Making to measure? Reconsidering assessment in professional continuing education

Drawing on studies of teachers, accountants and pharmacists conducted in Canada, this essay examines models for assessing professional learning that currently enjoy widespread use in continuing education. These models include professional growth plans, self-administered tests and learning logs, and they are often used for regulatory as well as developmental purposes by professional associations. The essay argues what others have critiqued about such self-assessment models: that their assumptions about learning are problematic and limiting in a number of respects, privileging human consciousness and intention, and literally ‘making’ a particular professional subject that is atomised and conservative. The essay goes on to suggest alternative perspectives that are receiving increasing attention in theorising work-related learning and that may offer fruitful questions for re-considering the nature of professional learning and its assessment. Three perspectives in particular are outlined, all of which shift the focus from the learning subject to practice as material, emergent and systemic: complexity theory, actor–network theory and cultural–historical activity theory. The discussion concludes with possible approaches to assessment of professional practice suggested by these perspectives.     

Pondering purposes,propelling forwards

ABSTRACT

This article, based upon the closing plenarydelivered to the recent conference of Professional Practice, Education and Learning, reflects upon the developments of the ProPEL network over the past seven years and its possibilities for future directions. To provide some context for these reflections, the article begins by outlining key challenges facing contemporary professions and their education. Against these, I consider themes and emphases that have characterised ProPEL initiatives and the papers presented to its conferences. Then, I compare these to the sorts of questions and issues that appear to be most urgently debated in other scholarly communities concerned with changing professional work and knowledge, particularly the dramatic transformations of professional roles through new digital technologies and artificial intelligence, transnational demands and new organisational forms.The article ends with questions for educators researching professional practice: where we need more focus, where perhaps we need less, and what may be productive ways forward.     

Mass Communications

Ted Perry (ed.) Performing Arts Resources: 1974 (New York: Drama Books Specialists/Theater Library Association, 1974—price not known)

George N. Gordon's Communications and Media: Constructing a Cross-Discipline (New York: Hastings House, 1975—$12.50/6.95)

Francisco J. Lewels Jr.'s The Uses of the Media by the Chicano Movement: A Study in Minority Access (New York: Praeger Special Studies, 1974— $15.00)

Lester Asheim and Sara I. Fenwick's Differentiating the Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975—$5.95)

C.A. Schicke's Revolution in Sound: A Biography of the Recording Industry (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974—$6.95)

T. Jan Wiseman and Molly J. Wiseman's Creative Communicati Teaching Mass Media (Minneapolis: National Scholastic Press Association at the University of Minnesota, 1974—price not given, paper)     

Women’s Learning in Contract Work: Practicing Contradictions in Boundaryless Conditions

The general rise in contractors, particularly among knowledge workers negotiating ‘boundaryless’ employment conditions, has generated interest in the nature and forms of contract work. This article explores the learning of contract workers as they negotiate these conditions, with a focus on women. Drawing from a qualitative study of women practicing nursing and education in Canada as self-employed contractors, the discussion focuses on the practices that they learn in order to manage their work activities and identities. In these practices, tensions abound – particularly around the recognition of knowledge in ways that establish the contractor’s identity, position within the organisation, and market value. For women, it is argued from the study findings, boundaryless contract work incurs particular gendered demands that embed contradictions that the contractor must learn to negotiate. This article describes five practices that women contractors learn within these contradictions: (1) being noticed while avoiding notice, (2) nailing down contracts without nailing the contractor, (3) performing a woman in control while hiding the chaos, (4) shape-shifting while ‘branding’ one shape, and (5) proving knowledge in a market of impressions. The article concludes with implications for education that might assist women contract workers.

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.     

Standards-based reform to senior-secondary curriculum and metacognition in the literacy domain

This study analyses the intended and enacted curricula that are produced when metacognition is included as an element within standards-based reforms for schooling. Reformers of the senior-secondary curriculum for South Australia (SA) and the Northern Territory (NT) hoped to improve the academic outcomes of all students, and especially those from low-SES and Indigenous backgrounds, by creating a curriculum that required year-10 students to reflect on their capacities. Reflection on learning in the literacy domain was a particular emphasis during the reforms. A constructionist epistemology and case-study methodology informed the approach taken in the study. Data collection and analysis involved accessing and analysing the intended curriculum, as well as the curriculum planning documentation designed by four teachers in one NT high school. The results indicate that learning opportunities to reflect on literacy capacities will not be created when the intended curriculum provides teachers, who are not literacy specialists, with little guidance about practices associated with metacognition and literacy.