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.