Abstract

The times in which we are moving are characterized on the one hand by the boom of memory and on the other by anamnesis (Martin-Barbero J.; 2003), a contradiction that denotes how we tend to “recycle” the past, keeping something and forgetting others things. The question of time and temporalities affected also our learning process, especially when we focus on “experiential learning” (Charlot, B; 1997) that is built in relation to ourselves and not just on technical knowledge. Indeed if learning is related to ourselves, to our identities changing in the flow of time, also the things that we can learn form the same experience, now archived in the past, are in-process. In this paper I analyze the learning process in a no-formal education experience (“European Voluntary Service”) through autoethnographic documents (Carolyn E., Bochner A.P.; 2000) written in two different time-moments, at two year of distance one from the other. This paper puts in communication the differences, the shifts and the new focus I acquire. What we learn form experiences is not fixed but continually changed and rebuilt, exactly as we change and rebuilt, in the flow of time, our identity ( Brockmeier J.; 2000). Not often we have time to stop re-think about our past learning to discover how it changed; but considering that “the past is invasive” (Virno P.; 1999), deeply influent to the present, it became fundamental to be aware about what we preserve, in this changing process, of our pasts experience.