Education

The work presented in this article arose from a small-scale project in the west of Scotland and was funded by the University of Glasgow. Three researchers and a visiting scholar worked with two local educators to examine the impact of using internationally available Arabic picturebooks for language and literacy learners in multilingual classrooms.

Although many studies on voluntary work in Canada have been undertaken (Hall, Barr, Easwaramoorthy, Sokolowski, & Salamon, 2005; Hall, McKeown, & Roberts, 2001), little is known yet about the learning dimension of volunteer work. The research literature on the extent, modes and effectiveness of volunteers’ acquisition of new skills, knowledge, attitudes and values, and on the relationship between formal, non-formal and informal learning in this process, is scarce.

Two factors may explain the scant attention paid in the past to this issue. First, unpaid work (such as household work and volunteer work) is seldom considered as ‘real work’ by policymakers and even by large sectors of the population, and therefore the mainstream literature on labour force training tends to focus on paid labour, often within the formal sector of the economy. Second, the field of informal learning has been at the margins of educational research, partly because such learning is not formalized and hence is more difficult to research (Livingstone 2002; Brown, 2000; Colley, Hodkinson, & Malcom, 2004; Foley, 1999; Eraut, 2000). Indeed, most studies on education and work focus on formal and non-formal education.

However, this is slowly changing. On the one hand, the feminist and nonprofit literatures have provided much evidence of the economic contributions of unpaid work, and policy-makers, researchers and the population at large are taking notice than non-market activities are important to the economy (Waring 1988; Statistics Canada. 1994; Hall et al. 2001). On the other hand, the recent sociology of education literature has shown evidence of the impact of informal learning in people’s educational journeys, and that most of the learning connected to volunteer work falls into the category of informal learning (Livingstone 1999). As a result, the topic is capturing more attention from educational researchers.

Also scarce is research that highlights learning dimensions of different volunteer‘ cultures’. We are using ‘culture’ in the sense of patterns, traits, and products considered as the expression of
a particular period, class, community, or population. In this paper we attempt to rectify this gap by beginning a discussion on different volunteer cultures. Our entry point into this is the
methodology that emerged from doing research with volunteers. This includes the culture of individual volunteers, the culture of volunteer organisations, and the culture of research in
general.