Beyond the Classroom: Psychological and Sociocultural Perspectives on Lifelong Learning in Everyday Life, Communities, Culture, and Work

BackgroundLearning across the lifespan extends beyond schools and universities into everyday life, communities, workplaces, families, cultural practices, digital environments, and intergenerational relationships. Yet educational research and policy often privilege learning that is formally organized, institutionally recognized, and conventionally assessed. Consequently, many meaningful forms of non-formal and informal learning remain under-recognized, while the psychological and sociocultural processes through which they develop remain insufficiently understood. This gap is increasingly consequential in societies shaped by technological change, demographic transitions, cultural and linguistic diversity, changing patterns of work, and persistent inequalities in educational access. A broader account of lifelong learning is therefore needed—one that explains how people exercise agency, participate in social practices, mobilize linguistic and cultural resources, and construct meaning across interconnected learning environments.GoalResearch on lifelong learning beyond formal education remains dispersed across adult education, educational psychology, community education, workplace learning, and cultural studies. This Research Topic aims to develop a coherent, theory-informed account of how such learning occurs, develops, and gains meaning. Learning ecologies will serve as the overarching framework, viewing learning as emerging through interconnected opportunities, relationships, resources, technologies, places, and practices across formal, non-formal, and informal settings. Sociocultural and situated learning theories, including communities of practice, will explain how participation in socially and culturally organized activities shapes learning. Self-directed and self-regulated learning, together with learner autonomy, will illuminate agency, motivation, goal setting, self-management, reflection, and resource use. Transformative learning will help explain how experience, dialogue, and critical reflection may reshape meaning perspectives, identity, agency, and action. These complementary perspectives guide the central question: how do individual agency, social participation, and cultural context interact across learning ecologies to shape lifelong learning beyond formal education? The collection will connect psychological learning processes with the sociocultural conditions in which they unfold.Scope and Information for AuthorsWe have no preferred methodology and welcome qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods studies, alongside review, conceptual, and theoretical contributions, provided the work is rigorous and clearly examines learning processes and educational implications. The Research Topic focuses on lifelong, non-formal, and informal learning across everyday, community, cultural, workplace, digital, intergenerational, leisure, and public settings, involving adult learners, older adults, workers and professionals, community members, families, intergenerational groups, and marginalized or underserved populations. It is relevant to educators, learning designers, and policy makers. Themes include learning ecologies; agency, self-direction, self-regulation, and autonomy; communities of practice; identity and meaning-making; transformative and experiential learning; cultural and heritage learning; local and Indigenous knowledge; intercultural and multilingual learning; digital and AI-mediated learning; and life transitions. We will not consider manuscripts lacking a clear psycho-educational perspective, including purely descriptive accounts or studies of workplace, organizational, or cultural practices that do not examine learning processes and educational implications. Topic editors: Dech-siri Nopas, Siew Foen Ng, Wirathep Pathumcharoenwattana, Archanya Ratana-Ubol Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85882/beyond-the-classroom-psychological-and-sociocultural-perspectives-on-lifelong-learning-in-everyday-life-communities-culture-and-work