Abstract:
This dissertation is a qualitative study on the formation of the learning habitus of the liberation and Korean War generation who experienced the historical events in which Korea gained independence from Japan as well as the Korean War. The participants are from the generations born during Korea’s great historical turbulence, and now form the elderly in Korea. The learning style of the increasing elderly population has been analysed and presented in their generational context by exploring the learning habitus that forms their current perception, attitude, and values in relation to lifelong learning based on their biographical background.
As the theoretical background of this study, a framework was developed by connecting Peter Alheit’s biographical learning and Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus with Karl Mannheim’s generational aspect. Although the subjects of the study were limited to the liberation and Korean War generation, a comparative analysis was conducted between the first-generation German immigrants (German group) who came to Germany to work as nurses through a labour contract between Korea and Germany from 1960 and the Korean generation who did not (Korean group). A total of 17 female participants were selected, of which eight were Korean cases and nine were German. After the pre-interview, six final participants were selected based on the study purposes and research questions. Their interviews were conducted with Schütze’s narrative interview technique to understand the overall structure and environment of their lives, and their narratives were analysed through the method of documentary analysis using MAXQDA software.
Afterwards, the data regarding their life environment were divided into two parts – before and after marriage – in order to present their lives as an objective structure based on in-depth analysis. The structure of a total of six people’s lives was classified into five themes, and the relationship between the construction of their learning habitus and their lives were identified with two research questions: how did the biographical learning of the liberation and Korean War generation in Korea and Germany affect the construction of their learning habitus? What perspectives related to the learning of the liberation and Korean War generation can be identified based on their learning habitus?
These five themes include: (1) family, (2) school education, (3) profession, (4) expected patterns for internalized gender roles and (5) lifelong learning. The five themes were re-analysed according to the detailed sub-topics, and finally, three sociogenetic types of learning habits were derived. Learning habitus A, the first result, is a type of ‘learning for survival’, while the second type B is ‘learning for recognition’, and the third type C is ‘learning for liberation’. The motivation, style, and orientation of learning were different for each learning habitus, but they were not completely independent types. There were some similarities by type, but I identified some differences. The similarity of these types of learning habitus was observed to be due to their generational background based on their common historical/social experiences. On the other hand, the difference in their learning habitus was due to the primary learning habits that reflected the structure and background of each individual’s life, especially their parents’ perceptions, aspirations, and attitudes toward learning when they were young. However, what is surprising is that their primary learning habitus was formed in their childhood through education at school and still has a large influence on the re-construction secondary learning habitus reshaped after adulthood, and few indications have been found that their primary and second forms of habitus have been changed. Through this conclusion, it was identified that the formation of their learning habitus according to their generational background had a great influence on their primary learning habitus, and that this was greatly influenced by their secondary learning habitus revealed in the current field of lifelong learning.
In addition, this discovery from a generational point of view suggested the possibility of entelechy formation as described in Mannheim’s theory of generations, but entelechy, which represents a generational style, did not appear clearly in this generation. This is considered to be due to the difference in the generational position of each participant. Based on these conclusions, at the end of this study, suggestions for academic research for political and lifelong education institutions, lifelong education educators/teachers, and researchers are presented.
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