Learning in Places: The Informal Education Reader

Learning in Places is a concerted effort undertaken by an outstanding group of international researchers to create a resource book that can introduce academic, professional and lay readers to the field of informal learning/education and its potential to transform present educational thinking. The book presents a wealth of ideas from a wide variety of disciplinary fields and methodological approaches covering multiple learning landscapes – in museums, workplaces, classrooms, places of recreation – in a variety of political, social and cultural contexts around the world. Learning in Places presents the most recent theoretical advances in the field; analyzing the social, cultural, political, historical and economical contexts within which informal learning develops and must be critiqued. It also looks into the epistemology that nourishes its development and into the practices that characterize its implementation; and finally reflects on the variety of educational contexts in which it is practiced.

The Editors: Zvi Bekerman teaches anthropology of education at the School of Education and at The Melton Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has written widely in the area of peace education and integrated bilingual Palestinian-Jewish education in Israel. His main research interests and publications are in the study of identity processes and negotiation during intercultural encounters and in informal learning contexts. He has recently become involved in the study of identity construction and development in educational computer-mediated environments.
Nicholas C. Burbules is Grayce Wicall Gauthier Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign. He has written widely in the areas of philosophy of education, technology and education, and critical social and political theory. The current editor of Educational Theory, he has also published Globalization and Education: Critical Perspectives (with Carlos Torres).
Diana Silberman-Keller is the Dean of the School of Multidisciplinary Studies, Beit Berl College, Israel, where she was previously Head of the Non-Formal Education Department. She has written widely in the areas of ideologies in education, literary theory and semiotics in education, non-formal education, and learning.