Informal Learning Contexts Research Articles

Music Learning as Life in an African American Family: The Story of Charlie Gabriel in New Orleans

The focus of this study is the early music education of Charlie Gabriel who learned to play jazz as a child in New Orleans and went on to enjoy a successful, international performance career. The work is based on an oral history account where the primary data collection process was interview. The key issues that emerged from the oral history are (1) the ubiquitous presence of music in Mr. Gabriel’s life experience and the musical enculturation this presence enabled, (2) the life-sustaining role of music in the lives of family members, which gave rise to a drive to participate actively in music and a pervasive striving for musical excellence, and (3) ever-present mentorship and apprenticeship in Mr. Gabriel’s home and in the musical community. These issues are discussed in the context of related literature on the roles played by musical families; the musical community; music for income/supporting survival, including federal support during the Great Depression; striving for musical excellence in both informal and formal learning contexts; and African roots of early jazz pedagogy

Sport Knowledge: The Effects of Division I Coach Communication on Student-Athlete Learning Indicators

Sporting environments are informal contexts of learning that are dependent upon coaches’ use of effective instructional communication strategies. Coaches’ use of power while communicating instruction to athletes is especially germane, as coaches must appropriately use relational influence to inspire optimal athletic performance. Using French and Raven’s power bases (i.e., expert, referent, reward, legitimate, and coercive power), this study considers Division I student-athletes’ reports of affective learning for their sport and coaches, cognitive learning, state motivation, and team winning percentages as a function of their coaches’ use of power. Data collected from 170 student-athletes participating in team sports at Power 5 institutions revealed two significant canonical correlation roots. The first demonstrated that the increased use of prosocial power and avoidance of antisocial power were associated with greater amounts of affective learning for coaches, cognitive learning, and state motivation. The second revealed that expert power was associated with increases in cognitive learning and winning. This research has heuristic implications for expanding the assessment of athlete experience, as well as practical implications regarding the identification of effective modes of relational influence in coaching.

Learning in digital play: a dual case study of video gamers\u2019 independent play

This paper explores the implications of youths’ out-of-school gaming practices for teaching and learning in formal and informal learning contexts. We report on a study where we examined the video game play of two youths using a case study approach. User experience approaches, e.g. the think-aloud protocol and interviews, were grounded in the theoretical framework of social semiotics to analyse the gameplay videos and to discuss the implications for the youths’ learning. The paper contends that youths are demonstrating critical thinking, empathy, and multimodal literacy through their gameplay. We offer suggestions for how adults can use video games for youths’ learning.

Hands on: Nonverbal communication in Native and non-Native American parent-child dyads during informal learning.

Parent-child communication is a rich, multimodal process. Substantial research has documented the communicative strategies in certain (predominantly White) United States families, yet we know little about these communicative strategies in Native American families. The current study addresses that gap by documenting the verbal and nonverbal behaviors used by parents and their 4-year-old children (N = 39, 25 boys) across two communities: Menominee families (low to middle income) living on tribal lands in rural Wisconsin, and non-Native, primarily White families (middle income) living in an urban area. Dyads participated in a free-play forest-diorama task designed to elicit talk and play about the natural world. Children from both communities incorporated actions and gestures freely in their talk, emphasizing the importance of considering nonverbal behaviors when evaluating what children know. In sharp contrast to the stereotype that Native American children talk very little, Menominee children talked more than their non-Native counterparts, underlining the importance of taking into account cultural context in child assessments. For children and parents across both communities, gestures were more likely than actions to be related to the content of speech and were more likely than actions to be produced simultaneously with speech. This tight coupling between speech and gesture replicates and extends prior research with predominantly White (and adult) samples. These findings not only broaden our theories of communicative interaction and development, but also provide new evidence about the role of nonverbal behaviors in informal learning contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The US bioeconomy at the intersection of technology, policy, and education

