Out of the classroom: ‘informal’ education and histories of education

Abstract

Historians of education are well placed to engage in applied historical approaches providing authoritative evidence of the past to inform policy and practice. This article is based on the presidential keynote delivered at the History of Education Society (UK) annual conference in 2019. As such it reflects on possible future directions for the history of education and considers the role of informal educational activity that takes place outside the classroom, including that of children's reading for pleasure. Stories in the interwar British, Canadian and Australian Girl's and Boy's annuals provide an example of how appropriate gender roles were presented to their young readers at a time of intense social and political change for Britain. With Brexit heralding a similar significant moment of change and the pandemic lockdowns resulting in children spending more time at home, it is concluded that the significance of 'informal' education, both historically and today, requires our attention.

The ‘third space’, where everyday and formal writing practices meet

“…The study highlights that co-designing a collaborative writing activity in a vulnerable school context can be effective if teachers and researchers recognize and value the non-formal writing repertoires that students develop in their everyday lives and connect them to the academic writing on relevant topics in students' experiences (Elola, 2010;Thompson, 2012). Improving the understanding of learning processes that are based on informal practices and incorporating them into formal practices, could therefore help students who find in a condition of disadvantage, to feel more valued in their skills and recognize in their potential (Bourke, O'Neill, & Loveridge, 2018;Spencer, 2021).…”

Elite women's clubs in the 1930s across three Australian states: a prosopographical study

“…The first paper on these data was within this domain and examined data about the women's formal schooling (May, 2023). This second paper addresses the history of informal education (Spencer, 2021) and frames women's clubs in 1930s eastern Australia as informal educative networks. These networks enabled women, in mutually supportive environments, to equip themselves for effective participation in the public sphere in clubs across a broad range of domains: social, sporting, political, professional and educational.…”