Australian Journal of Adult Learning

Map It: The Hands-On Guide to Strategic Training Design

Cheryl Ryan — 2024-02-06

Book Review

Map It: The Hands-On Guide to Strategic Training Design

Cathy Moore

Montesa Press, 2017

418 pages

Reviewed by Lexi Keeton
Senior Learning Designer, RMIT College of Vocational Education

Contributions of workplace experiences to adults' lifelong learning

Henrik Steenberg — 2024-02-06

Guest editors: Dr Stephen Billett is Professor of Adult and Vocational Education in the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University, Brisbane, and a National Teaching Fellow and Australian Research Council Future Fellow. Dr Cheryl Ryan is a Senior Lecturer In Education at the Faculty of Arts and Education, School of Education, Deakin University.

Across the lifespan, working age adults’ experiences within and through their work and workplaces make a range of contributions to their ongoing learning and development. Early in their work lives, these experiences variously assist them in identifying the kinds of occupations and work that they want to engage in or decide they are inconsistent with their personal goals and capacities. Those experiences can also assist these adults develop the occupational capacities and workplace competencies necessary to be effective in working life, sustain their employment and advance their worklife careers. That is, they have the capacity and potential to support their employability across working life. The educative qualities of workplace experiences also can assist in making decisions about transitions and fresh directions, including those beyond working life. Indeed, beyond paid work, many adults’ activities post their working lives are shaped by worklife experiences, the capacities they developed, and how they shape adults’ sense of self subjectivity. All of these emerge through and across working life. Moreover, beyond their personal learning and development, through experiences across working life, including their voluntary and community-based work activities contributions can benefit their communities, in terms of the goods and services they provide and making viable and sustaining local institutions, including private and public sector enterprises.

Analysing work and life course learning under capitalism using a mind in political economy approach

Peter Sawchuk — 2024-02-06

As life course research has long recognized, work and careers are what Pearlin (1988; p.259) describes as “durable arrangements” that serve to “organize experience over time.” However, understanding (a) the specific impacts of the alienations and contradictions of work and society under capitalism as well as (b) the analytic details of how the processes of learning are involved in the relationship of work experience and life course remain less well understood. An approached referred to as Mind in Political Economy is explained. It is based on a synthesis of several socio-cultural learning theories which allows the effective use of a theory of dramatic perezhivanie. This approach is then applied to a study of workplace learning in the context of a chemical production plant in Canada with a focus on the life history of one subject. It concludes that, based upon evidence of the realization of dramatic perezhivanie in relation to the contradictory object-motives of occupational autonomy/control as well as labour autonomy/control more generally, work-life learning in activity affected the quality of work experiences, the nature of development across employment history, and had carry-over effects beyond work. Moreover, it is shown that work-life learning could play a role in retrieving, reconstructing and making use of early life experience iteratively in the course of biographical meaning-making through the creation and refinement of biographical artefacts across the life course by a process of double stimulation.

Workplace practices that support learning across working life

Sarojni Choy — 2024-02-06

In an everchanging world of work, workers are expected to maintain currency of changes through lifelong learning to sustain employment and transition into new jobs or occupations - as the need arises. Adult workers rely on affordances from societal, workplace, community and educational institution sources that offer opportunities - intentional or sometimes unintentional. Productive engagement in these opportunities lead to positive outcomes in terms of learning and employment, although adults’ personal epistemologies, agency and intentionality determine which affordances they engage with, in what ways, and for what purposes (Billett, Choy and Le, 2023). Moreover, working age adults’ learning is largely and necessarily premised on their own constructive efforts albeit with guidance from those with whom they work closely. Their worklife learning is sustained through permutations of lifelong learning and lifelong education that enables them to navigate different kinds of transitions that may arise due to institutional or personal factors such as life stages, employment status, occupations, re-locations, health and personal preference or trajectories (Billett, Choy & Le, 2023). This means that lifelong educational provisions need to extend beyond those from educational institutions to include experiences in workplaces and the community. The growing realisation of the potency and importance of learning experiences in workplaces and other social settings is now attracting a greater consideration of these sites for ongoing learning of working age adults. This calls for learning in the course of everyday work to be acknowledged and systematised around work practices.

