Master of Education in Adult Learning and Education (MEd) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

A man I helped at the library last spring kept every password he owned on a folded sheet of paper in his wallet, written in pencil so he could change them. He was sixty-eight, had worked forty years as a joiner, and needed to renew a parking permit online. He did not need me to explain what a browser was. He needed someone to sit beside him while he did it himself, slowly, without taking the mouse. That afternoon has stayed with me because it showed how much adults bring to learning, and how easily well-meaning help can take it away from them.

I have worked as a library assistant for three years, and for the last eighteen months I have run two weekly drop-in sessions for people who want help with phones, email and government websites. When I started, the sessions were essentially queues. I reorganised them so that people booking a second visit were paired with a short practice task they had chosen, such as attaching a photo to an email for a grandchild, and I wrote one-page guides in large print with space for their own notes. Attendance at the second session became more regular, and several regulars now help newcomers at the next table. I did not design anything sophisticated, but I learned to ask what someone was trying to do before deciding what they needed to know.

My interest in why adults stay or stop began during my sociology degree. My dissertation used interviews with eleven former students of a further education college's evening courses who had not completed them. I expected cost and time to dominate their explanations. Those mattered, but what surprised me was how often people described a single moment of feeling exposed, such as being asked to read aloud or being corrected in front of younger classmates, as the point where their commitment weakened. The study was small and I was careful not to generalise from it, but it left me with questions I want to pursue properly about dignity, belonging and the structure of adult classrooms.

Since graduating I have read more widely. Malcolm Knowles's account of andragogy gave me useful language for what I saw at the library, particularly the idea that adults orient learning around problems in their own lives, though I have also read critiques suggesting his assumptions describe some adults better than others. Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed challenged me more. His criticism of the banking model of education made me uncomfortable about my early help-desk habit of simply demonstrating steps, and his insistence on dialogue has shaped how I approach my volunteering.

That volunteering is with a community group running English conversation evenings for recently arrived adults. I am not a qualified ESOL teacher and I do not plan lessons; I facilitate a table of four or five people around a topic the coordinator sets. Even so, I have noticed how much the conversations improve when participants choose the examples, whether that is describing a dish, a job they used to do or a bus route that confuses them.

Outside work I mend bicycles, mostly for friends and occasionally at a monthly repair café, where the rule is that the owner holds the tools. It is a small thing, but it shares the principle I value most in adult education: that people learn best when the competence they leave with is their own.

I want to undertake postgraduate study because my practical experience has outrun my ability to explain it. I would like to study the research on adult participation, community-based and informal learning, and the relationship between education and social inclusion, and to develop the methods to investigate these questions more rigorously than my undergraduate project allowed. In the longer term I hope to work in community or public library learning provision, designing programmes that adults return to because they were treated as capable from the start.