Resisting ageism through lifelong learning mature students' counter-narratives to the construction of aging as decline

This study aims to investigate the narratives of some “mature” students who are challenging the widely-shared view that studying, and learning new things, is a prerogative of young people. Twenty-five narrative interviews were conducted with older people enrolled at the University of Padua, Italy, to shed light on the motives, values, self-image, and personal solutions that supported their decision to resume and successfully pursue a path of studies at a “non-canonical” age. Starting from perspectives that emphasize the social dimension of meaning-making activity, we explore the counter-narratives functional to the deconstruction of “age prejudice”. The results that emerge from a thematic and structural narrative analysis show some common themes and three different counter-narratives through which respondents try to challenge the idea that they are too old to study. The paper ends with some considerations on the degree of efficacy with which these counter-narratives can resist age prejudice, identifying cases in which they favor change on a personal, social, or cultural level.