Stephen Richard Billett

Workplace Participatory Practices: Conceptualising Workplaces as Learning Environments.

Arguing against a concept of learning as only a formal process occurring in explicitly educational settings like schools, the paper proposes a conception of the workplace as a learning environment focusing on the interaction between the affordances and constraints of the social setting, on the one hand, and the agency and biography of the individual participant, on the other. Workplaces impose certain expectations and norms in the interest of their own continuity and survival, and in the interest of certain participants; but learners also choose to act in certain ways dependent on their own preferences and goals. Thus, the workplace as a learning environment must be understood as a complex negotiation about knowledge‐use, roles and processes – essentially as a question of the learners participation in situated work activities.

Learning through work: workplace affordances and individual engagement

Identifies factors that shape how learning proceeds in workplaces. Focuses on the dual bases of how workplaces afford opportunities for learning and how individuals elect to engage in work activities and with the guidance provided by the workplace. Together, these dual bases for participation (co‐participation) at work, and the relations between them, are central to understanding the kinds of learning that workplaces are able to provide and how improving the quality of that learning might proceed. The readiness of the workplace to afford opportunities for individuals to engage in work activities and access direct and indirect support is a key determinant of the quality of learning in workplaces. This readiness can promote individuals’ engagement. However, this engagement remains dependent on the degree by which individuals wish to engage purposefully in the workplace.

Toward a Workplace Pedagogy: Guidance, Participation, and Engagement

This article proposes bases for a workplace pedagogy. Planes of intentional guidance and sequenced access to workplace activities represent some key workplace pedagogic practices. Guidance by others, situations, and artifacts are central to learning through work because the knowledge to be learned is historically, culturally, and situationally constituted. However, the quality of learning through these planes of activities and guidance is ultimately premised on the workplace’s participatory practices, which shape and distribute the activities and support the workplace affordance workers and fromwhich they learn. Situational and political processes underpin these workplace affordances. Yet participatory practices are reciprocally constructed because individuals elect how to engage in and learn from what workplaces afford them. A workplace pedagogy is founded in these coparticipatory practices and needs to account for how workplaces invite access to activities and guidance and how individuals elect to participate in what the workplace affords.

Guided Learning at Work.

Reports and discusses the findings of an investigation that examined the efficacy of guided learning in the workplace. The investigation comprised the trialing of guided learning strategies and an analysis of the learning occurring in five workplaces over a period of six months. The guided learning strategies selected for investigation were questioning dialogues, the use of diagrams and analogies within an approach to workplace learning emphasising modelling and coaching. Throughout the investigation, critical incident interviews were conducted to identify the contributions to learning that had occurred during these periods, including those provided by the guided learning. As anticipated, it was found that participation in everyday work activities (the learning curriculum) was most valued and reported as making effective contributions to learning in the workplace. However, there was also correlation between reports of the frequency of guided learning interactions and their efficacy in resolving novel workplace tasks, and therefore learning. It is postulated that some of these learning outcomes could not have been secured by everyday participation in the workplace alone. Further, factors associated with the readiness of enterprise and those within it were identified as influencing the likely effectiveness of guided learning at work.

Workplace Pedagogic Practices: Co–participation and Learning

This paper advances tentative bases for understanding workplace pedagogic practices. It draws on a series of studies examining learning through everyday work activities and guided learning in the workplace. These studies identified the contributions and limitations of these learning experiences. However, whether referring to the activities and interactions arising through work or intentional guided learning, the quality and likely contributions of these learning experiences are underpinned by workplace participatory practices. These practices comprise the reciprocal process of how workplaces afford participation and how individuals elect to engage with the work practice, termed co–participation. Workplace experiences are not informal. They are a product of the historical–cultural practices and situational factors that constitute the particular work practice, which in turn distributes opportunities for participation to individuals or cohorts of individuals. That is, they shape the conduct of work and learning through these practices. However, how individuals construe what is afforded by the workplace shapes how they elect to engage in that practice and learn. There is no separation between engaging in conscious thought – such as when participating in socially derived activities and interactions – and learning. Learning is conceptualised as an inter–psychological process of participation in social practices such as workplaces. It is not reserved for activities and interactions intentionally organised for learning (e.g. those in educational institutions). Nevertheless, particular kinds of activities are likely to have particular learning consequences, regardless of whether they occur in the workplace or in educational institutions. The significance of co–participation is discussed in terms of the affordance of the workplace and individuals’ construction of that affordance and subsequent engagement. Co–participation is proposed as a platform to build an understanding of workplace pedagogic practices. This includes understanding the likely contributions of learning through everyday work activities and the use of intentional workplace learning strategies, such as guided workplace learning (e.g. modelling, coaching, questioning, etc.). Instances of co–participatory practices are illustrated and discussed. Following this, a tentative scheme, founded in socio–historical activity theory, is advanced as a means for describing the requirements for work and bases for participation. The scheme comprises two dimensions: activities and interdependencies.

