Social and Non-Formal Learning Environments

From the Introduction: "The purpose of this essay is to provide a series of brief short cases as examples unfolding a variety of learning approaches and communication practices, which we may place in the category of organized learning activities outside formal schooling, here termed non-formal education... Several of the cases here have a connection to processes of development and societal change....The essay is primarily an exercise for the reader to reflect upon the projects various underpinning educational ideas - and also, importantly, an invitation to look at one’s own life and work experiences in situations and spaces of non- formal education...."

This article from the Glocal Times includes cases introduced in teaching the course "Educational Communication" at the University of Guelph, Canada. Among other education-related analyses, the article analyses them in order to point to variations in or exceptions to the assumption that communication is either top-down (not participatory) or bottom up (participatory). "Practice may not be an either-or... and many ...argue for integration. The forms of communication in development projects often show different means and methods, phases of true equal partnership and dialogue as well as moments of dictatorship."

The 7 cases include several museums, a sports club, a project on conflict resolution, an art project, an eco schools system, and a television education entertainment series, some of which are described here:

• To increase citizen involvement at a Natural History Museum of Århus, Denmark, a field trip to the museum’s external camp, the Mols Laboratory, featured the participatory "Mammals Atlas Project", in which Denmark was geographically organised into 640 zones on a map, and the public was asked to note down a mammal when they saw one (a fox, a hare, or others) on a report card, to photograph the animal, or even to bring or post a dead animal in the mail to the museum. 
• Language centre Givat Haviva, Israel, arranges a 3-day encounter project bringing Jewish and Arab high school youth together. "Citizenship, collective narratives and memory, identity, and conflict are addressed head-on with a range of artistic devices..." through which "youth get a chance to meet and negotiate contemporary topics in an experimental collaborative fashion." The author recognises criticism of short term encounters between these groups versus longer processes. He then describes a mapping activity: "...[T]he two groups are set up to create impressions of 'home' in an Arab group and in a Jewish group. When each group has produced a drawing or map (using whatever mapping technique they want, cartographic, expressionistic, etc.), they meet to negotiate a common home, a third map, a 'third space'.."
• In Harburg, Germany, two artists raised a 12-foot tall monumental grey stone pillar covered with a layer/material which made it possible to write a collection of the community’s thoughts. At scheduled events, when the reachable sections of the pillar became full, it was lowered into the ground to leave a clear surface for more public notation. "Each lowering triggered public debate and gatherings/events at the monument. Memorials are about memory, but they rarely provide educational ground as cleverly as this one for a representation of how memory is changing or fragile or plural, or how the subject matter of the memorial and its very material are up for appropriation. The Harburg memorial involved its learners in the very process and production of the 'product', and also its disappearance..."
  
• Among the television series described in the article, the series Northern Exposure is characterised as unfolding social changes at the "final frontier" of Alaska. "Series such as Northern Exposure create stories that involve repetition, stability and change as well - capturing the hardships of change. Also, lasting fictions create fan communities on the Internet and other media spin-offs in a contemporary media-culture of convergence [footnotes removed by editor], content travelling, adaptations to new forms, a thingification of media/mediation of things, and therefore feed into overlapping forms of identity-exploration, and participatory production/consumption forms."