Conference Program

Adult education is often framed within the policy discourse of upskilling and employability. Yet, when observed through the lens of life-course trajectories, it reveals a more complex dynamic: learning frequently emerges at moments of rupture — job loss, migration, interrupted schooling, downward mobility, or delayed certification. Building on previous research on personality as a cognitive “filter” in adult learning and on the notion of learning as resistance within evening schools and CPIA contexts, this paper advances a further step: cognitive friction is not merely instructional, but biographical.

The life-course perspective allows us to reinterpret adult learning as a transitional space where identity, work and migration trajectories intersect. In such contexts, learners do not encounter new knowledge in a neutral cognitive vacuum; they confront it through sedimented beliefs, self-concepts and work-related identities. Personality traits — including openness to experience, conscientiousness, tolerance of ambiguity and perceived self-efficacy — shape how individuals interpret and metabolize educational demands during periods of instability. Cognitive friction thus arises when new epistemic frameworks challenge previously stabilized biographical narratives.

This friction becomes particularly visible among migrant learners and adults returning to education after prolonged exclusion. For migrant students, educational participation is entangled with linguistic adaptation, recognition of prior learning and renegotiation of professional status. For adults in work transitions, learning may threaten established self-definitions while simultaneously offering re-legitimation. In both cases, resistance to learning should not be read as deficit but as a signal of biographical realignment in progress.

Drawing on empirical reflections from Italian adult education settings (CPIA and evening courses) and integrating personality theory with transformative learning perspectives, the paper proposes the concept of biographical friction. This notion designates the tension generated when institutional learning structures encounter life histories marked by discontinuity. Unlike traditional models that focus on learning styles or purely motivational variables, biographical friction situates cognitive resistance within broader socio-economic and migratory trajectories.

The argument has two implications. First, adult education policies centered exclusively on human capital and employability risk overlooking the identity work required in transitional phases of life. Second, personalization in adult learning should move beyond adaptive didactics toward recognition of biographical density — including work histories, migratory experiences and prior educational failures.

Within the panel’s focus on life courses, youth, migration and work, this contribution suggests that adult education functions less as a linear continuation of schooling and more as a critical hinge in life trajectories. Where friction appears, transformation becomes possible — but only if educational institutions recognize that learning, at certain stages of life, is never purely cognitive: it is existential, social and biographical.