Educational research often portrays culturally, linguistically and economically disenfranchised (CLED) children's disengagement from school learning as individual behaviour, ignoring the contribution of race, gender, socio-cultural, ethnic and social class factors. This paper analyses a specific community engagement programme in Australia which…

This article is written by young people who attend an open-access youth project in the city centre of Hull. Although they describe themselves as "educational failures" (the "black holes"), they argue that they have a significant contribution to make to discussions about how to develop socially just education in schools. In the…

Using the badged open course, "Taking your first steps into Higher Education", this case study examines how assessment on online open courses draws on concepts of assessment used within formal and informal learning. Our experience was that assessment used within open courses, such as massive open online courses, is primarily determined…

Even though there are increasing numbers of PhD students in the distance mode, our current understanding of PhD candidature at a distance is limited and incomplete. On the one end of the spectrum are accounts of unhappy and isolated doctoral students who are separated from communities of practice. At the same time, literature offers accounts of…

Women's empowerment is a concept that has acquired substantial recognition in the past decade. However, it is better known among international development organisations, NGOs, and grassroots groups than in academic circles. This article examines the concept of women's empowerment as a foundational element in a theory of social change in which the…

This paper discusses the implementation of a university teaching module, based on Lucy Green's (2008) informal music learning model. The synergy between Green's model and Paulo Freire's critical pedagogy is addressed through explanation of the module and its practices. The module was offered six times, from 2011 to 2016, as an action research…

This paper examines digital and mobile learning that goes beyond bounded communities and closed domains. While recent work from the field of mobile learning has emphasized the importance of learning across "contexts," little analytical attention has been paid to the underlying dynamics of this phenomenon. To illuminate this, the four…

If young adults in remote Indigenous Australian communities are to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to participate effectively in mature roles in their own and the wider community, then educators will need to pay attention not only to the provision of schooling and formal adult-literacy tuition, but also to how language, literacy, and…

This paper discusses the Lifelong Learning Strategy document which was on the agenda during the European Union harmonization process of Turkey. The public policies in the document, regarding non-formal and adult education, will be analyzed. Lifelong Learning strategy became a current issue in the last stage of neoliberal transformation of…

As an international informatics contest, or challenge, Bebras has started the second decade of its existence. The contest attracts more and more countries every year, recently there have been over 40 participating countries. From a single contest-focused annual event Bebras developed to a multifunctional challenge and an activities-based…

One issue that is often ignored in political theory is the problem of means and modes of communication affecting "dialogue" between parties. In this age of hyper communication, this is something particularly relevant. The point here is that, despite the ease with which we have access to both means and modes of communication, there…

Non-formal education has been suggested as becoming more and more important in the last decades. As the aims of non-formal education are broad and diverse, a large variety of non-formal learning activities is available. One of the emerging fields in many countries, among them Finland and Germany, has been the establishment of non-formal laboratory…

Since informal learning occurs outside of formal learning environments, describing informal learning and how it takes place can be a challenge for researchers. Past studies have typically oriented to informal learning as an individual, reflective process that can best be understood through the learners' retrospective accounts about their…

This paper critiques discourse surrounding language learning strategies within Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and argues for the creation of new definitions of language learning strategies that are rooted in the socio-political and socio-economic contexts of the marginalized. Section one of this paper describes linguistic…

With the growth of English as an International Language [McKay, S. 2002. "Teaching English as an International Language." Oxford: Oxford University Press], there is a wealth of it now accessible to learners in their out-of-class environments; be these real, virtual, or a mixture of the two. Tomlinson (2008. "EFL Materials in the…