Explanations of individual successes and failures in the biographies as a reason to understand learning meanings. Context-sensitive analyses

The main aim of this text is the attempt to demonstrate what kind of learning meanings are created when adult people justify success and failure in their lives. The question – what success means has inspired the individual narration about life experiences of the 40 plus generation. In Poland this age group is perceived as the stabilization generation, because of the fact that people at this age did not have to experience a war, communist oppression or martial law. They were educated before the year of political transformation in Poland in 1989 and their adulthood occurred after economic changes. As a result, the narrations’ analyses led to identifying the concepts of learning. They were: learning as the process of pursuit of economic independence (1), learning as creating job opportunities (2), learning as the result of assessment of one’s own competence by others (3). During the conversation (while being interviewed) it turned out that the language of narration was economic regardless of whether they were talking about their vocational or personal life. The analyses that followed should be only treated as a qualitative case study.