Since informal learning occurs outside of formal learning environments, describing informal learning and how it takes place can be a challenge for researchers. Past studies have typically oriented to informal learning as an individual, reflective process that can best be understood through the learners' retrospective accounts about their experiences. Although reports on the individual lived experience represent the privileged way of understanding social reality (including informal learning), the linguistic/discursive turn of the 1980s proposed a shift in our view of the function of language as creating rather than representing versions of the world. Accordingly, we propose resituating informal learning from a reflective process occurring in an individual mind to the meaning making that occurs in group conversations. We present an exploratory analysis of a single thread from an online hiking community to introduce discourse analysis as a framework to study informal learning as a group meaning-making process.

Collaborative research often refers to collaboration among the researcher and the participants. Few studies investigate the collaborative process among researchers themselves. Assumptions about the qualitative research process, particularly ways to establish rigor and transparency, are pervasive. Our experience con ducting three collaborative empirical research studies challenged and transformed our assumptions about qualitative research: (a) research planning taught as concrete and linear rather than as emergent and iterative, (b) data analysis conceptualized as individual discovery rather than collaboratively-constructed meaning, and (c) findings represented as individual product rather than as part of an ongoing conversation. We address each assumption, including how our collaborative research diverged from the assumption and how this divergence has impacted our own practice.

While collaboration is common in qualitative inquiry, few studies examine the collaborative process in detail. In our study, we adopt an interpretive, reflexive stance to explore our process as a collaborative qualitative research team. We analyzed transcripts of eight research meetings for aspects and assumptions underlying our collaboration. Three overarching aspects of our process emerged from the analysis: position-taking, meaning making, and producing. We adopt a learning stance in our work together and make meaning through an iterative, dialogic process that foregrounds and backgrounds key elements of the research process. While some scholars have questioned whether truly collaborative research ever occurs among peers, we illustrate through our findings what such a process can look like.

Much research has validated procedures to enhance reading fluency in children and adolescents, but more is needed to determine whether such procedures work with adults who have deficits in reading skills. A within‐subjects design was used to evaluate and compare the effects of listening while reading (LWR) and repeated readings (RR) on reading fluency in adults reading at about fourth‐ or fifth‐grade level. Results confirmed previous studies with children and adolescents that showed LWR and RR did increase reading fluency, but neither was more effective than the other. This study suggests that the opportunity to read with LWR caused the adult participants' increases in rereading fluency. Although adults and adolescents had similar responses to LWR and RR interventions, the adults' reading fluency appeared to increase more. This finding supports the need for more studies on whether strategies that have been empirically validated with children produce similar effects in adults.