Learning something everyday: What do people learn from their everyday lives?

Abstract

The way people learn from their everyday lives is not valued or even well understood by many adult learning researchers, educators or policymakers. In addition, although we experience ongoing learning from and through our everyday lives, too many of us no longer recognise this type of learning within our own lives. A major factor in the discounting of everyday learning is the way that numerous individual research models and approaches act to exclude people's everyday learning from dominant adult learning, lifelong learning, workplace learning and informal learning discourses, policies, research and practice. The purpose of this study is to explore people's everyday lives as a source of important learning. In order to capture snapshots of people learning from their lives, the research included the use of in-depth semi-structured interviews with six people who were already known to the researcher and living in the New England region of NSW. Alongside the data collection, this study used a range of individual theoretical models and approaches to piece together a "patchworked" theoretical framework that was capable of recognising and analysing a broad range of learning practices within a wide scope of life contexts. The data and theoretical framework were then utilised together in a cyclical, iterative process of analysis to draw out the key themes and issues from both the data and the existing literature.