Promoting student readiness for work-life through internships

Natasha Tan — 2024-02-06

There are growing expectations that tertiary education graduates will be ready for working life. That is, possessing the capacities to participate effectively in an occupational practice in a specific work context. Yet, graduates are often unprepared to fulfil this expectation. In response, tertiary education increasingly includes workplace experiences (i.e., practicums, internships, & work placements). It is necessary to understand these experiences’ efficacy and their optimisation to promote work-life readiness. Drawing on students’ experiences of internships, this paper discusses what constitutes the value of internships in post-secondary diploma courses in Singapore. A quantitative analysis of interview data identified the contributions afforded through these experiences in workplaces – students’ intentional engagement, and their readiness for working life. Central here is how these contributions promote the development of adaptability required for effective participation in contemporary working life. The analysis identifies challenges including students’ adapting to new work environments, navigating workplace practices, and developing occupational capacities. Workplace supervisors’ and host educational institutions’ support suggest enhanced adaptability of interns through identified relations between the support they received and their engagement with challenges during internships. These findings offer understanding about the experiences and outcomes of learning through workplaces, implications for supporting and augmenting transitions into working life.

Social participation, altruism and learning opportunism

Catherine Arden — 2024-02-06

Workplace experiences are central to adults’ learning and development, providing opportunities for significant and valuable lifelong learning. Research into adults’ learning in volunteer work attests to its significance and value across the spectrum of adult learning, serving instrumental, social, and altruistic purposes for the learner and enriching lives through furnishing individual, collective and broader community benefits. But how does adults’ learning through workplace experiences in community volunteering contribute to their agency and lifelong learning while also generating wider collective benefits? What are people learning, and what are the learning incentives, processes, mechanisms and affordances at play? This article reports selected findings from a phenomenographic investigation into a group of community volunteers’ experiences of workplace learning in a social enterprise in an Australian rural town coming to grips with transitioning to life in a digital era. The findings illuminate the experience of community-based workplace learning from the adult learner’s perspective, and specifically, learning embedded in social participation in rural community volunteering and associational life, providing new insights about adults’ experience of learning through volunteering in the interests of understanding and furthering their own lifelong learning and development goals while contributing to their communities of interest, practice and place.

Learning at work in the light of andragogy: what assumptions characterize adult learners in the fields of technology and police work?

Soila Lemmetty — 2024-02-06

As learning needs of the adults grow in the workplace and society, there is a need to understand the specificities of adult learning and how to support and guide it at work. This article explores the applicability of the andragogical theory to learning at work. The research seeks answers to the following two questions: How do the assumptions about an adult learner occur in the learning experiences of the target organisations’ personnel? What kind of context does work appear to the adult learner from an andragogical perspective? Two organisations participated in this study, namely, a police organisation and a technology company. Thematic interviews (N = 54) were analysed using thematic analysis. The findings show that all assumptions described by andragogy are reflected in the data, but a substantial overlap exists in workplace learning situations. Furthermore, we found that the assumptions described in the andragogy lack a view of the adults’ need for collectivity and sociality in learning, which emerged strongly from our data. Therefore, this study produces a seventh assumption in the andragogy theory, that of sociability, which is not recognised as strongly by the previous theory. The article summarises four broad themes that describe the adult learner at police and technology work.

Vocational learning of incident commanders in tunnel fire safety work

Gabriela Bjørnsen — 2024-02-06

Fire and rescue operations in tunnels constitute unusual and complex working environments for first responders. The ability to make correct decisions, based on the tunnel’s specific characteristics, demands well-trained incident commanders equipped with sufficient knowledge and skills. The potential catastrophic consequences of tunnel fires have increasingly become a societal concern, with a growing demand to increase safety and emergency response management in European tunnels. However, from the incident commanders’ perspective, learning in tunnel fire safety remains a relatively unexplored area. The current learning activities for tunnel fire response are limited and place no specific requirements on the content, instructional techniques and necessary level of competence. Designing learning activities requires careful consideration of what, why and how learning occurs. To enhance incident commanders’ competence and ensure adequate emergency response during incidents in tunnels, the European Commission recently supported the development of an educational programme. As part of this programme, a pilot course was developed for incident commanders and carried out in Stavanger during the fall of 2021. The designers had a strict focus on parameters enhancing learning, based on a vocational learning model. This article presents the design and results from the pilot course and the mechanisms that are most likely to promote and inhibit learning. Results show that learners must be engaged in activities that emphasize problem-solving abilities and critical reflection, to enhance their ability to make sense of complex situations and subsequently act effectively. Furthermore, sharing experiences requires an open atmosphere of communication and the encouragement of creativity.

