Chapter 8: Expansive Conceptions of Informal and Everyday Learning

The approaches, frameworks, methods, and tools we developed during the project all derive from sociocultural and cognitive theories about learning and learners. These theories share four key premises as far as children are concerned. They are that: (i) children’s thinking is not inferior to adults’ thinking, just qualitatively different (Piaget, 1929, 1979); (ii) children learn with more knowledgeable peers or elders in socially mediated contexts (Vygotsky, 1978); (iii) the community within which children live influences what and how they learn, and they in turn influence others (Rogoff, 2003; Rogoff et al., 2016); and (iv) the activity systems children engage in have multiple distinctive rules, roles, and mediating artefacts that contribute towards children’s understanding of the object of their learning (Engeström, 2001). The focus of these four premises moves from the individual, to the social, to community contexts more broadly, and towards activity systems within those contexts. The premises collectively suggest that to gain a rounded understanding of children’s informal learning and a rounded appreciation of them as everyday learners, we need to see both the individual in the social, and the social in the individual. That is what we mean here by an expansive conception of children and their learning. We develop such an expansive conception in this chapter by bringing together the individual insights afforded through the CRISPA lens and the social insights provided through an analysis of children’s learning within activity systems using the complementary lens of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) (Engeström, 2001).