ERIC Number: EJ1404639
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2023
Pages: 17
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0260-1370
EISSN: EISSN-1464-519X
The Personal Curriculum: Conceptions, Intentions and Enactments of Learning across Working Life
International Journal of Lifelong Education, v42 n5 p470-486 2023
The concept of curriculum as a personal journey is now timely, yet timeless and pertinent as an explanatory basis for understanding learning and development across the lifespan. It addresses a current need to explain adults' learning across working life when achieving individual, occupational, community, and societal goals. Advancing this explanation necessitate elaborating how that learning is realised and can be supported educatively. This conceptual paper presents and discusses the concept of personal curriculum to illuminate and explain pathways of adults' learning and developmental experiences across working lives. It offers a perspective of curriculum as a personal, rather than an institutional phenomenon. It also extends the concept of 'experienced curriculum' beyond periodic episodes of engagement in educational programmes to capture the continuity of educative experiences across the adult life course. Importantly, this concept liberates curriculum from the constraints of something intended, enacted and appraised within specific social settings (e.g. educational and work settings) to be more inclusive of the totality of learners' experiences. The case is made for its conceptual, theoretical and practical salience beyond a focus on institutional imperatives. Drawing upon empirical work on how working age adults sustain their employability across working lives, this conception extends discussions about what constitutes curriculum, to encapsulate the learning pathways individuals take across working life.
Descriptors: Curriculum, Adult Learning, Informal Education, Experience, Learning Processes, Educational Experience, Lifelong Learning
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Adult Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A