Life-wide Learning (LWL) is a teaching strategy that involves real contexts and authentic settings.
The goal is to undertake different kinds of learning not covered in a traditional classroom. By including LWL with a traditional classroom, students are better equipped to achieve whole person development and to develop the lifelong learning skills.
It is the focus of education in Hong Kong. The concept is also being developed in higher education at the University of Surrey, England.
Lifewide learning adds important detail to the broad pattern of human development we call lifelong learning – all the learning and development we obtain as we progress along the pathway of our life. Lifewide learning recognizes that most people, no matter what their age or circumstances, simultaneously inhabit a number of different spaces – like work or education, being a member of a family, being involved in clubs or societies, travelling and taking holidays and looking after their own well-being mentally, physically and spiritually. So the time frames of lifelong learning and the spaces of lifewide learning will characteristically blend and who we are becoming are the consequences of this blending.
We live out our lives in these different spaces and most people have the freedom to choose which spaces we want to occupy and how we want to occupy them. In these spaces, we make decisions about what to be connected with, we meet and interact with different people, have different sorts of relationships, adopt different roles and identities, and think, behave and communicate in different ways. In these different spaces we encounter different sorts of challenges and problems, seize, create or miss opportunities, and aspire to live and achieve our ambitions. It is in these spaces that we create the meaning that is our life. The promise of lifewide education is that we can more fully appreciate and value our lives for the potential they hold for allowing us to become the people we want and need to become. In other words our everyday pathway to actualizing ourselves.