Yes,Classroom Sales Training Can Enhance Performance

Organizations today face competitive conditions unlike those experienced in the past. Managers and team leaders must learn ways to get the highest level of performance from a team of people, work with a variety of individuals diverse projects, communicate with a wide audience clearly and effectively, and be able to provide performance feedback and elevate performance levels for people they hardly know. While few will argue that learning in organizations is critical to meeting these challenges, an increasing number of decision-makers are raising questions about the value of classroom training. The questions are especially difficult to address in sales training where results are observable (i.e., sales) but difficult to trace to performance events and interventions. The current study was conducted to address two questions: 1) Is it possible to link sales production to participation in classroom sales training? 2) If so, what are the elements of the training that seem to be most useful in enhancing employee performance and sales performance?     

On the Origins of SLE Research,Questions, Outstanding,and Other Research Traditions

This brief article discusses important topics not addressed elsewhere in this special issue of EER. First, by documenting the true origins of significant life experiences (SLE) research, it corrects certain misinformation appearing in recent years. It goes on to raise some questions about past research techniques and interpretation of results. It concludes by recommending certain authors and titles from other research traditions, which could inform future SLE investigations.     

The ethical sensations of im-mediacy: Embodiment and multiple literacies in animal rights activists’ learning with media technologies

In this paper, I consider a social movement for animal rights as a site of learning about a particular form of ethics. I use a multiliteracies framework, which emphasizes critical consumption and creation across a range of media forms, to consider how learning unfolds using a different kind of medium: the affective body. Activists in this study learned to read the signs of their embodied encounters with nonhuman animals as a privileged mode for understanding their ethical truth. Then they used other forms of digital mediation to produce and spread the feelings of being present with animals for others. I discuss social media memes and virtual reality as two examples. I employ the term “im-mediacy” to emphasize both the affects of feeling present and the sense-making involved in mediation and its ideologies. This approach considers affect and semiosis as mutually constitutive processes in learning. The findings also suggest the need to consider the affects produced in learning environments that bring bodies in proximity to one another, or that use technology to mediate feelings of proximity, as well as what I describe as embodied literacies for sensing the needs of others and responding with care.