On Returning to School: Adults' Lived Experiences

In this paper, I use a phenomenological and hermeneutic approach to explore the lived experience of graduate students returning to school. The paper begins with a reflexive narrative in which I connect adults' experience of graduate school with children' s experience of elementary school. The paper then reports on some of the research interviews I conducted with 30 graduate students. I interlace direct quotations from the interviews with my interpretations of the students' experiences. I argue that the boundaries between child learner and adult learner are socially constructed and not ontological.