Writing a Diary as Tool of Self-formation

Keeping a diary is a long-standing practice. This text proposes to clarify this form of writing involved through the prism of informal education and to understand how this practice fits into the paradigm of lifelong education. If it is difficult to place keeping a diary in one clearly identified discipline, one can nevertheless locate the practice of diary keeping halfway between a critical sociology and a sociology of criticism. The clinical approach involved gives it an overall level of operation that refracts other personal, institutional and group projects. These are analyzed here within multi-disciplinary frames of reference.