AbstractThe bioeconomy is a complex, multivariate, and interdisciplinary system that requires a comprehensive assessment of its independent parts if it is to be understood fully. Hence, this article presents a holistic perspective of industry, public policy, and education aspects of the US bioeconomy. It is premised on the idea that a successful bioeconomy industry relies on the balanced development of all stages of the supply chain. For this balance to be struck, a strong interdisciplinary workforce must find novel solutions to multifaceted problems across the entirety of the supply chain. These solutions require innovative technologies that can improve the climate benefit of bioproducts, decrease their production costs, and make them more economically competitive. Increasing consumer education and awareness about the bioeconomy goes hand in hand with the development of a robust market for bioproducts. To guide these interdependent efforts, public policies must encourage demand, support competitive markets, promote the entry of renewable options, and stimulate growth by reducing financial barriers. We contend that a combination of policies is likely to be more effective than any singular policy on its own. Supporting the bioeconomy also entails attending to an existing lack of public awareness as well as workforce‐ready professionals. To address these gaps, the USA must increase the intensity and intentionality of its efforts to educate students about the bioeconomy, particularly at the K‐12 level. Furthermore, these efforts should encompass both formal and informal learning contexts in order to meet the workforce challenges facing the bioeconomy now and in the future. © 2021 The Authors. Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining published by Society of Industrial Chemistry and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Engineering play with blocks as an informal learning context for executive function and planning

AbstractBackgroundEngineering play is an emerging framework for understanding young children's constructive block play as an engineering design process. Few studies have evaluated engineering thinking, language, or behavior in preschool‐age children, especially quantitative evaluations that systematically document specific early engineering behavior. More research is needed to support diverse children's engineering education in ecologically valid classroom contexts and understand relations with the key cognitive domains that predict school readiness.Purpose/HypothesisThe present study investigated the associations of executive functioning and planning skills with preschoolers' engineering play behaviors with wooden unit blocks, tested the moderating role of disability status in these associations, and provided additional reliability and validity data on the Preschool Engineering Play Behaviors (P‐EPB) measure.Design/MethodParticipants were 110 preschoolers (44% female; 25% children with disabilities) observed and coded during 15‐min block play sessions with a peer partner. Children completed separate formal assessments of executive function and planning.ResultsA one‐factor engineering play variable including six behavior categories (i.e., communicating goals, problem‐solving, explaining how things are built/work, following patterns and prototypes, logical and mathematical words, and technical vocabulary) was significantly and positively associated with executive function and planning for children with disabilities.ConclusionsResults provide new knowledge about early engineering measurement and implications for teaching and learning engineering across multiple academic disciplines and with children from diverse developmental backgrounds.

Heritage Education and Research in Museums. Conceptual, Intellectual and Social Structure within a Knowledge Domain (2000–2019)

Heritage and museums have constituted two fundamental axes of heritage education research in recent decades. This can be defined as the pedagogical process in which people can learn about heritage assets in formal or informal learning contexts. Museums, as centres of reference in informal education, are in constant and fluid contact with schools and produce different and varied didactic materials related to heritage. This paper provides results concerning the development and shaping of the knowledge domain known as heritage education between 2000 and 2019 on the Web of Science (WoS). To this end, different techniques and tools have been used: R-package Bibliometrix and VOSviewer. This analysis has identified five clusters with the topics underpinning heritage education as a specific field of knowledge. Our inquiry has highlighted the fact that there has been an increase in production regarding research topics associated with heritage education and museums in this period, particularly between 2015 and 2019. The inclusion of ESCI journals has led to a greater visibility of WoS-indexed academic production in some countries. Finally, the concepts “heritage”, “museum” and “education” are the axes around which the research paradigms related to heritage education research seem to have been developed.

Pleasure or pain or both? Exploring working holiday experiences through the lens of transformative learning theory

Research on tourist transformation and transformative experiences is in its infancy. How tourists are triggered in a transformative dynamic of positive and negative components is little understood. This study attempts to fill this gap by using transformative learning theory (TLT) to explore working holiday experiences, based on evidence from Hong Kong tourists. A working holiday is a unique informal learning context involving an extended stay at a destination, which offers both pleasures and challenges. Interviews with working holiday tourists reveal that pleasurable and painful experiences are included in their working holiday recollections. Working holiday tourists transform themselves informally through these experiences, attaining psychological, behavioural and convictional outcomes. Our results provide managerial insights for government agencies, host destinations and other stakeholders, showing how they can enhance working holiday tourists’ experiences and enable transformative learning outcomes.

