Transformations at work: identity and learning

This paper examines how identity and learning are constituted and transformed at work. Its central concern is how individuals engage agentically in and learn through workplace practices, and in ways that transform work. Drawing upon recent research into work and participation in workplaces, the negotiated and contested relationship between workplace practices and individuals' identity and intentionality, and learning is illuminated and discussed. For instance, aged care workers and coal miners acquire work injuries that are almost emblematic of their work identity. Only particularly dramatic events (i.e. serious illness or workplace accidents) wholly transform their identity and views about work practice—their subjectivities. However, it is through the agentic actions of these individuals that workplace practices can be transformed. Yet individuals' agentic action is not necessarily directed to the abstracted and de‐contextualized economic and civic goals privileged in lifelong learning policies. Instead, there is relational interdependency between the individual and work that can act to sustain or transform both self and their work. Individuals' agentic action is exercised within these relations in ways directed by their subjectivities. So these relations and that agentic action have policy and practice implications for the conduct of work and learning through and for work.     

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.     

Understanding work,learning and the remaking of cultural practices

This paper focuses on dualities in both the process and outcomes of participation in work. Firstly, the process of participation in work activities and interactions draws on contributions of both individuals and the social world in ways that are variably interdependent, that is, relational. The affordances of workplaces shape the array of experiences individuals are able to access and, they in turn, elect how they engage, construe and construct what is afforded them. Both the social and individual contributions are exercisable with different degrees of intensity, focus and intentionality, thereby making the process of participation in work a relational one. Secondly, and consistent with these processes, the outcomes of workplace participation also comprise dualities. These are individuals’ learning or change, on one hand, and the remaking and transformation of cultural practice that comprises work, on the other. In illuminating and elaborating these concepts, this paper draws upon the initial findings of an inquiry that is mapping the working lives of groups of three workers in each of four workplaces. The aim is to understand how these relational interdependences shape the participation, learning and remaking of work practices in these workplaces. Further, the paper identifies the exercise of both affordances and engagement for each participant within their workplaces. The findings emphasise the distinctive bases by which the groups of workers engage with their work and construct meaning and remake practice as a result of that engagement.     

Learning from childhood to mature adulthood: what makes people want ‘to learn to learn’ and keep on learning?

This article describes 35 individuals who have expressed an interest in taking university courses after retirement. Longitudinal data and individuals' own accounts are presented, in an effort to clarify the role that symbolic resources play in individuals' lives, for their capacity to construct their own identity, to function as social actors, and ‘to learn to learn’. It is argued that their lives provide grounds to consider a re‐conceptualisation of adult learning.     

Rethinking reflective practice in professional lifelong learning using learning metaphors

Studies relating to reflection and reflective practice in learning, specifically workplace learning, have gradually emerged from within the professional education literature. Evidence has seen a shift from an individualistic to a more collective approach to reflection, in an attempt to move away from viewing learning as an individual action. Simultaneously attention has been given to socio-cultural theories which view learning as social practice inherent in our everyday lives, including work. This paper aims to engage in the current debate regarding the polarised conceptualisations of reflective practice within the context of professional learning. Drawing on this debate, as well as on learning metaphors, this paper proposes that professionals should engage in collective reflective practice for both individual and organisational development within workplaces; locations which could be seen as increasingly ambiguous and unpredictable throughout individuals’ working lives. Hence, we need to rehabilitate and extend some of the key aspects of the traditional concept of reflective practice to accommodate the changing terrain of professional practice within an individual professional's lifelong learning.     

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.     

