Becoming informed the informal way
July 2006
Informal learning - often, but not necessarily, supported by technology - can take place anywhere. It's not restricted to traditional classrooms and lessons. It's mobile, flexible and empowers the learner to make choices. It can also help to create powerful and relevant learning experiences, both in and outside of school, to truly engage learners, so maybe it's time to embrace informal learning...
With its many different guises, informal learning can include phoning someone to ask for information, being shown how to do something, or meeting people by chance and talking, either literally or online. It also often involves being guided by some sort of mentor.
Ian Cunningham's work in Sussex is a good example. He offers what he calls 'self managed learning' at his South Downs Learning Centre in Brighton. "The law requires that children be educated, whether in a school or elsewhere, and it gives equal status to both," says Cunningham, who works with three Sussex secondary schools and with primary schools in the London Borough of Haringey. He also runs 'learning groups' at the South Downs Learning Centre for flexischoolers and others wanting an alternative to fulltime classroom-based learning.
"Our research has identified 55 different approaches to learning," says Cunningham. "They include classrooms, computers, visits, work experience shadowing, discussions outside school and 50 others." The young people he works with can learn in any way which suits them. But this is no 'permissive' free-for-all. "They have to take responsibility for their own learning. And everyone negotiates how and what they are going to learn," he says.
The 'well-I-never-knew-that' sensation which comes to most people as they read, hear or notice things at any stage of life is part of informal learning. It can be enhanced by the current trend for online resources which support collaboration and enable people to share knowledge creatively and freely. Websites, blogs and wikis are among the technologies which can underpin a lot of this learning - aiding learners to learn, wherever they are. However, currently many children are in a 'walled garden' because schools, rightly mindful of child protection, restrict pupil internet and technology access. But limited information can mean limited learning - what's important is to teach them to be mature and responsible with the tools and information available to them.
Take Notschool, for example, which receives £3 million a year from the DfES and is currently working with more than 1,700 students in more than 20 LEAs, as they were known until recently. It's an online research programme which looks at ways of re-engaging young people of school age back into learning. They may be, for example, ill, disaffected, excluded or just looking for different way to learn. Notschool - part of the charity TheCademy - is specifically aimed at those for whom traditional alternatives to school, such as home tutoring, have not worked. Students are called researchers to emphasise the independent status of their learning. Each gets a free Apple Mac and online guidance in a wide range of courses, many of them leading to formal assessment and accreditation.
Recognition of the immeasurable value of informal learning requires a new mindset for schools. In the real world - at work and elsewhere - if you want or need to know something you go and ask someone, search the internet or consult printed material. If you want people to learn, it's illogical not to share expertise and knowledge. Cunningham, who regards collaboration as the key to all learning, agrees: "At work we encourage innovation, but in education that's stealing. And copying someone else's good idea is cheating if you do it in school. Research has shown that the peer group is by far the biggest influence on young people. So education needs to harness that for the good." He argues that the key to combating disaffection is choice, allowing pupils to control their own learning: "We have to get to a point when we let learners work out for themselves, with help, what they need to know and how they are going to learn it."
Of course this means a changing role for teachers and, possibly, a shift away from curriculum/exam-dominated education - although informal learning does not mean an absence of structure and nor does it exclude assessment. There has to be an increased level of trust between teachers and learners - whether they are in a nursery group, a post-retirement class or anything in between. The system will need to develop and support teachers so that they feel comfortable with not knowing all the answers. Indeed, many teachers are already recognising that they are more like 'advanced learners', helping pupils to access a variety of experts, either actually or virtually. It would make school-based learning much broader, extending it into the home and community.
Community Media is a Teesside-based project which grew out of community radio, where ICT and digital media developments have helped to create a range of opportunities for individuals and community groups to learn and teach collaboratively and to share information. It includes community websites, image galleries and a community media archive as well as Tyneblog, a number of blogs that reflect the culture, diversity and community issues on Tyneside. For instance, there is a blog called The Tall Ships Race which includes discussion and information not only about this famous race, but also about the local area generally.
Informal learning already meets many lifelong learning needs. Nicola Klein, 50, for example, a freelance journalist, wanted to improve her French. So she signed up for an Open University course, structured to take seven hours a week for nine months. "I quickly realised that I just can't set aside that sort of time," says Nicola. "So I shall just work through the course material at my own pace. It will probably take me 18 months but it doesn't matter. My French is improving all the time." Meanwhile Nicola is supplementing her learning by reading French magazines, accessing French websites, listening to French radio stations and e-mailing friends in France in their own language - all good examples of informal learning. No one has told Nicola to do any of this. She is a self-motivated learner and has fixed her own goals. She has personalised what the OU is offering her.
However the question of how to successfully integrate these valuable out-of-school learning resources and the lessons they teach about learning preferences into the education system remains, on the whole, unsolved. The English novelist GK Chesterton (1874-1936) once pessimistically described education as "the period during which you are being instructed by someone you do not know about something you do not want to know." Clearly he was a disaffected student, present in body but spiritually absent from school - and there are thousands like him in schools today.
More emphasis on informal learning - already the norm for many adult learners - could be part of the solution. We need to determine how we can better incorporate informal approaches to learning into schools to create more powerful and relevant learning experiences. This might mean considering how digital technologies could be used and how a school's layout could be adapted to enable informal learning. Fresh thinking about the way our schools are designed could help to blur the lines between learning in school and informal learning.
Of course, at the heart of all of this are the learners themselves. Yes, the physical layout, infrastructure and technology of a school are significant in enabling learners to incorporate informal learning into their education, but we also need to understand how to offer appropriate and relevant choices for learners. If we can learn from the choices that students make when learning informally (eg how they prefer to select the topics and tools they use, access experts and measure success) and we can offer an education system that reflects those preferences, whether in or out of school, then we could be looking at an education provision that truly engages learners.