Last week I attended the first meting of The Nordic Research Network on Learning Across Contexts (NordLAC). The topic of this meeting was to explore identity and contexts for learning. My talk aimed to: reflect on the current interest in learning out-of-school (politics & policy); explore the intersections of policy and research; raise some methodological issues relating to the challenge of researching out-of-school. I tried to do this by bringing together some recent work  from the Oslo based Learning Lives project , ongoing work on The Class and my MacArthur MacReport on learning in not-school situations (currently in production).

This week sees the first meeting of a new research network (DIMRCL) based at the LSE and  supported by the MAcArthur Foundation.

This working group brings together a unique set of international researchers, from the UK, Denmark, Finland, Italy and Norway who have been exploring and investigating ways to understand how learners might learn across different sites and locations. These include: learning across institutional frames- between in-, non- and semi- formal locations; learning on- and offline; through and in play; and across a range of cultural and interest driven spaces. The specific objective of the project is to clarify and typologise appropriate and innovative methodologies that have been used to characterise and capture new kinds of ‘connected learning’.

Whilst there is considerable academic and policy and innovation interest in connected learning as ways to harness the energies of learners themselves and to stimulate school reform, it is still a challenge for researchers to describe and know how connected learning takes place. This is significantly because satisfactory or agreed ways to ‘follow’ learners across, and between sites (either physical as in home/school/youth provision/with peers) or virtual (on fora, in gaming, social networks or via mobile technologies) or conceptually (tracing, translating and re-configuring understandings across contexts) is self –evidently complex and difficult. Methodological challenges are simultaneously: practical –  how to track  and physically follow learners; ethical and legal – how to ensure access and trust across social domains; and conceptual – what might constitute evidence of learning?

This working group will enable the sharing of best practice in two directions – firstly, ensuring that the emerging insights from active researchers on digital media learning are incorporated into on-going research (especially important since much of this work is very new and not yet published), and secondly, providing an opportunity for the insights developed within the workshops to be made publicly available for other researchers working on related projects internationally.

Principal Investigators: Sonia Livingstone, Julian Sefton-Green, Kirsten Drotner, Ola Erstad, Kristiina Kumpulainen, Nicoletta Vittadini

This is the title of a talk I gave to the new Children and Youth Research Centre, at Queensland University of Technology in November 2011.

I argued that recent years have seen an increased attention to learning outside the school. There have been high prolife State and philanthropic funding for  community projects or afterschool clubs  as well as in other forms of non-formal organised provision. At the same time, the home has a become a contested site for all kinds of educational experiences– a focus galvanised and  made problematic though the penetration of new digital technologies into the domestic sphere. Research and scholarship find it difficult to theorise and make sense of claims for learning in these ‘not-school’ environments’ as debate is often bound up with both techno-utopianism and generalisations about the purposes, effectiveness and success of public school systems.

This talk was based on on-going research in the England and Norway into  the ‘learning lives ‘ of young people trying to understand what it means to talk about learning in non-schooled environments as well as on-going writing surveying the research about learning out-of school. It focuses on the theoretical challenge of identifying and characterising ‘learning’ as framed in both of these domains as well as considering the practical difficulty of conducting empirical work to make sense of claims made for out-of-school learning.

In December 2011, I gave a talk to the Dusseldorp Foundation in Sydney, Australia at a gallery in Paddington. The talk explored how the idea of creative learning has been prominent in debates around education reform in recent years. Based on recent and ongoing research and experience around the world I will talk about competing definitions of what ‘creative learning’ might mean, how it has been recognised, evaluated and described, how it has been imagined and  implemented in practice, and how ideas of creative leanring are present in studies of learning outside the school, especially in the techno-cultures of the young.

The talk is now available online here.

I visted the Department of Cultural & Creative Arts at the Hong Kong Institute of Education in November 2011. I gave two talks there: on the creative workforce in Education in the UK; and on Creative Pedagogies. The first of these was based my work on Creative Agents for Creative Partnerships and the second on ongoing work for the Signature Pedagogies project (see Jan 20 2011 post).

I have just been appointed Honorary Professor in the Department of Cultural & Creative Arts at Hong Kong Institute of Education.

I have been invited to work as an associate of  the Centre for Research in Multiliteracies at Brock University, Toronto, Canada

This study of some of the artist workforce woking on Creative Partnerships programmes,  undertaken May 2010- April 2011 has just been been published by Creativity, Culture & Education. It is available here.

I have just returned from this event, Learning in the Network Society, held  by the Austrian Ministry of Education, in Vienna. I gave a talks entitled: Towards a new settlement: young people’s life-worlds, learning and school change. I tried to bring together 2 key discourses of change in recent Education Policy and Research, ‘The Creativity Agenda’ and research around Digital Cultures, in order explore how both fields – which in different ways have a new and distinctive sense of the agency of young people – influence and are influenced by contemporary change in Schools.

The volume has been reviewed in the International Journal of Education & the Arts.

Along with Pat Thomson and Naranee Ruthra Rajan I am the series editor for books aimed at  classroom practitioners at Key Stages 2 and 3 who are interested in developing creative learning and teaching in their schools. Each book is supported by Creative Partnerships and offers suggestions, models of practice and stimulus material for CPD sessions. The emphasis is on practical, accessible studies from classrooms framed within jargon-free understandings of key issues and principles found in more academic studies. Studies are complemented by accounts from learners, capturing pupil voice and making clear the benefits and values of changing approaches to learning.

A description of all volumes in the series can be found here.

The first volume in the series by Ethel Saunders Leading  a Creative School has just been published.