Specialists’ views on feedback at the medical workplace

Helen Jossberger — 2024-02-06

The present study aimed to explore the role of feedback in the medical workplace in the domain of radiology. Feedback is considered essential for learning, performance, and professional development, as it helps to build knowledge and skills, to correct errors, and to provide safe and autonomous patient care. Fifteen specialists were interviewed about what role feedback played in their own professional development. Moreover, we enquired how they interact with residents and how they provide feedback in their daily work. Content analysis was used to categorise participants’ answers. Results show that specialists see feedback as an omnipresent phenomenon at the workplace and perceive it as central for training. Feedback is usually provided face-to-face to reinforce, transfer knowledge, improve domain-specific knowledge, reduce mistakes, improve the outcome for the patient, change behaviour patterns, or increase social skills. Although feedback at the workplace was considered important for professional development, physicians stressed that there is often not enough time to discuss performance and possibilities for performance improvements. Forming tandems between less and more experienced physicians, so that learning becomes more embedded in medical practice and work activities might be a facilitating condition at the workplace.

The experiences of doctoral students working in university settings

Emine Karaduman — 2024-02-06

Informal learning activities and workplace learning constitute a substantial part of a PhD student’s knowledge as an adult. It is essential to define the scope of the concept of workplace learning, the roles and responsibilities of doctoral students clearly and transparently while explaining clearly where doctoral courses and workplace experience match. Learning , in this sense, manifests itself in everyday practices of work and social context. In this vein, this study explores the informal workplace learning experiences of PhD students working in university settings with different job titles to make contribution to informal adult learning literature. Data have been collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 10 PhD students who are employed at different university settings. Thematic analysis has been used to interpret the data. The findings have revealed that doctoral students working at universities learn at work by participating in various work-related tasks, collaborating with their colleagues and other people in these settings, and meeting new challenges that provide learning opportunities for them. The unexpected challenges, tasks and office conversations which are not directly related to the work actually play a key role in learning and skill acquisition of this target group. Doctoral students are among the intellectual assets of the countries and the whole world. Besides their formal graduate education, understanding their informal learning and how they learn in their workplaces would contribute both to academia and to organizational effectiveness. In parallel to this, the idea of raising the qualified labor force of the future through graduate education has become a fundamental issue for every country to compete on a global scale.

Investigating the phenomenon in different university contexts and area specific programs would contribute to understand informal workplace learning experiences of doctoral students. Graduate program planners would consider integrating the informal learning processes of graduate students into future graduate programs.

Exploring the effects of working practice in cultivating Chinese university teachers’ professional identity

chunlin yao — 2024-02-06

The study explores the effects of working practice in cultivating Chinese university teachers’ professional identities. It collects data from questions delivered in a presentation forum and individual interviews. After analysing data the study gets the following findings. Firstly, the reasons for participants choosing to be university teachers include personal interests and job satisfaction. Secondly, after working for some years, participants’ professional identities change significantly. They understand their position deeply, becoming more interested in their jobs, setting up more apparent professional goals or missions, and highlighting their moral levels and working ethics. Thirdly, working practice helps participants build clear professional plans. They expect to promote their teaching capabilities, communication abilities, and moral levels. Fourthly, working practice helps participants set up a strong sense of belongingness as university teachers. They care about other’s opinions of their group. The findings illustrate that working practice can improve Chinese university teachers’ professional identity, which can be explained by the collectivism of Chinese culture.

Power, policies, and practices in adult literacies

Henrik Steenberg — 2024-02-06

Power, Policies, and Practices in Adult Literacies

CALL FOR PAPERS LITERACY AJAL NOVEMBER 2024

Guest Editors: Susan M. Holloway is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Patricia A. Gouthro is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

The term “literacy” has shifted to “literacies” in recent years as critical educational discourses recognise the multiplicity of learning experiences encompassed in the fields of critical literacy, New Literacy Studies, multiliteracies, and sociocultural approaches to additional language learning. The plurality of literacies speaks to the pressing need to find relevant ways to communicate about increasingly complex issues in a fast-paced world.