The Story Inside the System: Applying Autoethnography in Adult Education and Human Resource Development

This paper examines autoethnography as a research methodology, pedagogical practice, and tool for professional reflection within adult education and human resource development. Autoethnography allows practitioners to critically examine work and life experiences by integrating autobiographical narrative with ethnographic inquiry, situating personal experience within broader cultural, historical, and institutional contexts. Drawing on scholarship from both fields, the paper traces the emergence of autoethnography alongside shifts in qualitative research that challenged positivist assumptions and emphasized reflexivity, subjectivity, and ethical responsibility. Within adult education, autoethnography aligns with long standing traditions of experiential learning, critical pedagogy, and life history approaches that treat learners’ stories as sites of knowledge production. Within human resource development, it offers a means of examining workplace learning, professional identity, organizational culture, and power relations that are often overlooked by rational technical approaches. The paper explores how autoethnography is used to support critical learning, surface barriers and inequities, deepen understanding of learners and practitioners, inform curriculum and organizational practice, and contribute to advocacy and institutional change. Ethical considerations are examined, including vulnerability, consent, relational responsibility, and power dynamics in research and instructional contexts. Together, these perspectives position autoethnography as a method that connects lived experience to broader educational and organizational concerns while foregrounding the responsibilities that accompany writing from the self.