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Disaster education is considered as a newly emerging area of research and practice, which promotes community-based educational approaches for building resilience. Given the atypical nature of these disturbances, people and communities need to develop the knowledge required to anticipate and understand what they could have to contend with and proactively develop strategies that can minimize their risk and afford ways to cope with and adapt to adverse situations in an effective manner. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that informal education resulting from daily activities related to work, family life, or leisure can be harnessed to develop disaster resilience within community settings.

This conceptual paper provides the discussion and synthesis of literature covering community resilience, disaster risk reduction (DRR) and informal education. In doing so, this study proposes a conceptual framework and implementation strategies for harnessing informal education in building community resilience.

To harness informal disaster education for community resilience, the authors suggest a conceptual framework and four implementation strategies with the corresponding implications: cultivate social environment for conversations, discussions, reflections and learning; design social activities for promoting and encouraging informal learning; appropriate interventions by informal educators in social activities; and transparent resources and channels for information and social supports. A compilation of a number of community-based DRR practices involving civil society organizations has been incorporated in the proposed framework for exemplifying informal disaster education for community resilience.

Promoting informal education in community settings is aimed at building community resilience in a collective way, which is especially important in disaster-prone areas. Informal education for community resilience not only educates individuals how to deal with disasters, but also connects individuals together to be more resilient in their ability to cope or bounce back from adverse events in their life.

Although the design studio has formally been the locus for design education, informal education approach has gained more and more acceptance in the world. Informal education, which is the education outside the confines of curricula, includes the acquisition of knowledge and skills through experience, reading, social contact, etc. Workshops cover the essential weight of this informal education. Although the role of the design workshops in architectural design education has been very limited through overall design education’s past, many schools of architecture have taken steps to consider workshops as the part of informal learning and education.

“Culture and Space in the Build environment” (CSBE) Network of IAPS have been organizing “culture and design workshop series” for graduate and post graduate students in Turkey since 2001. In these workshops, a design teaching approach based on the conceptual framework of culture and space interactions is applied. The conceptual framework developed for the architectural design education, takes three fundamental starting points for workshops as the part of informal design education: as a tool for informal design education (method), as a tool for learning & understanding culture-environment relations (content), and as a tool for awareness of different environments/contexts (scale/place). The foundation of the conceptual framework is based on the general approach that discusses the “architectural design process” with regards to environmental context and content.

Within this context the aim of the paper is to discuss and evaluate the importance and the contribution of workshops as tool for informal architectural design education. These discussions will be held on the case of IAPS-CBSE Network’s last workshop “Istanbul as a Palimpsest City and Imperfection”. In the paper, the process, the method, the content and the results of workshop studies will be discussed and evaluated.

This chapter illuminates the impact of providing informal learning experiences for students pursuing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) teaching careers at a time when there is a considerable shortage of qualified teachers in America's urban centers. Preservice STEM teachers were provided with the opportunity to participate in a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant funded Noyce Internship Program prior to serving as counselors and teaching assistants in a STEM camp for underrepresented middle school students. Through the Noyce Internship Institute, participants were introduced to interactive sessions that model promising teaching practices including inquiry-based and project-based learning. This narrative inquiry examines the impact of these experiences on preservice STEM teachers' self-efficacy and highlights outcomes in three areas: increase of preservice teachers' confidence, classroom management, and strengthening their desire to teach STEM.

Many higher education institutions are committed to developing students as skilled professionals and responsible citizens for a more sustainable future. In addition to the formal curriculum for sustainability education, there is an increasing interest in informal learning within universities. This paper aims to extend the current understanding of the diversity and significance of informal learning experiences in supporting students’ learning for sustainability.

Six focus groups were formed with 30 undergraduate and postgraduate students from an Australian higher education institution committed to supporting graduate competencies for sustainability. An inductive and qualitative inquiry was designed to enable participants to reflect on the ways in which their university experiences support meaningful and significant learning for sustainability.

The paper presents a typology of the diverse communities of informal learning that students create and engage with. These range from ongoing to transient groups, from environmentally to more socially oriented groups and from incidental to intended learning, from local to national in scale, with varying types and degrees of connection to the formal curriculum and the university campus. The paper demonstrates that these student-led experiences support three domains of learning: cognitive, practical and affective.

Deepening the understanding of the forms and significance of student-led learning within their university experience contributes to the identification of the roles that informal learning may play alongside formal education in developing graduates as agents of change for a more sustainable future.

