Gian Waldinsperger

Today we describe  three ways how one can learn an ability. First there is the formal education, where the person is part of an institution and gets a certificate by finishing the program. Another option of learning is described as nonformal education. It results from a program but is not evaluated and doesn’t lead to certification. The third way of informal learning occurs in daily work, leisure or family, and is neither regulated nor certificated.

By knowing the fact, that only the formal education gets considered in a job application, it is obvious that something must be missing. Nonformal and informal learning play an important role in the education of humans but get neglected in decision making. In this blog post  I would like to dig deeper in the question of how informal learning could be evaluated. In addition, I will elaborate what the consequences of considering informal education as education could be.

Measurement of informal education

As informal education is very broad, spontaneous and sometimes even unconsciously made, it is very hard to define it. For me,  the term means something like “skills of life”, because we learn these informal skills in our daily life by doing them. Informal education helps us to manage the problems we encounter every day. In contrast to formal learning, which will not help us to pay the tax bill. For the pedagogy researcher Zhelyazkova-Teya, informal education is the «non-institutionalized, unorganized, unconstrained, unlimited, free, accessible, constant and widespread accumulation of knowledge, development of skills and the formation of competencies in the life process of people of different ages, supporting the process of their personal self-development and self-creation» (Zhelyazkova-Teya, 2022). This definition is the reason why we cannot measure informal education with traditional skill testing we use in formal education. There is no math exercise which show your informal skills. The measurement must be as broad as informal education itself. It has to contain points as for example problem solving, social abilities and time management in the same test.

Figure 1: Definition of informal learning by a Octagon-model (Julian Decius, 2019)

So the big question is: Who defines informal education and which abilities become valuable? One could say, the world leading experts and scientists on education should set the definition.  There are several attempts done, one of them we already saw above, from the pedagogy researcher Zhelyazkova-Teya. But as there is no moral “good” and “bad” in science, how could one rate informal education scientifically?  There have been done many surveys on what people should know, speaking of facts they learn in formal education. But even in this context there have been biases of measuring “the knowledge” (Susan M. Stocklmayer, 2012). I imagine it is way harder to find a measurement for informal education. Another projection could be to set an inclusive democratic process, where everybody can bring their opinion and values. But imagine the tremendous workload the world has to manage if we would start to collect positions from all over the world. On the other hand, AI may help us in future to handle these kinds of vast data collections. My thoughts flow in direction of letting the education experts make a survey , which tries to formulate the right questions for a following survey which will specify the term “informal education” and the values. This second survey should then be answered by a large number of humans all over the world. Of course the organising team have to manage that the participant are from all classes of society. This process may be a justifiable solution for the two problems mentioned above.

The effects of recognising informal education

Ideally, we have a unbiased definition of informal education and the abilities are representatively evaluated. At this point, we can introduce the certificate for informal education. By now I may have better chances for a job just because I have a great time management skill. However, how would this influence the world, the existing inequality? First, it helps a lot for those humans (mostly female) who have no access to formal education. Now they can prove their abilities in all possible categories. Furthermore, no one is dependent on having the permission to go to formal education, as informal education happens in dairy life. Of course, a certification in a certain informal skill will not provide you a job. However it is a proof for an ability, which can bring suitability for a job.

In the question of gender, a certificate in informal education would move society in a direction where the ability and not the gender matters. The certification of having a certain skill is stronger than the biases in gender. In the situation where a woman with certified ability in leading a team and a man with no certificate are in the selection for a team-leading job, the woman may get the job because of her certificate.

If we think further, we could assume that a new perception of learning would develop. Learning is an ongoing process, it is not necessary that we have a teacher in front of us who tells us how the world turns, but we have our own senses. It relocates the responsibility from the educators towards the learners. This happens because humans start to realise that their abilities are profitable, not just the certificate at the end of the program. So people would maybe start to be curious again and try to enrich themselves with daily skills.

My conclusion is that it would be very precious to consider informal education in decision making, because it reduces sexism and gender biases. I imagine the definition and valorising of informal skills is very difficult, especially because it has to be an inclusive process all over the world.

References

Julian Decius, N. S. (2019). Informal workplace learning: Development and validation of a measure.

Susan M. Stocklmayer, C. B. (2012). Science and the Public—What should people know?,. nternational Journal of Science Education,.

Zhelyazkova-Teya, T. (2022). Prolegomena in Pedagogy of Informal Education. Bulgaria.