An individual learning journey: learning as becoming a vocational teacher

In this paper, I address a perceived gap in the lifelong learning literature. There is very little research which addresses how learning should be construed, when individuals transition across a longitudinal span of their working life. This transition which could be viewed as a process of ‘becoming somebody’, often oversimplifies the full complexity of individuals’ learning experiences. Using a sociocultural perspective, the paper explores the lived experiences of individuals in the process of becoming a vocational teacher, in order to help conceptualise the individuals’ learning through their working life. The study draws upon data from a completed research on a group of vocational education trainee teachers learning to teach. This paper argues that learning varies significantly from individual to individual, time to time, context to context and also in different stages of individuals’ lives. This transition could be viewed as an individual learning journey, through understanding the interrelationship between individuals and the contexts, across the individuals’ lives. Drawing from this understanding, the individual’s agency is presented as a way that individuals construct their own lifecourse through the actions and choices they made within the opportunities and constraints of the context. The findings of the study also contribute to the understanding of changes, from the individual learner’s perspective, which could be useful for policy and practice relating to lifelong learning.     

Personal Epistemology Research: Implications for Learning and Teaching

The ideas that individuals hold about knowledge and knowing have been the target of research programs with disparate names, such as epistemological beliefs, reflective judgment, ways of knowing, and epistemological reflection, all of which appear to be a part of a larger body of work on “personal epistemology.” Epistemological perspectives are salient in numerous academic experiences, have been shown to be related to learning in various ways, influence reasoning and judgment throughout our lives, and have implications for teaching. Yet this work has remained outside the mainstream of educational psychology and cognitive development. This paper addresses three main questions: (1) What is personal epistemology research and how is it conceptualized? (2) How are individuals' conceptions of epistemology related to learning and instruction? (3) Given what we know about personal epistemology, what might educators do? Suggestions are also provided for future research and theoretical development.     

Subjectivity, Learning and Work: Sources and Legacies

Individuals’ dispositions have long been held to direct and energise cognition in ways that shape how they experience and respond to events in the social world. Therefore, a consideration of these dispositions is likely to be helpful in understanding the inter-psychological processes between individual and social world that frame contemporary socio-cultural accounts of learning. Here, the specific concern is to elaborate the sources, legacies and potency of individuals’ dispositions in the learning of occupational practice through these processes. Having reviewed ideas about the dispositional underpinnings of individuals’ construal and construction of the knowledge required for work, these conceptions are exercised through illuminating the roles dispositions play in the process of constructing the knowledge required for an occupational practice (i.e. hairdressing). The study reported here combines workplace ethnography and problem-solving tasks to identify the source of these subjectivities, how they shape individuals’ cognitive processes at work tasks and their learning through participation in vocational practice. In all, it identified how individuals’ dispositions arise through socially-shaped life histories or ontogenies, albeit in person-dependent ways. The participants’ conceptions, preferences and procedures that shape their learning and the enactment of their practice were found to be products of earlier socially-derived experiences, thereby making them personally-subjective. These personally-subjective dispositions were identified as shaping how these individuals engage in work, learning and the ongoing remaking of work activities, because they influence inter-psychological processes that comprise the immediate experiences that constitute the enactment of these activities. So, this suggests that the sociogeneses of knowledge and learning likely includes personally unique social contributions that arise through ontogeny.     

The Tailored Practice of Hobbies and Its Implication for the Design of Interest-Driven Learning Environments

This article seeks to sharpen current conceptualizations of interests and engaged participation, and to derive lessons for the design of interest-driven science learning environments (formal and informal). The empirical basis of the research is a set of ethnographic records of two communities of amateur astronomers, as well as the details of astronomers' instantiations of the hobby. Hobbies are paradigmatic examples of interest-driven practices and thus they offer an excellent window into truly interest-related phenomena and processes. The analysis and data collection followed a grounded theoretical process, which I describe in two parts. First, I comb through the data iteratively and present a theory of persistent engagement in a hobby practice. Based on this theoretical sketch, I then explain how individuals' persistent, interest-based pursuit of amateur astronomy is made possible by 4 structural and process features of the practice, which together afford individuals the ability to continuously tailor the hobby: (a) an extensive and varied material infrastructure; (b) participating simultaneously across multiple communities/sites of astronomy practice; (c) activity structural resources that function as templates for short- and long-term activities; and (d) processes of collaboration and idea sharing. Lessons for the design of science learning environments that are truly interest-driven follow.     

