Personalization as a Developmental Challenge of Adulthood – Around the Question of Personal Self-creation Possibilities

The article refers to personalization patterns which stimulate development in adulthood. These are: confrontation with the circumstances of life, implementation of life’s tasks, seeking and adapting patterns of personal self-creation. The author notes that each of these mechanisms can be seen and experienced as a conflict. Particular attention is paid to the pattern of self-creation, subjected to empirical verification. The text analyses personal stories provoked by the narrative impulse: “Who is this I?” The analysis helps reconstruct the three orientations of the narrative and indicates the characteristics of the wholeness type of personality

Critical Life Events and Their Impact on Seniors’ Biographies

The article presents the preliminary results of a wider intergenerational study on critical life events. A background analysis of theoretical works on critical life events has led to the selection of criteria (such as the unexpectedness of an event, unpredictability of its effects, its equivocation, type and the nature of life changes it causes) that were used to review the collected narratives of the respondents. The authors attempt to reconstruct critical life events that are the most typical and significant in the biographies of seniors. The seniors’ temporal perspective (decline of life, time of summaries) encourages a more reflective narration that unveils the rich exemplification of potential effective and ineffective life strategies, the subjective quality of life, and the basis of life wisdom.Artykuł przedstawia wyniki stanowiące część szerszych badań międzypokoleniowych na temat ważnych, znaczących wydarzeń biograficznych. Narracje osób badanych zostały poddane analizie przez pryzmat wyłonionych w literaturze kryteriów odnoszących się do tzw. krytycznych wydarzeń życiowych (m.in. nagłość zdarzenia i nieprzewidywalności jego skutków, potencjalna dwuwartościowość, rodzaj i charakter zmian życiowych, jakie są efektem zmagania z tym zdarzeniem). Autorki podejmują próbę zrekonstruowania najbardziej typowych krytycznych wydarzeń życiowych i ich znaczenia w biografiach seniorów. Perspektywa temporalna (schyłek życia, czas podsumowań) służy refleksyjnej narracji i czyni ją tym samym wartościową dla egzemplifikacji możliwych (potencjalnych) skutecznych i nieskutecznych strategii życiowych, poczucia jakości życia oraz podstawę budowania mądrości życiowej

Intimate Relationships as Personal Life Projects – an Attempt to Conceptualize Post-modern Relationship Patterns

Today’s reality requires an individual to respond creatively to the challenges of the changing world and a liquid reality. Nonconformism and individualism are socially promoted. Still, many people want to live in an intimate relationship with a person close to them. There are visible changes of the individual life and anticipations about intimate relationships. Modern studies describe a lot of alternatives to the heterosexual marriage. The test results relating to the formal structure of compounds in the vast majority show no difference in the quality and durability of various forms of relationships. There is no in-depth analysis of the informal of relationship’s structure. In this article, it was assumed that an intimate relationship is a kind of life project through which people struggle with post-modern social reality. Via intimate relationships, partners can enhance personal creative potential and more creatively confront the events of life and face the challenges posed by developmental and life tasks. The theoretical analyses indicate the need to examine contemporary patterns of relationships. Perhaps those patterns will provide adequate socialization patterns. It was assumed that the relationship pattern includes: characteristics of partners, characteristic of the features of the formal and informal structure.3725727315Studia Edukacyjn

Joint Biographical Involvement Episodes as a Source of Wisdom

The aim of the article is to introduce the author’s category of joint biographical involvement episodes (EWZB) into the space of educational discourse, especially in relation to adult education (including academic teacher training). The proposed EWZB category derives from the work of Rudolf Schaffer on episodes of joint engagement and is enriched with knowledge on biographical learning. The author notes that one of the volitional goals of adult learning is the desire to acquire wisdom, understood as an aspect of personality development in adulthood, and the basis for building it is learning based on the co-experience of both one’s own and Others’ biographies

Family biography – an attempt to reconstruct the dynamics of the development of the family system

Artykuł ma charakter koncepcyjno-metodologiczny, a jego celem jest próba rekonstrukcji dynamiki zmian w systemie rodzinnym z wykorzystaniem metody biograficznej. Kanwę teoretyczną stanowią podejścia wywodzące się z konstruktywizmu i konstrukcjonizmu społecznego, systemowe rozumienie rodziny oraz koncepcje biograficznego uczenia się. Rodzina jest rozumiana jako system społeczny podlegający zasadom całościowości oraz autopojezy, które wyznaczają ramy i możliwości jego rozwoju. Wprowadzono autorską kategorię „biografii rodzinnej”, która oznacza zwielokrotnioną (będącą czymś więcej niż sumą biografii jednostkowych) nieskończoną (re)konstrukcję wynikającą z napięcia między biegiem życia rodziny a opowieścią o historii życia rodziny. Zastosowanie biografii rodzinnej jako sposobu opisu rzeczywistości systemowej (z uwzględnieniem jej nieoczywistej dynamiki) oraz jako wyznacznika zbierania i analizowania danych empirycznych jest nową możliwością w pedagogicznych badaniach rodzin.The article is of a conceptual and methodological nature, and its aim is to try to reconstruct the dynamics of the development of the family system using the biographical method. The theoretical basis are approaches derived from constructivism and social constructionism, systemic understanding of the family and concepts of biographical learning. The family is understood as a social system subject to the principles of wholeness and autopoiesis, which define the framework and possibilities of its development. The author's category of "family biography" was introduced, which means a multiplied (being something more than the sum of individual biographies) infinite (re) construction resulting from the tension between the course of family life and the story of the family life. The use of family biography as a way of describing system reality (taking into account its non-obvious dynamics) and as a determinant of collecting and analyzing empirical data is a new possibility in pedagogical family research

I Am a Mother Because I Wanted to—I Am a Grandmother Because Others See Me That Way—Motherhood as a Critical Life Event for Ageing Women

The purpose of this study was to analyse women’s perceptions of their transition to motherhood in the late decades of their female adulthood. The research problem was whether and to what extent the meaning of the transition to motherhood changes for women from different birth cohorts. Our sample included mothers from two generational cohorts: 50 women in middle adulthood (M = 47.66), and 52 women in late adulthood (M = 69.35). The results were analysed using qualitative data analysis methods, including frequency analysis and qualitative narrative analysis. Based on the analyses, the category of transition to motherhood was found to be a standard feature for all the women studied in middle and late adulthood. In both older generations, some women recalled the birth of their first child as a coping with change. Indicators of criticality were extracted from their narratives: potential bivalence, the unpredictability of consequences, and longevity of life changes. The results showed that the generation of women in late adulthood exhibited significantly fewer difficulties related to their own motherhood. The semantic dominant of the narratives studied is motherhood as taking responsibility for another person