The effect of perceived competence on second language communication frequency: the mediating roles of motivation, willingness to communicate, and international posture

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the mediating effects of second language (L2) motivation, willingness to communicate (WTC), and international posture on the relationship between L2 Self-perceived communication competence (SPCC) and L2 frequency of communication (L2 FC) in online informal English learning contexts among tertiary students in Malaysia. The predictor variables were drawn from Gardner’s (1985) socio-educational model of language learning and MacIntyre and Charos’ (1996) WTC model and adapted to examine the frequency of communication in online contexts. A total of 296 valid responses were collected from university students in Malaysia. The data were collected using online survey and were analysed through partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) technique. The findings suggested that higher level of L2 SPCC would lead to more frequent L2 use in online contexts. Furthermore, the mediating roles of L2 WTC and international posture were found to be statistically significant. However, the mediating effect of L2 motivation on the relationship between L2 SPCC and communication frequency was not supported in this study. Implications of the research findings for understanding the relationship among the study’s variables are also discussed.

Ethnographic "Experimental Collaborations" As Practitioner Methodology

In this paper we discuss emergent cross-cutting themes across a series of educational intervention projects in which practitioners-in-training adopted and adapted in their proposals and work design the logic of ethnographic experimental collaboration (XCOL) and participatory action research (PAR) (Clark, 2010; Estalella & Sánchez-Criado, 2018) perspectives. We were involved in three interventions developed in Madrid (Spain) across formal and informal learning contexts as part of the internship/practicum of future educational psychologists. Our work was designed in response to the identified needs and demands of the internship sites. Yet, as educational interventions, they were explicitly conceptualized and implemented in ways that depart substantially from the common expectations of process-product educational intervention and dominant ways, at least in Spain, of constructing educational accountability (cf. Berliner, 1989; Gage & Needels, 1989). We unpack four themes relevant across the three projects, which emerged from our joint discussions of the three interventions: (a) how "outcomes/results" are reconstructed in XCOL/PAR educational interventions, (b) the transformations in our emergent professional identities, (c) the place of different materialities and expressive media in the work we planned (d) how space-time constraints were construed in our unfolding projects.

Motivation for the Family Visit and On-the-Spot Activities Shape Children's Learning Experience in a Science Center.

Children’s learning often happens in the interactions with more knowledgeable members of the society, frequently parents, as stated by the sociocultural theory. Parent-child conversations provide children with a new understanding and foster knowledge development, especially in informal learning contexts. However, the family conversations in museums and science centers can be contingent on the motivation for the family visit or the activities organized on the spot. In order to establish how family motivation and on-the-spot activities influence children’s informal learning experience, the present study was carried out in a family science center. The study focused on children’s learning experience in a hands-on exhibit featuring objects that allow for the exploration of the concepts of sound waves and light. Thirty-nine 7–10-year-old children (21 boys and 18 girls) and their families participated in the study. Twenty families received a worksheet to prompt an experimentation activity with one of the light exhibits. Motivation for the family visit was probed at the end of the visit. The target children of the families wore a GoPro HERO 5 camera attached to a chest harness throughout their visit. The video was coded for family interaction and experimentation with the light exhibit. Family conversations were coded for open-ended questions, responses to open-ended questions, explanations, associations, attention directing, and reading signage aloud. Family motivation for the visit was related to the quality of family conversation during the visit. The experimentation activity prompt did not affect the likelihood of noticing and engaging with the particular exhibit. At the same time, it did affect the quality of engagement: children who received the experimentation activity prompt were more likely to explore the effects the exhibit provided and experiment rather than play with the exhibit. Family motivation and on-the-spot activities are discussed as two possible factors to influence children’s learning experience in science centers.

