Community Men’s Sheds and Informal Learning: An Exploration of Their Gendered Roles

Our general intention in this chapter is to explore some of the gendered aspects of learning that have been recognised through the creation of the community men’s sheds movement during the past decade in four countries. It includes a new and critical exploration of women’s historic and current role in the community men’s shed movement across four nations to 2014. It is timely that we revisit and expand on our early and tentative observations (Golding & Foley, 2008; Golding, Kimberley, Foley & Brown, 2008) about the emerging role of women in men’s sheds, at a time (in 2014) when the movement has grown and significantly expanded, including beyond Australia, to Ireland (Carragher, 2013), the UK and New Zealand. Men’s Shed-based organisations, now flourishing and spreading in community settings across over one thousand sites in these four countries are already changing theory and practice in men’s informal learning, particularly for the significant proportion of men not in paid work. Golding (2014b) recently invoked the idea of ‘shedagogy’ as a distinctive, new way of acknowledging, describing and addressing the way some men prefer to learn informally in shed-like spaces mainly with other men.