Chapter 3: Revealing Children's Informal and Everyday Learning

When children engage in everyday and out-of-school learning they use a range of sophisticated skills to learn, to motivate themselves, and to engage either independently or socially in their play or activity. This learning is not always visible or acknowledged, and even the children do not always see themselves as successful learners on these occasions. Instead, they rely on school-based learning and assessment systems to determine their worth as a learner. This chapter discusses how we took a different approach to reveal children’s everyday learning as a phenomenon in its own right and to identify the categories and dimensions that constitute this learning. In this way, we arrive at a better position from which to articulate and document what it means ‘to learn’ outside of school and to have a language to talk with children about their out-of-school learning. As the quotation from a child research participant at the beginning of the chapter suggests, in this project, we were fortunate to be able to stay a long time with the children in order to learn something from, with and about them.