Intergenerational community conservation projects, STEM identity authoring, and positioning: the cases of two intergenerational teams

ABSTRACT This research aimed to better understand the interaction between positioning and STEM identity authoring as intergenerational teams collaborated to complete community conservation projects, following a two-day conservation and geospatial technology workshop. Scientists and science educators supported these learners as they developed the focus, resources, timeline, and methods used to accomplish their negotiated pursuits at the two-day workshop and throughout their subsequent community project as a form of public engagement. To better understand the ways in which intergenerational teams located or positioned themselves and their partners, the ways in which teens and adults engaged in STEM identity authoring, and the interplay between positioning and STEM identity authoring a two-case study was completed. In this, field observations, interviews, and project artifacts were collected as the primary data sources. Findings emerging from the qualitative analysis of the data collected revealed how positioning and STEM identity authoring were found to be entangled and concurrently reinforcing even at the outset of the intergenerational teams’ work. Additionally, positioning and STEM identity authoring in intergenerational teams were influenced by societal and cultural norms. These findings as well as recommendations emerging from the findings are further elaborated with the aim of supporting future intergenerational work of teens and adults in informal STEM learning contexts.

Young People’s health-related learning through social media: What do teachers need to know?

International regulatory bodies have argued that young people should be better supported to engage safely, responsibly and effectively with social media. This paper considers ways in which the introduction of structured social media engagement in schools could bring educational benefits for young people, particularly in supporting them to deal with challenges relating to health and wellbeing. New evidence is provided on: (i) the value of social media as a health-related learning tool to bridge informal and formal learning contexts; (ii) how teachers should be supported to better understand and respond to young people’s learning needs; and (iii) the school-based policies, expectations and resources that will help teachers to offer relevant support.

Youth Culture and EFL Students’ Development of Integrative Motivation

The aim of this study is to examine the role of the habitual use of English mediums (English T.V programs and English websites), being informal learning contexts, in Syrian non-English majors university students’ development of integrative motivation. Furthermore, this study aims at highlighting the importance of integrative motivation in foreign language acquisition whether for teachers, learners or language policy makers. Results showed that the students professed positive attitudes towards learning English in general and a good level of integrative motivation. Furthermore, resorting to correlational formula has proven that students’ habitual use of English mediums do have a role in developing integrative motivation especially viewing English T.V programs. It was also noticed that the students’ integrative motivation did have a positive influence on their achievement in the English language course. The most significant implication of this research is that once learners realize that they could use English for self expression, as a desire brought on by the impacts of the international youth culture, they will be more integratively motivated to learn the language.

Social Networking Services as Informal Contexts for Foreign Language Learning

This article focuses on online informal learning contexts, namely social networks to which learners may resort for their linguistic needs. The distinguishing feature of such platforms is that content is neither provided by an educational institution, nor is it necessarily presented in a formal fashion. While research has extensively focused on the connection between technology and autonomy, the social aspect behind 2.0 tools has been partly neglected. Therefore, we argue that learner training, i.e. preparing language learners for autonomous language study through technology, should be partly rethought and include such skills as communicating in didactic interactions and evaluating information.

Learning to Be Employable Through Volunteering: A Qualitative Study on the Development of Employability Capital of Young People.

Over the last decades, consistent research showed that voluntary work could be considered as a tool for professional development and concrete employment: volunteering could be either experienced as a desire to improve career opportunities or to acquire new skills. The study aimed to investigate voluntary work as a context of informal and non-formal workplace learning and vocational guidance, useful to develop skills and abilities, namely the capital of personal and social resources, that could promote future employability. Participants were 38 young volunteers who experienced the Universal Civil Service, a national Italian program addressed to young people aged up to 28 years, giving them both the opportunity to engage in social activities useful for the community and have the first contact with a working context. In line with the objectives of the study, participants were invited to describe their volunteering experience in a diary, highlighting if and to what extent this context contributed to enhancing their employability capital, namely the asset of skills, knowledge, and networks acquired, that they could transfer to a future professional domain. The narrative data collected were examined through diatextual analysis, a specific address of discourse analysis designed to catch the relationship between enunciators, text, and context of the talk. This qualitative analysis allowed us to investigate the meanings young people attributed to these activities. In light of these results, the paper contributed to investigate volunteers’ perceptions about the conditions that could best foster this specific kind of workplace informal and non-formal learning and at proposing a qualitative perspective on the analysis of the employability capital they developed.

