Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates the use of autobiographical narrating in migrant adult education, on courses and museum workshops. Working with stories is an important pedagogical tool helping to (re)create identity, coherence and authority and to invoke empathy and identification.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates the use of autobiographical storytelling as a pedagogical tool and a way to address the cultural and social diversity in migrant adult education, in a project "With your own words" for young migrants, and in Västerbottens museum's workshops. It is based on ethnographic methods: observations (of museum workshops and events at "Narrative festivals" where several groups presented for a wider public); interviews (with a teacher, a project leader, and a museum pedagogue); the project's activities on social media and printed material from the project. The museum's narrative workshops and the public presentations at the Narrative festival aimed at new forms of engagement and inclusion of little represented and seldom participating groups. In the interviews, a strong belief in autobiographic storytelling's emancipatory, integrative and democratic potential was articulated. It was regarded as an excellent way to improve language skills and to make one's life more comprehensible to oneself and to others by everyday, common memories and not only the biographical "disruption" of migration (the reports from media, however, still focused rather on the dramatic narratives of oppression, escape and otherness). Inclusion and social emancipation lied at the heart of the pedagogical stance (with mostly non-prestigious activities) and documentation practices of the studied courses, workshops and events. Stories about personal experiences were considered to be a crucial and creative human practice; implicitly a tool for (re)creating identity, coherence, authority and continuity of the self, and a way to make oneself comprehensible, invoking empathy and identification.