Learning in Places: The Informal Education Reader

by Zvi Bekerman (Editor)

Learning in Places is a concerted effort undertaken by an outstanding group of international researchers to create a resource book that can introduce academic, professional and lay readers to the field of informal learning/education and its potential to transform present educational thinking. The book presents a wealth of ideas from a wide variety of disciplinary fields and methodological approaches covering multiple learning landscapes – in museums, workplaces, classrooms, places of recreation – in a variety of political, social and cultural contexts around the world. Learning in Places presents the most recent theoretical advances in the field; analyzing the social, cultural, political, historical and economical contexts within which informal learning develops and must be critiqued. It also looks into the epistemology that nourishes its development and into the practices that characterize its implementation; and finally reflects on the variety of educational contexts in which it is practiced.

315 pages, Paperback

First published November 16, 2005

Reviews

[Burke Scarbrough · Rating 4 out of 5]

The articles in this reader vary widely in their aims and interests, but if you're interested in a comparison between the approach to learning institutionalized by schools and the approach to learning inherent in informal settings, this is a good start.

[Fish · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book does a much better job of pointing outward at larger theoretical infrastructure underlying trends in "informal" education learning than it does presenting and analyzing specific instances of it. I found myself making notes about bibliographic entries of Bourdieu. Vygotsky and Freire to pursue from these essays more often than I was making notes about methodological revelations or compelling case studies, though there were some of the latter present as well (the piece on community mediated/ supported learning of weaving comes immediately to mind).

The most compelling and, for me, ultimately useful/productive essays in this book, are those which deal broadly (almost at a sort of phenomenological level) with notions of time, place and learning. If the title "Learning in Places" seems vague or pretentious at the outset, I think that it is clearly revealed to be an appropriate one for a collection that deals so well with such a multifaceted and ubiquitous phenomenon as curriculum-free learning.