The distinctive features of joint participation in a community of learners

The importance of teachers' and children's collaborative engagement in shared learning activities has a strong evidence base in sociocultural research and is promoted as an effective pedagogy in New Zealand's national curriculum. However, what this means for teachers' practice is unclear. Teachers can engage in practices thought to be ‘shared’ but when examined turn out to be teacher dominated. This article reports on findings from a New Zealand study that explored the development of shared learning activities in four primary school classrooms. The study identified the reciprocal, dialogic, responsive and learning-focused interactions when teacher genuinely engaged collaboratively with their students, and distinguished these shared encounters from more commonly observed individual interactions. Because the teachers in this study struggled to understand and to engage in shared activity, it is important to distinguish the features of joint participation to support them to examine and broaden their pedagogical repertoires to include practices consistent with a learning community.     

Foundation degree learning: an educational journey of personal development

The foundation degree is an intermediate-level qualification designed to widen participation in higher education while providing work-related skills and knowledge. It has a vocational focus and a pedagogic approach that integrates academic and work-based learning. Research into opportunities and the process of learning within foundation degrees is limited, particularly that which looks in depth at personal development occurring within these courses. This study contributes to the literature in this area, reporting on the results of a case study of the foundation degree in medicines management (University of Portsmouth). A key finding of this work was that knowledge was gained within a community of practice, and led to students’ development as individuals. Motivation, learning to learn and guidance and feedback, alongside peer learning within the course, were central aspects of this process. The learning and personal development taking place resulted in increased awareness, confidence and empowerment in students, which was reported to influence their work and personal lives. However, the development of specialist work-related skills and knowledge was found to be limited, questioning the fitness for purpose of the course researched. While key aspects of the subject investigated have been described in this work, further research is needed to understand this complex phenomenon.     

The Dynamics of Professional Identity Formation: Graduates’ Transitions from Higher Education to Working Life

This paper explores the development of professional identity as a relationship between professional and personal aspects of life. The focus is on student and novice professional psychologists’ and political scientists’ processes of professional identity formation in their transition from higher education to working life. Drawing on Wenger’s theory of nexus of multimembership (1998), the findings indicate that professional identity is a dynamic relationship between different life spheres rather than an isolated phenomenon only taking place at the university or in the work context. The analysis yielded three different forms of professional identity, non-differentiated identity, compartmentalised identity and integrated identity, which exemplify different negotiated relationships between professional, personal and private life spheres. The findings show that these three forms of professional identities are sequential, from an individual focus to more relational and integrated ways of reasoning about one’s profession. It is through the negotiations between personal and socially derived imperatives that identity formation progresses throughout working lives.     

Learning Practices in Vocational Education

The article describes the learning practices created by 12 vocational teachers from five programmes by the tasks they give their students to work with. 'Classroom tasks' were observed and analysed according to their content, their forms, and the tools used. Further, the texts used for/written in connection with the tasks were classified. Three types of tasks were identified: school tasks, simulation tasks and vocational tasks. Many tasks in all three categories required the students to read quite a lot. The texts the students were to read were of two kinds: school texts and vocational texts (manuals, handbooks etc.). Most of the texts were vocational and were part of the tools the students were supposed to use in their daily work. This indicates that vocational education is often assumed to be 'practical'--as opposed to 'theoretical' programmes that prepare for further studies--also increasingly rely on texts. The texts you read and how you read them are, however, specific for each vocational area. The different learning practices, represented by the tasks in this study, can be described as bridging from one social practice, that of the school, to another--that of the vocation.     