An ever-increasing emphasis is being placed on the concept of cross-institutional educational initiatives. Among these are university–school partnerships, seen as possessing immense multidimensional potential. The model of university–school partnership espouses distinctive advantages: it promotes close collaboration on an array of pedagogical elements, a manifold of opportunities for inter-professional learning, a unique course delivery, and the development of innovative curriculum materials. There is a consensus that effective teaching calls for more than possession of craft skills and knowledge, but should go beyond traditional pedagogical bounds, in which the innovation in new educational models is embedded in a nexus of relationships involving close multi-faceted, cross-institutional collaborations, incorporating elements of informal education. The proposed chapter aims to address the theoretical discourse and practical application of such partnerships, guided by the conviction that an effective partnership constructs new enabling structures that span the boundaries of school/university, placing an increased focus on learning for all stakeholders. It aims to supplement the existing theoretical discourse by presenting an implemented cross-institutional partnership as a case-study – a university class of intercultural competence – undertaken in cooperation among the Institute of European Studies, Jagiellonian University, and High School No. 8 in Kraków. The case study aims to illustrate how a cross-institutional partnership contributed to the development and implementation of innovative and active teaching methods, placing a particular emphasis on elements of informal education. Through a variety of methods, such as outgoing seminars, peer-mediation, and city games, the outlined partnership model serves as an effective example of innovative practices in higher education.

Previous studies on the effect of entrepreneur education are not comprehensive. Thus, estimating the effect of entrepreneur education is imperative. According to the Malaysian Ministry of Education (MoE), only 1.7 percent (as of 2013) of university graduates are self-employed, that is managing one’s own business or known as graduate entrepreneurs. Consequently, a huge gap exists between what is targeted by the government (5.5 percent by 2015) and the reality (a small number of graduate entrepreneurs). The purpose of this paper is to analyze the factors influencing a graduate’s choice to be entrepreneur, particularly the effects of different entrepreneur education, either formal or informal.

A total of 2,300 graduates from Universiti Utara Malaysia participated in this study.

The findings showed that the majority of the respondents are consistent in terms of their intent to become entrepreneurs.

Due to time and resource constraints, the data are limited to only one university in Malaysia. It is suggested that future studies include more universities, especially entrepreneurial universities. Although it is believe that public universities’ undergraduates population are highly homogeneous, it is good that the findings of the present study to be further validated by future studies using larger sample that consists of varies of public universities.

This paper supports government policies in terms of cultivating educated entrepreneur such as promoting the entrepreneurship education among higher institutions of education (MoE, 2007). However, there are negative relationships among higher academic achievement of graduates toward their intention to be entrepreneurs. It is indicated that high academic achievements are negatively related to becoming entrepreneurs. Thus, it is suggested that entrepreneurship education in terms of both formal and informal education be implemented into the curriculum in order to cultivate entrepreneurial intentions.

There is still much more to be learned to fully understand the processes that leading to the decision to become an entrepreneur. Nevertheless, the results presented in this paper provide some understanding of the factors influencing the decision to become an entrepreneur among university students and graduates using a convenience sample. Thus, the results are exploratory and subjected to validation by future studies using more representative samples. Nevertheless, the study makes a contribution to the effort to predict and develop entrepreneurs in the country.

Explores relations between workers’ extent of control over their paid and unpaid labour processes and the incidence of different types of organized and informal learning. Activity theory is used to posit relations between power and knowledge acquisition in different spheres of work. The sources of evidence are recent Canadian national surveys. Implications of the findings for more democratic organization of paid workplaces and educational institutions are briefly noted.

As university faculty faced new challenges, such as rapid digital social and the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) response, this study aimed to identify the daily changes in the interaction between the faculty and the organizational environment (colleague, policy and new issue) by exploring their recent dynamic educational efforts and the professional development.

This is a study wherein perceptions of 20 faculty from 15 universities and colleges were collected through in-depth online interviews. The authors analyzed interview data by arranging and visualizing the analyzed data using network clustering. Further, they applied the Latent Dirichlet allocation of the topic modeling to monitor the appropriate number of clusters, ultimately determined as four clusters using partial clustering.

The results showed that university faculty spontaneously tried to solve the problems through informal learning while the commitment to peer learning was deepening, reflecting the collectivist orientation nature of Chinese culture. Besides, the faculty also required support to reflect on their daily efforts for professional development. These results about their various learning routines prove the justification for the faculty's professional development to be discussed from the “learning by doing” perspective of lifelong learning.

This study proved the significance of informal learning for university faculty's professional development and the reasonable value of peer learning, and provided insights into how the Chinese context may influence university faculty's informal learning experience.

The focus in professional learning is often on formal activities such as workshops, conferences and courses. There is also a tendency to focus on formal programmes of coaching and mentoring in teacher education. Emphasising the formal activities means that everyday informal learning in educational settings is overlooked. Informal coaching and mentoring could be utilised to support teachers' career-long professional learning.

This is a conceptual paper which draws on the author's research and seeks to expand what is considered as professional learning within teacher education – namely, informal coaching and mentoring. To understand how to support this professional learning, the lens of social practice is used with an emphasis on learning environments and learning practices.

Coaching and mentoring can be identified in informal encounters in the staffroom, school corridors and many places and situations. Findings are presented in relation to the importance of informal learning from and with colleagues and the role of headteachers.

More attention has been paid to informal learning, but there is still a need for what could be termed an “informal turn”. Understanding that informal coaching and mentoring afford professional learning opportunities to the teachers who both provide and receive coaching and mentoring can help to support their learning. Recommendations are provided on how educational settings can facilitate and support these professional learning opportunities while preserving their informality.