I gave this talk at North Western, Chicago 9th April. For over 25 years I have been interested in bringing together students’ out of school cultures and academic learning. Starting in media education classrooms the challenge was to find ways to build upon students  every day consumption of popular media in order to build critical  and political understanding of the role of mass media in  their lives. I then followed through studies of emerging digital technology exploring how domestic  and amateur  technologies may or may not support forms of creativity. I have examined semi-organised community-based out-of-school learning  institutions as well as ethnographic investigations of everyday making and learning.

At the same time, the politics of education have changed radically with their emphasis on outcomes driven standardised testing and a drive to colonise children’s lifewolrds as in some ways  ” educational”.

Drawing on this range of experience and concluding with details from  informal music  playing from a recent year-long ethnography of 13 to 14-year-olds, I  reflected on why we are interested in learning out-of-school: what’s at stake in our investigations and in whose interests such endeavours take place in order to tease out  some of the pitfalls in the current focus on out-of-school learning experiences.