Informal Learning: Facing the Inevitable and Seizing the Advantage

Reading recently through Edutopia's resources on informal learning, I found the distinction between formal and informal learning resonating more strongly now than ever.

For a classroom teacher, this difference is an important distinction. Formal learning happens through strategically planned learning experiences -- often direct instruction from teachers. Teacher and school improvement is driven by the notion of improving teaching and schools, which is kind of a circular argument. At best, we'll get better teaching and schools.

Informal learning is the kind of stuff that happens when we let go -- and is thus impossible to control and prescribe.

Experiential learning and constructivism, among other ways of thinking about how students learn, hold that learning is not only available outside the confines of the iconic teacher-student relationship, but is perhaps most powerful there as well. There is nothing (that isn't removable) within the walls of a typical school that makes deep thinking and enduring inquiry impossible, so certainly it's possible that extraordinary learning can happen there. But often, in spite of Herculean effort by teachers and administrators, it does not.

Which is strange, don't you think?

Project-Based Learning as Informal Learning Writ Large

Project-based learning is another "wayward" way to think about how learning happens -- not "doing projects," but learning through the process of project design and management. PBL also works as a vehicle for the planning and learning process itself. Within PBL, the Maker movement, mobile learning and game-based learning (among other trends) are all possible.

In fact, even self-directed learning can occur through the natural skeleton PBL provides. Sociologist Seymour Papert, a perhaps less charismatic precursor to Ken Robinson in terms of editorializing about education, held that that schools were not only screwed together all wrong, but that they were in danger of making themselves obsolete:

Occupy Education?

While there has been no Occupy Education movement in classrooms, the revolt has been more subversive, in the form of disengaged learners who can't or choose not to sustain lasting academic curiosity. That's the kind of curiosity that compels a student to sit with a text, to "roll around in it" (as Sam Anderson described), to ask the right question at the right time for the right reason, to transfer understanding on his or her own, without prompting, or to solve authentic challenges in pursuit of personal and social change.

But perhaps there is hope in informal learning when we see it as the natural departure from pure academia through the rise of countless learning trends crowding the landscape of 21st century learning -- trends that make textbooks look silly, make teachers seem longwinded, and make schools look positively sedentary.

Forbes columnist Jessica Hagy recently explained it better than I can:

As educators, we can no longer afford to resist the cultural and technological trends that have already fully disrupted how we access information, connect with one another, and publish the events of our lives. But that's the easy part. The challenge? Insisting that public education, as a system, formally recognize and honor -- on equal terms -- these "lesser" forms of learning. Forms that surrender control, value the role of play, decenter schools and programs, and really, truly teach students how to think for themselves.

And then embrace the struggle and disruption that kind of thinking invites.