| Summary: | This dissertation presents my research on the concept of learning as an element of life politics. The main aim of the research is to seek answers to the question: Why do students of the vocational education of adults almost always experience their time of studying as difficult but positive, as demanding but rewarding? What kind of significant dimensions can be found in the sequences of life, when the individuals are taking part in the institution of education, when they are studying in the vocationally oriented courses for adults? I have searched for four significant areas concerning the learning project. The first of these involves how the students make educational choices and the kinds of agreements they have to make. Secondly, experiences of learning processes are multidimensional, and the process gives more impulses than the students expect or are ready for: material for self-evaluation, questions and demands on lifestyle, peer group experiences, a new concept of temporality and a different cognitive substance to understand plurality of meanings. The most important idea is the impulse for a reflexive evaluation of autobiography. The third area is the analysis of communality and social relations in the frame of the educational group. Lastly, I have studied the relations between individual and institution-how the personal processes are possible within the functional frame. The most important matter seems to be the evaluation of the different sources of flow-experiences, which are no more connected only to institutional functions. The second theme of my research is to make an interpretation of learning as an element in life politics, when the sociocultural sphere is undergoing change. The components are individualization, reflexivity and detraditionalization. I have conceptualized these 'great phenomena' into theses of 'One's own Life' according to the theory of Ulrich Beck, to theses of experiences according to the theory of Gerhard Schulze and to theses of post-traditional community and non-conventional communities according to the writings of Georg Simmel and works of other researchers. For me these two paths form sources for making some conclusions about adult education in the meaning of aspect in life politics, course-time as a multidimensional sequence of life, when education itself is one of the feedbacks and impulses to new positions, but the more remarkable thing is situation: time, place, feedback for reflexivity and peer group relations. I have found learning to be a social mode in a different meaning, as a response to individualizing sociality, or one's own reflexivity process alongside social participation. The research is a phenomenological and constructive social study. The data for findings is based on 137 stories, mostly told by women, from ages 25 to 50, basic-certificate, whose education took place at a day-time school for 2, 3 or 4 years, plus seven stories about learning in Adult Education Centres.
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