ABSTRACT
Many critical voices have been expressed towards formal education and its practices (Hubbard, Mehan, and Stein, 2006; Resnick, 1987; Sarason, 1993; Tyack and Cuban, 1997). The critics maintain that formal education does not acknowledge enough those experiences and that agency that learners bring to school from other contexts, such as from their homes, after-school clubs, museums, libraries and science centers. Further, formal education is said to be unable to exploit fully cultural resources, i.e. funds of knowledge (Gonzáles, Moll, and Amanti, 2005) of communities surrounding schools-their expertise, knowledge, and artifacts-and utilize these in a systematic manner. Critics continue that formal education should realize and acknowledge in more visible ways the fact that learning takes place everywhere. Learning in other contexts may even be more important or make more sense to the learner in her daily life than what is learned in the formal setting of the school. In fact, a major part of children’s waking time activities take place in non-school settings (Bransford et al., 2006). In addition to the importance of acknowledging learners’ out-of-school experiences in formal educa-
tion, there is also a clear need to understand better what learners take with them from the school to other settings (Pugh and Bergin, 2005). Are we successful as educators in providing our students with opportunities to construct experiences, attitudes and knowledges that are usable, helpful and productive outside the school? Indeed, often times learners are left to navigate in different settings of learning without adequate support and without the recognition of the importance of communication and social interaction as vital mediators of learning. This argument unfortunately applies to both formal and informal settings of learning. There is clearly a need for the development of pedagogical models, solutions and activities that can best support learners’ meaningful and productive transitions and participation in formal and informal settings. The funds of knowledge developed in one setting should become resources in the other. This is likely to increase learners’ agency and active engagement in learning the stretches beyond settings and contexts. Our chapter discusses a study that investigates the practice of dialogic inquiry within a classroom com-
munity whose formal learning spaces were extended to more informal settings of learning, namely to a technology museum, a science center and a forest. The study illuminates the ways in which the cultural practices of dialogic inquiry, its norms, values, and discourses, were talked into being in these multiple learning spaces that were aimed to enrich the students’ learning experiences, and promote their agency in learning, as well as to support their meaning making and knowledge generation.
