Learner-led and boundary free: learning across contexts

In this paper, the contributing authors seek to extend our thinking about the nature of learning across settings. All emphasise the role played by the individual in shaping learning and consider the importance of agency in sustaining motivation for learning beyond structured settings. Kersch examines these issues in the context of workplace learning. Potter identifies a new physical site of learning – the home-school boundary – and argues that learner agency and the relationship between interest and motivation provide a useful lens through which to examine and understand young people’s choices and behaviours in and out of school. Finally Pitts discusses the ways in which motivation and learner agency may be sustained across lifetimes with respect to engagement in music. In examining varying forms of learning that occur beyond the classroom, all three authors move beyond more traditional conceptualizations of learning as simply the acquisition of knowledge and skills, and instead offer a more nuanced notion of learning pertaining to the development of personal dispositions that enable effective participation in contemporary society in both work and social settings.