Nonformality

Image from the cover page of the 2009 UK White Paper The Learning Revolution on
informal adult learning by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills.

Palomar5 Education organised a small, conspiratory event in reponse to Sir Ken Robinson’s call to bring on the learning revolution, a great opportunity to get some glimpses of how we will learn in the future through the lenses of Basti Hirsch, who went on a five-week education expedition through the United States; Aron Solomon, who is busy creating a boarding school with wheels, the Think Global School; and Margret Rasfeld, who founded a protestant reform school in Berlin. What have I seen?

Intercultural learning is an issue that is often discussed, debated and disagreed upon. Nonformality is one of the places where strong critique has been voiced about ICL and new paths have been called for.

And the confusion lingers…
Photo by doctabu on Flickr

A training kit on intercultural learning has been published, there have been many training courses and even long-term training courses, and last but not least an expert-seminar (report: pdf) tried to deconstruct and reconstruct intercultural learning, searching for ways forward.

Ironically, in none of the publications available you can actually find a definition of intercultural learning. And there are signs that the interest in intercultural learning is waning: not much has happened after the report of the expert seminar was published in 2009—two years after the seminar itself—and the T-Kit on Intercultural Learning, while it has been heavily criticised and could definitely use some updating, remains untouched in its tenth year of existence.

At the same time, a new term, yet not so new concept, seems to be entering the European youth field: intercultural competence.

The nature of our conversations determines the quality of the ideas we share, and therefore it’s worth reflecting on the ways that we talk to each other – check out this infographic on dialogue by Peter Stoyko: