Description: 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.
Review Quotes: 'Learning in Places: The Informal Education Reader' may sound at first a bit ambitious. In fact, not only is there nothing else like it in 'the field, ' but it is indeed canonical - in its quality, in its range of interests, and, appropriately, in its description and analysis of the variegated nature of the settings or 'places' in which learning occurs. (Philip Wexler, Professor of Sociology of Education, School of Education, Hebrew University, Jerusalem)