through education.