ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

The purpose of this study was to identify how the elderly female learners recognized the meaning of their lives and death, and tried to change it through participation in lifelong education. To achieve this purpose, this study adopted a life-history study to understand and analyze deeply elderly women’s personal history and life experience. As a result, most of old female learners who had participated in lifelong education tended to try to change their lifestyle enthusiastically. The reasons they participated in lifelong learning were that first, their negative experiences that they had been not able to participate in official education because of social and cultural situation led them to participate in lifelong learning. Second, their strong wish and hope that they could overcome these negative experiences caused learning motives for changing their life. Old female learners experience changed life styles and attitudes through acquiring not only technical skills but also new social roles from helping and sharing with others in daily life. Finally, they came to reinterpret their lives to overcome their inferiority complex through diverse activities, and began to have new dream and desire for learning after participating in lifelong learning. However, since death anxiety accompanied by aging was ambivalent emotion, they were hard to step out from their anxiety and difficult to overcome them only by lifelong learning.

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