Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 4, Issue 1, Foreword (Jun., 2003) David ANDERSON, Gregory P. THOMAS & Kirsten M. ELLENBOGEN Learning Science from Experiences in Informal Contexts: The Next Generation of Research Previous Contents Next

Views of Learning Appropriate to Today's Research Agendas

Contemporary visitor studies tend not to differentiate between "formal" and "informal" varieties of learning, instead pointing out that the difference is the learning context. In the past, distinctions were made between formal and informal learning suggesting, for example, that the learning that occurred in a school was different from the learning that occurred in a museum. However, Dierking (1991) argued that the distinction may not be appropriate because "learning is learning, and it is strongly influenced by setting, social interaction, and individual beliefs, knowledge, and attitudes" (p. 4)ⁱⁱ. Like Dierking, we contend that because learning is dynamic in nature, it is false to assume that "real learning" is the providential domain of any one experience, be it derived from a museum setting or a classroom. Rather, the multiplicity of daily life experiences - watching television, surfing the Internet, having conversations, going to science class, or visiting a museum - are the substance from which we continually construct and reconstruct our knowledge and make our own meaning of the world around us. We also believe that experiences in informal settings, like museums and science centers, have the potential to produce rich knowledge and understandings if visitors are able to draw connections with their own prior knowledge and are able to see connections with subsequent life experiences, in the classroom or in any other experiential aspect of life. Thus it behooves the teacher to help students to see and connect with museum experiences though adequate pre-visit preparation, and even more importantly, to creatively embed the experiences into the classroom curriculum following the visit.

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ⁱⁱ A continued debate on this issue is taking place in the publication 'Informal Learning Review.' In particular, see Dierking et al, 2002.