Adult Education

This article explores interactive qualities between newcomers and workplace practices, the newcomers being adult immigrants in job placement schemes. Focus is on how the novices enter work sites, how they participate and what their duties in daily work situations are in three working life sectors in Norway. The discussion draws attention to courses of involvement and participation through the structuring of work activities and the acceptance of the newcomers in the communities of practice.|spagf|ro|epagf|     

Constituting the workplace curriculum

This paper advances some bases for a workplace curriculum. These are premised on conceptions of curriculum as intents directed to individuals’ progression towards full and effective workplace performance, yet whose enactment is shaped by workplace factors and is ultimately experienced by workers as learners. So whether the intentions will be realized is likely premised on the support (affordances) for their enactment by interests within the workplace. Workplace affordances, like those in educational institutions, emphasize the role that the norms and social practices that comprise workplaces play in regulating individuals’ engagement in and learning through work. The degree to which these affordances invite, structure, support, and guide participation, and are likely to engage workers in the kinds of thinking, acting, and learning required for effective workplace performance, is important for developing effective vocational practice. The conception of an ideal curriculum directed towards full participation is subject to the affordances of the interests of managers, co‐workers, and factors affecting production, as well as the intentionalities of worker‐learners themselves. These concepts may well provide ways of thinking about curriculum more broadly as participatory practices.     

Developing a postgraduate work-based curriculum using an Intervention Mapping Approach

Advanced practitioner skill development has become an important focus in health service delivery as increasingly complex consumer needs, practice environments and national professional registration requirements impact on professional work practices. Increasingly, work-based or workplace learning experiences are being seen as an effective means for maintaining skill currency across working lives. Currently there is limited literature on pedagogical practices to support the educational and training requirements associated with development across a person's working life. This paper reports on an example of how an intervention mapping framework was used to guide the development, implementation and evaluation of a work-based praxis course for students in an interprofessional, online postgraduate mental health programme. The intervention mapping framework provided a stepped process to guide decision-making and allowed the incorporation of theory and evidence into the course design. This approach provided a stepped process to guide decision-making and allowed the incorporation of theory and evidence into the course design. While the use of the intervention mapping framework is often used within health promotion arenas, particularly for the effective design of health promotion educational programmes, it is argued that this framework can be utilised effectively when developing curriculum for use within higher education programmes.     

Knowledge Construction and Collective Practice: At the Intersection of Learning,Talk, and Social Configurations in a Computer-Mediated Mathematics Classroom

In this study I investigated how students' mathematical activities, and thereby their mathematical understandings, change as a function of their participation in different social configurations. I examined how the interplay between 2 social configurations-local investigations at a computer simulation and whole-class discussions-contributes to how 7th-grade students learn probabilistic reasoning. I used 2 case studies to investigate (a) how different forms of participation are linked to different social configurations, and (b) how specific discourse practices and ways of reasoning propagate across the classroom and are adopted by individual students. The analyses suggest that classroom mathematical practices are developed, in part, for the social or communicative purpose of settling disputes and not purely for their rational or cognitive value to individuals. Results also provide insight into how to design and orchestrate classroom practice, particularly computer-mediated inquiry, to foster individual learning that is situated within a classroom community oriented toward the construction of a shared understanding of probability.     

Lady,Inc.: women learning,negotiating subjectivity in entrepreneurial discourses

This paper presents an analysis of individuals' experiential learning through their work as entrepreneurs. ¹In particular, it examines women's learning as a ‘working-through’ of discursive conflicts of subjectivity. The paper is grounded in a poststructural frame that understands subjectivity to be continuously constituted through engagement with cultural discourses and learning to occur at the interstices of negotiating positionality and identity amidst contradictory discourses. The data under analysis is drawn from a qualitative study examining the learning and development of women entrepreneurs across Canada. Interviews explored the process of work learning and personal change reported by these women after at least four years running their new business, their challenges and personal needs in work, the practices they chose to engage, and their meanings of both learning and success. This analysis focuses on the discursive contexts of entrepreneurship, examining the competing images and messages which implicate women, and the various ways women business-owners learn to appropriate or resist these messages to negotiate subject positions and craft their own meanings of success and work. Implications for educators are presented at the conclusion.     

典型工作任务下的高职商务英语专业听说课程开发

典型工作任务来源于企业实践,是通过系统的、科学的职业资格研究而来的。将典型工作任务引进高职商务英语专业的听说课程教学不仅能够轻松地实现“工学结合”的理念,而且能够让学生在工作过程中掌握基本知识,锻炼技能,提前形成核心工作能力。