Enacting Smart Pedagogy in Higher Education Contexts: Sensemaking through Collaborative Biography

Scholars and practitioners argue that information and communication technology (ICT) provides flexibility of time and place and softens boundaries between students’ learning lives. The fluid movement between formal and informal learning contexts afforded by digital technology has prompted a re-definition of higher education learning environments to harness its potential. Further, technology can cater to diverse learners and promote lifelong learning in ways that the traditional didactic settings characteristic of tertiary contexts cannot. Scholars and practitioners have labelled this new teaching and learning landscape as smart pedagogy. This article engages with this scholarship by analysing a specific Australian case study in which ICT reforms have been deliberately implemented to adhere to smart pedagogies. Using collective biographies as a methodological tool, this inquiry provides insights into sensemaking experiences of a group of university academics whilst implementing ICT reforms anchored on Smart Pedagogy.

APRENDIZADO DE LÍNGUA INGLESA EM UMA ESCOLA PÚBLICA NA VOZ DE ESTUDANTES DO ENSINO MÉDIO

Este trabalho busca depreender atitudes de alunos do Ensino Médio de uma escola pública estadual de Santa Catarina sobre a língua inglesa. Este artigo é parte de um projeto maior que levantou o perfil linguístico desses alunos por meio de um questionário semiaberto, e posteriormente, foram realizadas entrevistas semiestruturadas. Com enfoque na Educação, a literatura sobre línguas adicionais, contexto escolar e políticas linguísticas foi utilizada para a análise dos dados, que revelam crenças a respeito do aprendizado de inglês. Como resultado preliminar, para os sujeitos participantes, o aprendizado (na língua inglesa) colabora com o desenvolvimento pessoal e profissional. Os sujeitos demonstraram autonomia para o aprendizado de línguas nos contextos informais pelo fato de poderem pesquisar temas de seus interesses e de interagir com pessoas ao redor do mundo. Dessa forma, os dados sugerem que os currículos escolares devam levar em conta o que o aluno aprende além da escola, possibilitando pôr em prática conhecimentos linguísticos aprendidos tanto na escola quanto fora dela a partir de interações informais.

Exploring participant engagement during an astrophysics virtual reality experience at a science festival

ABSTRACT Virtual reality applications turn abstract concepts into experienceable phenomena and present exciting opportunities to transform science education and public outreach practices. While research has started to look into the affordances of virtual reality (VR) in the formal science education context, the potential of these technologies to enhance public engagement with science is largely unexplored. To improve the way that VR may be used in informal learning and public outreach contexts, the purpose of our study was to undertake evidence-based investigations that shed light onto the relationship between VR and public engagement. Aiming to identify and develop the benefits of VR technologies, we propose a conceptual framework for engagement with VR at a science festival that comprises four aspects of participant activity: immersion, facilitation, collaboration, and visualisation. This framework guided the research design of our exploratory case study of one VR tour at a science festival. Data included visitor surveys, video recordings, VR screen captures, and focus group interviews with outreach and science professionals. Our findings reveal important ways that VR supports visitor engagement at a science festival. More generally, these findings and our framework contribute to the ongoing efforts of engaging the public with science in more diverse informal learning contexts.

Learning and Teaching

Learning and Teaching: Artful Narratives of Transformation, a special issue of the Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education, features ten articles, field notes, a book review, and a virtual art exhibition–a first for this journal–meant to complement and extend discussions on the theme of learning, teaching and transformation. More specifically, this issue brings together creative essays from diverse perspectives and disciplines, using multiple artful forms, to illustrate transformation in both formal and informal learning and teaching contexts. This collection contributes to the ongoing discussions on alternative and emergent approaches to transformative learning–a theoretical framework that continues to be crucial in adult education. As well, it invites us to consider the power of reflective, narrative, creative, and artful processes to give form to, communicate, and transform our complex, multi-layered, and colourful professional and personal (as well as collective) experiences of teaching and learning.