Possible Selves and Adult Learning: Perspectives and Potential (review)

The nature and operations of the “self ” or the “self-concept” have posed essential problems for academic and popular psychology. Thus: Is the self stable over the course of one’s life or is it malleable? Is there one “true” self or several? And how does one’s self-concept influence behavior? With the idea of the “possible self,” Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius (1986) named a feature of cognitive structure that was dynamic and future oriented but with significant meaning for any life as it was being lived. Thus, “possible selves . . . provide the interpretive and evaluative context for the now self” (964).

Markus and Nurius proposed that the concept could overcome the static quality of many other formulations and help to explain behavior by coordinating concrete images of the future representing both opportunities and threats to change and development. “Possible selves provide for a complex and variable self-concept but are authentic in the sense that they represent the individual’s persistent hopes and fears and indicate what could be realized given appropriate social conditions” (965).

The concept of the possible self has become an influential one (the article introducing it has been cited over a thousand times in work in the behavioral sciences) and thus deserves the attention represented by Marsha Rossiter’s slim volume. In her introduction, she proposes that “our insights into adult learners’ motivation, future time orientation, educational goals, and self-efficacy beliefs will be enriched by an acquaintance with the dynamics of possible selves” (13). In effect, the concept offers a fresh vocabulary for addressing familiar theoretical and practical problems in adult learning but even more so in activities occurring in the classroom and other locations of formal education.

In Chapter 2, Ageliki Leondari identifies the particular responsibility that teachers of adults have in recognizing their students’ possible selves. “Given that their views of various career and educational opportunities may have been stunted or curtailed earlier in these learners’ lives, the educator’s role in facilitating an expansion or transformation of the learner’s sense of possibility is critical” (23). Still, there is a difference between supporting a student’s image of herself or himself for the future as a resource for aspiration and significant change and mobilizing a possible self for academic work currently underway. The image of the successful student—an example of the possible self—can reinforce self-efficacy. And the modesty of classroom success as a reachable goal can fortify the habit of academic achievement. That is what Leondari acknowledges: “Those selves that seem plausible and probable for one give meaning to current behavior—positive and negative—and influence the direction of current activities by enabling the person to focus attention on specific, task-relevant thoughts and to organize action” (20).

Like the other contributors, Leondari recognizes that possible selves can be “vivid and elaborate” and have roles in “fostering a positive emotional state that is energizing” (20). Thus, an individual can look well beyond a particular performance on an exam or in a course. Accordingly, the possible self can be seen as a kind of bridge between what must be done in the present to move someone toward a goal that may be relatively abstract and far in the future.

The applied context of most adult learning means that the possible self is seen as a resource for career counseling and what new educational and career aspirations it can demand, typically in the resumption of postsecondary education or embarking on it for the first time. In Chapter 4, Lee and Daphna Oyserman seek to influence institutions and educational policymakers to recognize the role of the possible self among low-income single mothers struggling to succeed as nontraditional students. Their aspirations are to be cultivated but not without attention to the uses of “feared possible selves” (the unsuccessful student) and their productive role in motivation.

Markus and Nurius called attention to the need for...