In the last few years our research group (Contemporary Subjectivities and Educational Environments –ESBRINA) has carried out two research projects: 1) “Policy and Practice regarding ICT in Education: Implication for Educational Innovation and Improvement” (MICINN. SEJ2007-67562); 2) “Rethinking school success and failure of secondary education from the relationship of young people with knowledge” (MICINN. EDU2008-03287), that allowed us to explore fundamental educational issues such as: a) how schools meet (or not) the challenge of educating students in the digital society; b) how school use Information and Communication Technologies to enhance students learning; c) how students give meaning (or not) to their school experience.

However, the most significant matter arising from these two projects has been the existing gap between the “real” world and the school world; between students’ social and personal experiences out school, and students’ learning practices in school.

Now-a-days students are living in settings literally bombarded by aural, visual and sensorial stimuli providing them with very distinctive life and learning experiences, which are often neglected or rejected by the unchanging structures and orientations of schools (Sancho, 2009). The so-called Web2.0 seems perfect for expressing the “self” as a second generation of web-based communities and hosted services —such as social networking sites, wikis, folksonomies, weblogs (blogs), social bookmarking, podcasts, RSS feeds, and so on— aim to facilitate authorship, creativity, collaboration and sharing between users and effective information handling. An environment ideally suited for multiliterate users (Cope & Kalanski, 2000). Young people’s recurrent activity with these technologies fundamentally shapes their notions of communication, knowledge management, learning, and even personal and social values (Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005; Howe & Strauss, 2000).

These situations raise a set of questions such us: To what extent are schools taking into account that learning does not only take place in the classroom? To what extent is it considered that learning, for better or worse, takes place in all formal and informal environments in which people happen to be involved, at any point in life? To what extent students learning experiences out of school are “interfering” school learning and results and foster students lack of engagement in processes meaningless for them?

In order to find new answers to these questions we have set up a new project (“Living and learning with new literacies inside and outside the secondary school: contributions to reduce truancy, exclusion and young students’ disaffection”. MICINN- EDU2011-24122) to explore the following hypothesis: There is a gap between what the school believes that learning is (in general, listening to the teacher, making exercises and accounting for a reproductive test or exam) and how young people learn outside school when they build digital trading communities with colleagues and use new literacies.

Our presentation will focus on the decision made to set up the proposal and undertaking the first research steps, putting a special attention to the setting up of the ethnographical studies to explore “with” secondary school students how they do learn in and out school.

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