When reality surpasses concepts: informality in social pedagogy

More than half a century ago, UNESCO popularised the terms formal, non-formal and informal to define, organise and characterise the macrocosm of educational actions. In this article I question the current relevance of these categories, and the characteristics of education and learning that act and intervene within the framework of social pedagogy. I focus mainly on informal learning, not only because it is the least well-known type of educational action, but because it is one of the central pillars on which the socio-educational relationships developed by social educators are built. I follow an orientated, though not systematic, procedure of documentary analysis. The analysis is conceptually orientated because I analyse two types of documents: (a) the documents that refer to informal education or learning, regardless of the territorial context or academic environment in which they are produced; and (b) those that relate such education or learning to social pedagogy. I organise the results obtained from these analyses into four sections. In the first section, I relate what different studies have proposed on formal, non-formal and informal education/learning, the ways of understanding them and the contents and procedures that respectively distinguish them. On the basis of this research, in the second section, I then propose a means of mapping to distinguish between the three types of education/learning. In the third section, I relate these forms of education/learning to social pedagogy. And finally, in the fourth section, by way of conclusion, I present some of the overlaps and hybridisations that demonstrate the current complexity of the universe entailing educational actions.