An experience academic becomes participant in a training course. An autoethnography of emotion and learning

In this paper I explore my emotional involvement in a Train the Trainer Course (TTC) for adult education I attended in 2010. Within this learning experience I was a participant involved simultaneously in observing my participation. My aim is to explore the emotional life of ‘an academic going back to school’. In the first part of this paper I will present my background and the TTC context and then I will describe autoethnography as a research method. In the second part I will consider some autoethnographic vignettes written during the course; I use a reflexive narrative to comment on my emotional and learning experience. At the end I focus on my emotional narratives, my learning during the TTC and on the connection between learning and emotions.