Adult learning and meaning-making in community-based guided autobiography workshops

Summary: Learning characterizes older adulthood as much as it defines the childhood years, but receives far less attention and systematic investigation. In this article, we review literature on learning among middle-aged and older adults. Secondly, we summarize initial findings from our exploratory study investigating learning reports from six guided autobiography workshop groups comprising older adults, mostly in their 60s and 70s when queried: "What am I learning in this guided autobiography workshop?" Guided autobiography workshops (Birren & Cochran, 2001) are designed to facilitate participants' interests of writing and telling their life stories. We analyze learning reports of participants about how and what they were learning and the major topics and themes identified in their reports.