Realising the educational worth of integrating work experiences in higher education

Across advanced industrial economies, programs in higher education are increasingly becoming occupationally specific and universities are being seen as providers of ‘higher vocational education’. With this have come expectations that graduates from these programs will enjoy smooth transitions into professional practice. Aligned with these expectations is an educational emphasis on providing students with access to and engagement in authentic instances of practice, and an expectation that these will be effectively integrated within higher education programs. Consequently, it is important to understand how these kinds of educational purposes and processes can be realised, and how higher education students’ experiences in both university and practice settings should be best organised and integrated to realise these purposes. This article discusses the worth of these educational purposes and bases for realising the effective integration of these work experiences. This discussion includes considerations of the kinds of curriculum and pedagogic practices needed to be enacted to secure this educational worth.

LEARNING THROUGHOUT WORKING LIFE: A RELATIONAL INTERDEPENDENCE BETWEEN PERSONAL AND SOCIAL AGENCY

ABSTRACT: Individuals actively and continually construct the knowledge required for their working lives. Two outcomes arise from this constructive process: (i) individual change (i.e. learning) and (ii) the remaking of culturally-derived practices comprising work. These arise through a relational interdependence between the contributions and agency of the personal and the social. The relationship is interdependent because neither the social nor personal contributions alone are sufficient. The social experience is important for articulating and providing access to work performance requirements. However, personal factors such as individuals’ capacities, subjectivities and agency shape how workers interpret and engage with what they experience and, consequently, how they learn and remake practice throughout their working life. This case is elaborated through a discussion about learning with considerations of intersubjectivity, personal epistemologies, pedagogy and curriculum as experience.

Learning through working life: self and individuals’ agentic action

An individual’s capacity to be effective throughout their working life is now claimed to be necessary to sustain individual, local and national well‐being. Yet without knowing more about an individual’s motivations to continually learn throughout their working life, it remains uncertain how realistic these expectations are. This paper examines the transitions and continuities in a year in the working lives of five individuals. It illuminates how their identities, subjectivities and sense of selves are exercised through the churning and transformations that comprise their working lives. Although accepting the intertwining between the individual and social, the primary focus here is on individuals and their sense of self. Against some predictions, the five individuals were able to enact their working lives in ways that broadly served their personal interests and goals, even to their detriment. This included achieving continuities associated with their sense of self in negotiating transformational workplace requirements. These findings from just five workers prompt consideration of a more relational basis for conceptualizing learning throughout the working life and the role of the self in that process. It suggests that learning throughout life is aligned with the personal as much as the social suggestion of the workplace, employers or government and that external mandates and regulatory practices may be insufficient and ineffective in securing lifelong learning goals.

Work, Subjectivity and Learning

In recent year, efforts to understand learning for and throughout working life have moved away from a focus on workplace training to concerns about learning as a component and outcome of engaging in work and work-related activities and interactions. This shift acknowledges a broader set of workplace factors that shape workers’ learning and development. Yet equally, it acknowledges that this learning through engagement is also necessarily shaped by the diverse ways that individuals elect to engage or participate in workplace activities. Central here is the issue of individuals’ subjectivity and how this is shaped by but shapes engagement in work and, therefore, what learning flows from their participation. It is in considering the relations among subjectivity, learning and work that it is possible to advance both the conceptual and procedural bases for understanding learning through and for working life. Moreover, the focus on relations among subjectivity, work and learning represents a point of convergence for diverse disciplinary traditions and practices that are provided by the book’s contributors. In this way, the contributions represent something of the emerging perspectives that are elaborating the complex relations among subjectivity, work and learning, and circumstances in which they are played out.

Work, change and workers

Dedication Preface Section 1: Introduction: Work,Change and Workers,- Section 2: Social and Individual Bases for Understanding Work Life: Cultural, Situational and Individual Geneses of Work Life,- A Relational Basis for Understanding Work Life,- The Worth of Work,- Section 3: Changing the Concepts and Requirements of Work: Changes in Available Work,- Changing Participation in Work,- Changing Composition of Paid Workforces,- Changing Requirements for Work Performance,- Section 4: Describing and Elaborating Work: A Framework for Describing Work,- Changing Work Practice and Work Requirements: Case Studies,- Work, Learning and Identity,- References,- Index