Informal learning through collectives and communities: Women in a rural community

Abstract

This paper is concerned with examining how informal learning in communities can be understood as collective accomplishments of learning as becoming, residing in heterogeneous networks of relationships between the social and material world. Traditionally, learning has been viewed as an individualist cognitive acquisition of knowledge which can be separated from other activities and/or as an embodied socially situated practice which occurs in contained places or contexts of learning (education institutions or communities of practice). Consequently most studies of informal learning have been shaped by these understandings which rely on preconceived constructs of learning, and who the learner is..