Current Activities

Ivor Goodson is currently engaged in directing two large research projects which focus on his ongoing development of life history approaches.

The first project, ‘Learning Lives’, conducted in association with colleagues at the universities of Exeter, Stirling and Leeds, looks at people's learning trajectories across the life course. This is investigated by employing regular life history and life course interviews with around 120 participants. In most cases eight life history interviews will be conducted and also a number of follow up thematic life course interviews. The intention is to understand critical incidents in people's learning lives and to develop an understanding of how people manage their lives through learning. A particular focus is to begin to understand the pattern of narration which people employ in storying their lives. It is argued that if we understand patterns of narration and life story telling we can begin to look for ‘pedagogic levers’ which engage with the deep narration processes that are part of human nature. The intention is to develop a different learning theory from the dominant cognitive model. The cognitive model uses prescribed curriculum to teach people pre-digested blocks of knowledge. This is done whether that knowledge fits in with their on-going life purposes and life stories and whether or not it fits in with peoples on-going life narration and life stories. Set against that narrative learning will aim to harmonise learning episodes with people's on-going life missions.

The second project, ‘Professional Knowledge’, looks at the life histories of teachers, nurses and other professionals in eight European countries. The project is funded by the European Union. Again the intention is to use life history methods to understand the professional missions and purposes of people working in the caring professions. Here a particular concern is to show how new reforms and restructuring initiatives in the professions either harmonise or collide with the sort of life missions which professionals take into their work.

Both the ESRC and EU projects are 4-year projects and they will terminate in the year 2008. At this point its envisaged a range of books will disseminate the results of the projects.

Ivor is currently working on the book ‘Understanding our Lives: the Struggle for Public Purpose and Private Meaning’. This looks at both the caring professions and other vocational lives and begins to explore the transformation of human storylines. From the modernist period where storylines used ‘mythical anchors’ such as ‘career’ or ‘romantic love’ or other epi-central storylines, scripts are now changing rapidly. In the new flexible economies of post-modernism, storylines are far more episodic and ephemeral. By focussing our work on understanding the transformation of human storylines we see how seismic the change in human subjectivity is at this point in history.

In terms of professional positions, Ivor Goodson works as Professor of Learning Theory at the University of Brighton in the Education Research Centre, as well as Research Associate at the Von Hugel Institute at St. Edmunds College at the University of Cambridge.

In addition he has a Stint Foundation research professorship which he holds in the universities of Uppsala and Gothenburg in Sweden. This appointment is for five years in the first instance. In the first six months of 2005 he was resident research professor at the University of Barcelona funded by the Catalan Research Council.