Chapter 6: Changing Understandings of Informal Learning

One of the valuable educational aspects of this project was the opportunity for us to develop understandings of how the children’s, teachers’, parents’, and caregivers’ conceptions of informal learning changed over time, across multiple contexts, and in the authentic settings of their everyday experiences. Educational research typically does not receive significant amounts of public or philanthropic research funding compared with, say, health research. Consequently, it is too often confined to providing snapshots in time of a particular phenomenon using approaches and designs that do not allow for an understanding of how learning changes as life proceeds. This inevitably limits our understanding both of everyday learning over time and of its consequential effects on the development of children, their family, and their teachers.