May 24th, 2019, 13:00 hrs., at the MRU LAB (L-102), Institute of Educational Sciences and Social Work PhD student Neringa Kurapkaitienė will defend her dissertation, "Learning Experience From Volunteering of Young Adults."
The aim of the doctoral dissertation was to investigate and describe the phenomenon of young adults learning in volunteering by listening and analyzing the experience of the research participants.
Interpretative phenomenological analysis methodology (Smith et al., 2009) was chosen for the research and the implemented semistructured interview for the investigation.
The research data revealed the process of learning in volunteering, according to the experience of the research participants. The learning process is experienced by volunteers in trustful relationship with the Other when relation becomes a part of the "I - Thou" dialogue.
Trustful relationship volunteers, created with a freely chosen authority, that makes even the most difficult experiences in volunteering understandable and meaningful. Because of the trustful relationship, young adults were able to help the Other constantly and at the same time to survive the existential crises. Without authority and without trustful and recognition based relationship, learning in volunteering becomes impossible and help loses its meaning.
In the absence of a trustful, recognition based relationship with a the chosen authority - pushed into the experience of meaningless existence, which, for the young adult, remained as an incomprehensible experience.
The experience of the research participants revealed isolation experience in volunteering, which was occurring by being different and a stranger. The experience of isolation has led young adults to a meeting with themselves or towards exclusion as an essential experience of volunteering. On the one hand, isolation experience served to bring the idealized image of volunteering closer to the reality through poverty, illness, disability, and so on.
On the other hand, isolation of a volunteer without trustful and recognition-based relationship closed volunteers in the long-term exclusion. Learning from volunteering is fulfilled deliberately and unconsciously, while trying/or not trying to give a meaning to the experience.
The perspective of learning from volunteering opens up through a paradigm of learning from experience, holistic learning, transformative learning, and perceptual learning.
Research participants deliberately and/or unconsciously experienced learning in volunteering, that led them to a multi-faceted and multi-layered understanding of themselves and of the Other.