About the LIFE Center
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is funding Science of Learning Centers (SLCs) in order to extend the frontiers of knowledge on learning of all types and create the intellectual, organizational, and physical infrastructure needed for the long-term advancement of learning research. The Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center was one of the first four Science of Learning Centers to be funded in the Fall of 2004. LIFE is an interdisciplinary collaboration between learning scientists at the University of Washington, Stanford University, SRI International, and other institutions across the country.
THE LIFE LEADERSHIP TEAM consists of Brigid Barron, Philip Bell, John Bransford, Patricia Kuhl, Andrew Meltzoff, Na’ilah Suad Nasir, Roy Pea, Byron Reeves, William Penuel, Nora Sabelli, Dan Schwartz, Reed Stevens, and Nancy Vye. They are joined by an exceptional group of graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, faculty researchers, and staff in LIFE Center activities.
THE PURPOSE OF THE LIFE CENTER IS to develop and test principles about the social foundations of human learning in informal and formal environments, including how people learn to innovate in contemporary society, with the goal of enhancing human learning from infancy to adulthood.
Our selection of ‘the social foundations of learning’ as LIFE’s Purpose derived from four factors: (a) Center-wide LIFE discussions of our findings with the goal of identifying common principles across diverse settings, domains, and ages, (b) identification of learning features in both informal and formal settings, (c) new advances in related fields, (d) a consensus among LIFE’s scientists that the role of ’social’ in learning is underrepresented in current thinking about the science of learning.
Figure: The LIFE Center Lifelong and Lifewide Learning Diagram
The LIFE Center’s Lifelong and Lifewide Diagram by LIFE Center is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
THE MISSION OF THE LIFE CENTER:
LIFE has two Missions that embody what we must do to achieve our Purpose.
LIFE’s Mission 1 is:
To identify and investigate underlying principles of how people learn socially by strategically sampling learning across settings, domains, and ages, and by using multiple methodologies (neurobiological, cognitive, developmental, & socio-cultural) to spark conceptual collisions and syntheses among viewpoints.
This Mission highlights our belief that a truly transformative science of learning requires both strategic sampling across settings, domains, and age of participants, and also involves multiple methodologies that LIFE and its partners can bring to bear on our Purpose. This is where LIFE’s breadth becomes a strength.
LIFE’s Mission 2 is:
To foster research and education collaborations with individual and institutional partners, and to promote qualitative improvements, both theoretical and practical, in our collective capacities for understanding and supporting human learning.
The scope of Missions 1 and 2 is illustrated below in Figure 2. LIFE is systematically working in a number of different environments, and across different ages, in order to provide sufficient variability for problem finding, hypothesis testing, and theory building to address our purpose of investigating the social foundations of learning in informal and formal settings.
Figure 2: The LIFE Center Lifelong and Lifewide Learning Diagram: Illustrated Samples. Numbers represent strategic LIFE sampling across settings, domains and ages to uncover principles of social foundations, social practices, and social designs in learning.
The LIFE Center’s Lifelong and Lifewide Diagram by LIFE Center is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
In Figure 2, each number (1-8) represents one or more LIFE research projects involving settings and ages: (1) learning in infancy; (2) early school-age including formal and informal environments; (3) formal K-12 environments; (4) informal environments for middle school students (e.g., clubs, museums and family homes, and connections across these environments and to schools); (5) community college and college environments; (6) graduate training of pre-service teachers; (7) interdisciplinary training of LIFE graduate students and post-docs; and (8) workplace environments. LIFE researchers are making use of the variability found across these settings to uncover key issues of learning that can easily remain invisible if they are not systematically explored under such variation. LIFE’s sampling of settings, domains, and ages is enhanced by collaborations with a variety of individual and institutional partners, in keeping with the goal expressed by Mission 2. We have a number of successful illustrations of that strategy.
Our aim is to establish LIFE as a center of bi-directional and multi-directional influences-we continue to learn how to fully more utilize LIFE’s partnerships and collaborations to enhance theory building and foster continued collaboration and capacity building.
Print This Page
