Empowering non–traditional students’ careers through autobiographical writing

Abstract

The target group of non–traditional students includes adults, but also first generation students, women in a situation of inequality, workers, people with immigrant origins, and generally students from educationally disadvantaged background conditions. In this paper we will concentrate on autobiographical writing as a tool of empowerment, reflectivity and creation of personal resources to promote completion and avoid drop–out in HE. Autobiography makes it possible to explore the past and the present of the autobiographer in the framework of the family, of the local community and the widest institutional and sociocultural contexts. As a training instrument, autobiography favours: self–knowledge, the ability to analyze the past; the setting up of connections between the experience lived, the present and future projects; and the identification of the most important factors that condition the personal and educational evolution of the autobiographers. Our proposal of educational autobiography has a guided approach. In the training we have aimed to combine group sessions, centred on oral work, with the students’ autonomous work which consists of developing the educational, family and social life story. At the end of the process, each student will have produced two written documents: an autobiographical story and an analysis of this story. In this paper we will present a case study of a disadvantaged student from a rural area, stressing the contributions of autobiographical writing to develop reflective competences and awareness about the relations between individual itineraries, family contexts, and broader sociocultural frameworks. We will specially focus on the analysis of the autobiography done the own student, navigating from subjective narratives to social and cultural comments and reflections. This approach favours innovation and empowerment in HE contexts, making possible the development of the re- flectivity competence.