Toward a Model to Leverage Informal and Incidental Learning in Family Contexts

Abstract Purpose – The authors describe research aimed at developing: 1) a more comprehensive framework for informal and incidental learning in family contexts; 2) a learning dashboard customized for parents interested in enhancing their capacity to reflect on the ways in which they learn to face the challenges, changes, and periods of transition that their own families go through. Design/methodology/approach – Our proposed model grows out of a reanalysis of data from an earlier study that focused on understanding practical learning and situated knowledge that adults feel meaningful and relevant to constructing their own parental identities, their modes of belonging, and their trajectories of participation in their respective families. Findings – Findings are based on a multiple case study in which Italian parents residing in Milan and Italian-American parents living in New York City, all belonging to upper-middle-class families, were interviewed. Italian families were also involved in laboratories designed to support them in the processes of collective critical reflection on their familial practices. Research limitations/implications – This study followed a grounded theory research design, formulated to enable development of a middle-range substantive theory that is well suited to: 1) explaining the informal and incidental learning paths through which adults construct practices of parenthood; 2) defining a learning architecture and designing a research-based self-report inventory to recognize and assess them. Originality/value – We present informal and incidental learning examples occurring in family contexts that range from predictable “crises” to those that are unanticipated and not routine, and a self-report inventory for self-assessing parental learning practices and their possible outcomes. We discuss transformative dimensions of informal learning that become important when parents’ frames of reference are self-perceived as distorted or dysfunctional when confronted with the more or less critical events that mark family life cycles. We also conceptualize informal and incidental learning through a practice-based approach in the attempt to provide a theoretical vocabulary that enables thought about knowing and learning as processes that are: social, materially-and-historically-mediated, emergent, situated, and always open-ended and temporary in character.