This nine-chapter book, written in Europe by a French-speaking Swiss educator, explores the rationale for using educational biography approaches in adult education and presents examples that illustrate various uses of these life history activities. Chapter 1 provides an introduction and overview of educational biography, and Chapter 2 describes practitioners' experience with major educational biography approaches, including written and oral narratives. Chapter 3 presents a review of the literature, concentrating on examples of educational biography approaches that occur in particular contexts and address particular themes. Chapter 4 explores how adults educate themselves in various settings, including family and school. The main theme of Chapter 5 is adults' ways of thinking as men and women functioning in family, school, and workplace, and the influence of various subcultures. Learners' needs and motivations are the focus of Chapter 6, and, in Chapter 7, the main theme is helping learners name their experiences and their world and deal with issues that emerge from this interpretation. Chapter 8 addresses how educational biography can help adult learners gain a new understanding of evaluation by examining the power relationships that influence education and educational goals, the uses of evaluation decisions, and formative evaluation as interpretation. Chapter 9 concludes with a discussion of ways of creating conditions for successful adult learning based on the main themes raised by the educational biography approach. (Contains 108 references.) (KC)