Chapter 2: The Richness of Children's Lives

An important point of departure in this book is our claim that there is a richness to children’s everyday lives and learning across the multiple activities and settings in which they are engaged, but that this richness has largely been rendered invisible and not recognised as contributing to valuable learning. In part, this is due to the hegemonic importance and value ascribed to formal learning in many cultures. These significantly shape what families and professional educators understand learning to be about and what teaching should consequently promote and facilitate. As one consequence, the great majority of educational research, theorising and policy about learning has been focused on learning in formal contexts such as early childhood education and care settings and schools. The invisibility of informal, everyday learning outside schooling is also a consequence of the way children and childhood have been thought about and positioned according to adult ways of experiencing the world. Adult conceptions of children and childhood have also had implications for children’s involvement in the generation of knowledge about their own lives.