Judith Loveridge – författare

Learning and personal development are integral to being a person, and learning and teaching are integral to life as a social being. Understanding Children’s Informal Learning presents children’s informal learning out-of-school and explores how this knowledge can enhance teaching and learning practice in the classroom.The authors focus on the richness of children’s everyday learning, and in what ways children, teachers and schools can work to bring more of the everyday learning strengths that all children have into the interactional framework of the classroom. Offering practical applications for teachers and other education professionals, the chapters work to ensure children’s voices are heard and actively influence understandings of learning, so that out-of-school learning is legitimised as a critical constituent of in-school learning.Addressing the need to provide a strong ‘student voice’ component and strategies to support children’s learning both in-school and out-of-school, Understanding Children’s Informal Learning furthers comprehensive education research, policy, and practice.

This book celebrates the rights of the child, through including student voice in educational matters that affect them directly. It focuses on the experiences of children and young people and explores how our educational policies, practices and research endeavours enable educators to help young people tell their own stories. The respective chapters illustrate how listening to young people can help them attain new positions of power, even though doing so often creates discomfort and requires a radical change on the part of the adult establishment. Further, the book challenges researchers, teachers and practitioners to reconsider how students are involved in research and policy agendas, and to what extent radical collegiality can create fundamental and positive changes in the lives of these learners. In recent decades, greater attention has been paid across policy, practice and research discourses to involving children more meaningfully and actively in decisions about theirparticipation in both formal and informal educational settings. The book’s goal is to illustrate how researchers have systematically involved students in the pursuit of a richer understanding of educational experiences, policy and practice through the eyes and ears of young people, and through their own cultural lens.