This paper focuses on the learning that happens in everyday life, beyond the formal learning environments of schools, colleges, and universities. It conceptualizes this as ‘invisible education’, unrecognized but powerful and formative (Quinn, 2022). Such invisible education has a powerful impact on formations of gender, class, race, sexuality, and disability. Strong arguments have been made to move beyond Education as presently conceived (Meyerhof, 2019) to change formal education. However, the invisible education of everyday life has gained less scrutiny and much less empirical work. In Ordinary Affects Kathleen Stewart explores the affective dimensions of everyday life and mentions ‘learning affects’: ‘not so much forms of signification, or units of knowledge as they are expressions of ideas or problems performed as a kind of involuntary and powerful learning and participation’ (2007, p40). The term ‘involuntary’ is a suggestive one, this is not learning as a goal or pathway. as happens in conceptions of non-formal or even informal learning, but rather emerges indirectly from other activities and simply in daily living. As such it is oppositional to the ‘learning outcomes’ that have come to dominate formal education. Multiple forms of learning: in communities, activism, nature, arts, volunteering, the home and online offer potential for new forms of power, knowledge, and subjectivity. These neglected spheres of learning are helping to shape the future and are where the most significant lessons about global social issues such as sustainability, racism and feminism are being learned: with both positive and negative consequences. The paper suggests that although this form of education remains mostly invisible and disregarded it is a rich and important field of enquiry with important consequences for gender equality.

 The paper addresses the following research questions: What is ‘invisible education and how is it gendered’? How does invisible education happen in the lives of diverse participants and what are the consequences for gender equality? How can this be theorized? The objectives are: to challenge the narrow construction of what counts as education and educational research; to propose and discuss the concept of invisible education in relation to gender and explore the learning which takes place in everyday life, in spaces/spheres beyond formal education; to show that such learning can benefit from a critical posthuman/feminist new material analysis; to discuss the role such learning plays in being in the world and creating new worlds, drawing on a range of research studies. This data will be re/diffracted through critical posthuman perspectives/feminist new materialism in particular Barad’s (2007) theory of intra-activity. She argues that there is no pre-existent stable human or any form of matter, rather new worlds that are constantly being created. The paper will explore how invisible education is part of this process.

The paper will draw on a diverse range of grant funded, qualitative, research projects to focus on such invisible education and to generate theoretical understandings. This will include longitudinal life history research with older women activists conducted over a period of two years in person and by telephone, face to face interviews conducted at six month intervals with young women in low paid work, and face to face interviews and participant observations with women and children living in a women’s refuge. All of these studies obtained ethical approval from University of Plymouth Education Ethics Committee and followed the norms of informed consent, anonymisation and confidentiality. Care was also taken to consider the specific vulnerabilities of participants. For example protecting the location and the identities of women in the refuge was paramount.Most of the research was undertaken in the UK, but the paper also draws on insights from comparative research conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Beirut, recognising that invisible education is shaped by space, place, culture and conflict: globally significant but always diverse. The paper reengages with these research studies not as a fixed set of data that will always tell the same story but as examples of diffractive reading through notions of visibility and invisibility,This data will be re/diffracted through critical posthuman perspectives/feminist new materialism in particular Barad’s (2007) theory of intra-activity. Bringing to light must not assume mastery: invisible education is a complex and slippery subject but is useful in helping to explore everyday learning and think through the positive and negative consequences for women of what is cast as unseen, an unconsidered trifle.

The paper concludes that it is possible to trace everyday learning activities that do not fit into the accepted bounds of Education yet are profoundly educational in that they teach formative lessons and offer new capacities. Drawing on the research data the paper traces how this invisible education can be a process of accretion. For example, women activists learned how to conceptualise inequalities through an ongoing process of activities, refining their perspectives and gaining more sophisticated understandings. Feminisms and campaigns for gender equality emerged from this invisible education and not from formal education. Women and children escaping from violence used their engagement with music where they were to build transitions, feeling their way to a different future, rather than learning formal skills in college or university. Invisible education can also be something hidden and treasured: a skill set that no-one knows about such as the education young women gained in their everyday intra-activities with nature. In all these instances such education was not valorised by wider society or even seen, and its potential for progressing gender equality could be considered both significant and dormant. A feminist new materialist perspective that combines Stewart’s ‘learning affects’ and Barad’s ‘new worlds’ is productive in building a theoretical approach to such invisible education and ensuring that gender is foregrounded. The paper concludes that ‘invisible education’ is a useful concept and opens up understanding of how women's everyday learning is powerful, but obscured, devalued, and made invisible.

Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the Universe halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglements of Matter and Meaning, London: Duke University Press Meyerhof, E. (2019) Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press Quinn, J. (2022, forthcoming) Invisible Education: Posthuman explorations of learning in everyday life, London: Routledge Stewart, K. (2007) Ordinary Affects, London: Duke University Press