What (and Where) is the ‘Learning’ When We Talk about Learning in the Home?

Authors

Julian Sefton-Green, London School of EconomicsFollow

Abstract

In this paper, I will build on the proposal that we need to pay attention to both of these frames through characterizing the metadiscourse surrounding learning in the home. I suggest that this metadiscourse is made up of several elements. I will show how a number of families — the subjects of a larger research project that investigates learning across time and contexts — adopt and use folk “ theories of learning,” and I will consider, in particular, how such theories relate to dominant discourses around learning in school. Second, I will explore how media technologies — and in particular, how the ways that they are purchased and how they are located in the home— also contribute to dominant conceptualizations of learning and at times almost seem to stand for a proxy measure of it. Third, I will draw on observations and accounts of how learning is enacted as a discipline and as a habit within the ebb and flow of family life.

Author Biography

Julian Sefton-Green is currently the principal research fellow at the Department of Media and Communications, LSE, and a research associate at the University of Oslo. He is an honorary professor of education at the University of Nottingham, UK, and at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. He has been a schoolteacher and also worked in teacher training and in the informal education sector. He has researched and written widely on many aspects of media education, creativity, new technologies, and informal learning. Recent volumes include the coedited International Handbook of Creative Learning (2011) as well as Learning Lives: Transactions, Digital Culture, and Learner Identity (2013).

Recommended Citation

Sefton-Green, J. (2013). What (and Where) is the ‘Learning’ When We Talk about Learning in the Home?. Occasional Paper Series, (30). DOI: https://doi.org/10.58295/2375-3668.1035