Research Approaches On Workplace Learning

The volume comprises a variety of research approaches that seek to explore and understand employees’ learning and development through and for work. Working life reveals challenges through technological, economic and societal development that can only rudimentarily be addressed by formal education and training. Workplace learning becomes more and more important for employees and enterprises to successfully cope with these challenges. Workplace learning is a steadily growing field of educational research but it lacks so far a scholastic canon – there is rather a diversity of research approaches. This volume reflects this diversity by bringing together researchers from different countries and different theoretical backgrounds, presenting their current research on topics that all are relevant for understanding presages, processes and outcomes of workplace learning. Hence, this volume is of relevance for researchers as well as practitioners in the field and policy makers.

Comprising 15 chapters the book offers perspectives from Finland, Germany, New Zealand and Australia and across a range of occupations and places of work. Individually and collectively these chapters make important contributions to learning about the self and agency at work and about learning work tasks.

Published Under the Garamond Imprint This innovative book is concerned with the power relations, complexities, and contradictions in the paid workplace. Workplace learning is not value-free or politically neutral, and cannot be studied independently of the political economy of work. Workplace Learning is part of a growing body of work that offers an alternative to mainstream approaches to workplace learning, recognizing that power relations, politics and conflicts of interest all shape learning. The authors emphasize the lived experiences of working people, avoiding prescriptive accounts and uncritical Human Resource Development views. Comments: "Here is a map through contested and largely uncharted terrain..." - from the foreword by D'Arcy Martin

In our research programme “The Learning Potential of the Workplace” we set the task to analyse, describe and explain the conditions of the workplace as a tool for learning. Learning potential is for some experts an individual asset, others see the learning potential in the external conditions in work and work processes; again others see it in the reflection on action by peers, colleagues and experts.

Work now invariably requires a continual focus on learning: to improve productivity, to enhance the flexibility of employees and to develop and transform organizations. This volume brings together leading experts from the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand to critically evaluate the current debates on workplace learning and to propose directions for future developments in both research and practice. Topics covered include: * expectations of learning at work into the twenty-first century * learning theories, practice and performance implications * the relationship between workplace learning and other forms of lifelong learning * the international developments in competency-based approaches to learning and assessment * the influence of language, power, culture and gender upon the 'construction' of learning. Topical and informative, this volume will be an invaluable resource for students and researchers of training, HRD, continuing and adult education.

This book analyses and elaborates on learning processes within work environments and explores professional learning. It presents research indicating general characteristics of the work environment that support learning, as well as barriers to workplace learning. Themes of professional development, lifelong learning and business organisation emerge through the chapters and contributions explore theoretical and empirical analyses on the boundary between working and learning in various contexts and with various methodological approaches. Readers will discover how current workplace learning approaches can emphasise the learning potential of the work environment and how workplaces can combine the application of competence that is working, with its acquisition or learning. Through these chapters, we learn about the educational challenge to design workplaces as environments of rich learning potential without neglecting business demands. Expert authors explore how learning and working are both to be considered as two common aspects of an individual’s activity. Complexity, significance, integrity and variety of assigned work tasks as well as scope of action, interaction and feedback within its processing, turn out to be crucial work characteristics, amongst others revealed in these chapters. Part of the Professional and Practice-based Learning series, this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in workplaces as learning environments: those within government, community or business agencies and within the research communities in education, psychology, sociology and business management will find it of great interest.

This book explores important questions about the relationship between professional practice and learning, and implications of this for how we understand professional expertise. Focusing on work accomplished through partnerships between practitioners and parents with young children, the book explores how connectedness in action is a fluid, evolving accomplishment, with four essential dimensions: times, spaces, bodies, and things. Within a broader sociomaterial perspective, the analysis draws on practice theory and philosophy, bringing different schools of thought into productive contact, including the work of Schatzki, Gherardi, and recent developments in cultural historical activity theory. The book takes a bold view, suggesting practices and learning are entwined but distinctive phenomena. A clear and novel framework is developed, based on this idea. The argument goes further by demonstrating how new, coproductive relationships between professionals and clients can intensify the pedagogic nature of professional work, and showing how professionals can support others’ learning when the knowledge they are working with, and sense of what is to be learned, are uncertain, incomplete, and fragile.

This book analyzes the nature and requirements of workplace e-learning based on relevant theories such as adult learning, community of practice, organizational learning, and the systems thinking. By integrating considerations on organization, pedagogy and technology, a performance-oriented e-learning framework is then presented, where performance measurement is used to: 1) clarify and link organizational goals and individual learning needs, 2) direct learning towards work performance; and 3) support social communication and knowledge sharing and management in the workplace. E-learning and related emerging technologies have been increasingly used by organizations to enhance the skills and performance of knowledge workers. However, most of the efforts tend to focus on the technology, ignoring the organizational context and relevant pedagogies of workplace learning. Many e-learning projects in the workplace settings fail to connect learning with work performance and align organizational goals and individual needs in a systemic way. Moreover, there is insufficient effort on externalizing and transferring tacit knowledge embedded in practices and expertise, based on which to maintain and expand knowledge assets for sustainable development. The book presents a systemic theoretical framework, design principles, and implementation methods, together with a case study to demonstrate the use and effectiveness of the performance-oriented approach to workplace e-learning, in which organizational, social and individual perspectives are integrated in a systemic way. The performance-oriented approach to workplace e-learning enables self-regulated and socially constructed learning activities to be clearly motivated and driven towards the goal of performance improvement, and makes learning at the organizational, social and individual levels integrated in a systemic way. The effects of individual and social learning support and organizational learning environment on employees’ motivation to use performance-oriented e-learning are also investigated.