Chapter 9: Conclusion

The key aims of the project reported in this book have been to (i) convey a sense of the richness of children’s informal learning in their everyday lives and (ii) encourage families, teachers, and schools to support and assist children to bridge the conceptual and practical chasms they often experience between their learning in-school and out-of-school. Our overarching proposition is that classrooms and schools should be reoriented to draw more intentionally on the learning strengths that children bring from their childhood worlds outside school to the classroom and to the routine teaching, learning, and curriculum relations within it.

This proposition is not without limitations or constraints, particularly in the contemporary schooling policy environment that places so much emphasis on the assessment of abstract academic achievement outcomes and where ‘educational discussion is dominated by talk of standards’ (Noddings, 2003, p. 84; see also Alexander, 2011; Thrupp, 2018).