Thinking inside the box

are already disadvantaged. What this article mainly seeks to do is ‘unwrap’ one of several forms of learning that have been found to be enthusiastically embraced by older men previously thought of, almost patronisingly, as being ‘unreached learners’. In the process, I am seeking to ‘join some of the dots’ between learning and several of the World Health Organisation social determinants of health: social exclusion, unemployment, difficult past lives and a stressful current life. My broader intention is to demonstrate that it is possible for older men to create

new grassroots organisations in which transformational learning takes place through the activity in a community or practice rather than as the object of the activity. The insights in this article are informed by a suite of ongoing research, recently elaborated by me in Chapter 4 of Innovations in lifelong learning (2010, edited by Sue Jackson), and summarised in a forthcoming (2011) article in Adult Education Quarterly. In essence, my argument is that learning and wellbeing are not necessarily maximized as outcomes by educational intervention that presupposes

The ‘men’s sheds’ movement is a grassroots phenomenon that has engaged and inspired men from communities across Australia in hands-on, workshop- based social activity. With men’s sheds spreading to other countries, including the UK, BARRY GOLDING asks what adult educators can learn from the movement

higher formal literacies or pedagogies. But, first, I want to say a little more about

my field of research interest. My interest is in the nature and value of learning through rather than learning about, particularly by older men (50-plus) in later life. While the type of learning I am interested in is often called ‘informal’, I tend to shy away from naming (and thereby shaming) it in opposition to ‘formal’. As Tom Schuller and David Watson identified in Learning Through Life (p. 172), our needs change as we age. In older people the need and interest is less

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