Stepping outside the box: the need for innovation in researching out-of-school learning

Out-of-school learning is a vast and diverse field, with wide ranges in terms of: what it is; where, when, and why it happens; who participates and what roles they take on. The concept resists being pinned down, categorised, and neatly defined. Such diversity and unpredictability in what out-of-school learning "looks like" means that many long-established approaches to researching learning will simply not work. This paper will discuss the need for researchers of out-of-school learning to adapt and innovate their methods, as they progress through research projects. Researchers in this field need the ability to reshape how they do research, to respond to the unpredictable contexts in which they find themselves, and make sense of the complexity of out-of-school learning.