Informal learning and literacies

Wow. I nearly forgot to do my blog post this week. Why? I hear you ask, well I was busy using the Internet to learn about the best ways to deter spiders (don't ask - just know I am an arachnophobic and that this is the weekend from hell!). Anyway, when I need to learn something fast, I go online and find the answer. As a woman living alone in a strange country (well I guess I should say foreign country, although it is a little strange as well!), I have to teach myself things every week that my formal education as a doctoral student can't help me with. In essence, I am taking part in "informal learning".

This week I read a brilliant article by Mary Hamilton (y'know, one of those articles that you just smile at afterwards because it says everything you've been thinking), and it talked about the kind of informal learning and literacies that people take part in everyday: Hamilton, M. (2006). Just do it: Literacies, everyday learning and the irrelevance of pedagogy, Studies in the Education of Adults, 38(2), 125-140.

"Everyday activities can at any moment present an opportunity for learning" (Hamilton, 2006, p125), and I think we all recognise that we learn unexpectedly from a variety of reasons every day. Among other things, Hamilton goes on to explain that New Literacy Studies "are implicitly concerned with, and informed by, models of situated and informal learning" (p. 126), and the idea of situated learning is one that I think is key in adult education.

Adult basic education students are often those most reluctant to return to the institutionalism of formal education, yet these are also the people who use literacy in their everyday lives "to serve their own purposes and needs"; however, these vernacular literacies aren't always highly valued in formal learning (Hamilton, 2006, p. 131). As with my spider searching, people's everyday literacies and informal learning involves "activities that people carry out to make life habitable" using whatever resources happen to be at hand, as Hamilton puts it, "it scavenges available resources and expertise, appropriating them to new ends" (p. 133).

The point of all this then, is that informal learning incorporates a variety of literacy activities and shows the strong motivations adults have when seeking out learning for a variety of purposes. However, to bring this back to a phrase you've all heard me use many times before, doesn't school suck the life (or in this case the purpose, motivation, and "hands-on" aspect) out of learning?

Hamilton's article seems to suggest that the pedagogies used in formal learning situations can actually prevent learning from occurring, because they "colonise learning, standardise and reduce it...they fail to engage with existing motivations, emphasising a narrow range of achievements and ways of being" (p. 133). There are so many areas I could go to with the rest of this post, for instance, looking at the notion of formal and informal learning from a Postcolonial lens, or summarising the rest of Hamilton's article as she discusses how formal educational situations can learn from the informal to better teach adult students. Instead though, I'd like to bring this back to the topic that started this PhD journey for me, the idea that school (or academic literacies) suck the life out of reading for pleasure.

While Hamilton is talking about adult basic education students with low levels of literacy and I am talking about pre-service teachers who will one day teach literature, the phenomenon she describes is the same for both. It is the "reduction" of a topic to the point where students can no longer find enjoyment of it; it is the disconnection between curriculum and students' motivations, "emphasising a narrow range of achievements and ways of being"; and it is inflicting "individualised, authoritarian relationships and particular methods and routines of study" (p. 133).

These problems, as I see them, relate to curriculum across the board of formal education - Hamilton's words here go some way to explain while people who love reading may sign up for an English degree but get so lost in the formal academic reading of novels and texts that their love of reading is not acknowledged, valued, or used in the classroom. If anything, the adult basic education students may be better off in this area; researchers acknowledge their vernacular literacies and informal learning practices and are beginning to research how to incorporate them into formal learning. I suppose adolescents in high school are also being thought of in terms of situated learning - there is a vast amount of literature on how to incorporate high school students' cultural and social literacies into the classroom to make learning more interesting for them (whether teachers follow through with it or not).

Yet I wonder how much of this is being incorporated into the higher education curriculum, for example, in English Literature degree courses. While universities talk about the best way to encompass multi- cultural- and social-literacies for students in secondary education, do we follow the same suggestions for our own degree level students at all levels, or do we simply try hard to acculturate students into the academy (or academic literacies) with little care of what motivated them to study in the first place?