Peter Jarvis: Lifelong coach learning

Peter Jarvis was born in 1937 in the United Kingdom. He is a Professor of Continuing Education at the University of Surrey and a former Adjunct Professor in the Department of Adult Education, University of Georgia, USA. He studied sociology at Sheffield University (1969), took a master’s at Birmingham (1969), and a Ph.D. at Aston (1977). For Jarvis ‘learning should have life-wide connotations, or perhaps more significantly … we need to look at the whole person learning in life-wide contexts’ (Jarvis 2006: 49). Therefore, we have selected some biographical events that we think may have had an impact on Jarvis’ journey of becoming who he now is. When he was eight his father was killed in a road accident and from the age of ten until he left school he worked in a dairy to supplement the family’s income. Unfortunately, he had to drop out of school because of low marks but then he decided to volunteer for the Royal Air Force. After three years he looked for a new life episode; he wanted to be a ‘helper’, thus he studied theology and became a full-time minister. During this time he studied full-time and got his first degree in Sociology and Politics. In reference to this period he mentioned that his first lecture in adult education was when he preached his first sermon (around 1955). Jarvis has a prolific career, writing and editing over thirty books and 200 papersand book chapters. He is still very active, contributing to our learning by sharing his deep knowledge and experience of the field, as demonstrated in a recent article ‘From Adult Education to Lifelong Learning and Beyond’ (Jarvis 2014). Jarvis is often presented as a pioneer in the field of adult education, and his first book, published in 1983, was entitled Adult and Continuing Education: Theory and Practice. While adult learning was his starting point, he progressively included the concept of lifelong learning. For example, the title of the third edition of his first book (2004) was changed to Adult Education and Lifelong Learning: Theory and Practice. Inan interview that took place at the Routledge offices in Abingdon (UK) in January 2009, when asked, ‘When you look back on your career in lifelong education what are you most proud of?’ the answer was: ‘Starting the International Journal of Lifelong Education’. Among his reasons he mentioned: ‘As I look back, yes, there have been a lot of people published in this journal, some of them publishing their first articles, and if we can give people an opportunity to develop themselves through a journal that, for me, is terrific.’