Life-Long, Life-Wide, and Life-Deep Learning

Many theoretical and empirical accounts of learning are not well suited to explain important dimensions of how, where, and why people learn. There is a growing recognition that in order to better understand variation and regularities in human learning and educational accomplishment as it relates to the increasing cultural diversity of society, educators need to further develop, promote, and synthesize theoretical and empirical accounts of learning that highlight developmental, ecological, and cultural dimensions of the process and outcomes. The life-long, life-wide, and life-deep framework provides a broad conceptual framework for accounting for how, where, and why people learn. There are powerful opportunities for promoting equity and social justice in education by understanding and leveraging temporal/developmental, spatial/contextual, and value-laden dimensions of learning in relation to coordinated supports for the extended learning pathways of youth and adults.

The report Learning In and Out of School in Diverse Environments: Life-Long, Life-Wide, Life Deep, written by James A. Banks and colleagues, synthesized the empirical literature related to how youth from diverse communities learn in and out of school. The effort was a collaboration of the Center for Multicultural Education at the University of Washington (UW) and the Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Science of Learning Center at the University of Washington, the School of Education at Stanford University, and SRI International. A committee with expertise in educational equity and learning was convened with the goal to develop a set of principles that educational practitioners, policymakers, and researchers could use to understand and build on the learning that occurs in the homes and community cultures of students from diverse groups. The committee outlined a conceptual framework for life-long, life-wide, and life-deep learning that highlights developmental, spatial/contextual, and value-laden dimensions of the process and outcomes of learning, respectively. The following summary of each dimension is adapted from Banks et al. (2007, pp. 12–13).

Life-long learning refers to the acquisition of fundamental competencies and a facility with real-world information over the life course—from infancy to old age. Generally, learners prefer to seek out information and acquire ways of doing things because they are motivated to do so by their interests, needs, curiosity, pleasure, and sense that they have talents that align with certain kinds of tasks and challenges. Expertise and competencies develop over the course of years through concerted effort and deepening participation in relevant social practices. The life-long dimension highlights the long-term developmental processes and capacities associated with learning over years and decades.

Life-wide learning shows how learners navigate diverse social ecologies each day as they circulate through everyday activities and settings—from the classroom to home, afterschool programs to informal educational institutions, and into their communities and online spaces. Learning derives, in both opportunistic and patterned ways, from this breadth of human experience and the related supports and occasions for learning—in ways that are not fully understood. Learners figure out how to adapt and to transport knowledge and skills gained in one situation to another, and to transform direct experience into strategies and tactics for future use. As a result of the boundary-crossing nature of lived experience, people need to learn how to navigate the different underlying assumptions and goals associated with education and development across the settings and pursuits they encounter. The life-wide dimension highlights the [Page 1395]contextual and setting-focused dimensions of learning across a variety of learning environments that vary in their degrees of formality.

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