The Use of Life History Collage to Explore Learning Related to the Enactment of Social Consciousness in Female Nonprofit Leaders

This paper advances a novel qualitative research approach using life history collage. Rather that utilizing an interview protocol to enter into a participant’s story, life history collage invites participants to create a longitudinal collage of significant life events around a theme such as learning, relationships, or identity. The longitudinal nature of the collage situates and prioritizes significant life events with images, words, and elements chosen to represent events and circumstances. Each image within the collage contains rich and nuanced storylines that invite exploration by both researcher and participant. Meanings and subtexts are revealed as participants describe their collage and the choices they made regarding image and representation. This research method was used to explore the enactment of learning related to social consciousness in female nonprofit leaders. Enactivism, a biologically based learning theory, was used to analyze themes that emerged in the life history collages. The structural organization of each participant related to social consciousness was examined and a consideration of how this structure coupled with environmental opportunities to coemerge social consciousness was explored. Findings indicated that the structural organizations related to each woman’s social consciousness were shaped in childhood, but were enacted in late adolescence and adulthood and were not directly ascribed to constructs of social action. In other words, constructs such as frugality, responsibility, and class mobility were structures that drove women to couple with opportunities to “make a difference.