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This article describes the procedures and findings of a study of workplace learning arrangements in a mining and secondary processing plant. The evaluation was conducted on-site between July and October 1993, and involved 15 employees of the plant as participants. The study examined the nature and outcomes of workplace learning arrangements, which comprise formal structured learning arrangements and informal learning arrangements experienced as part of everyday work practice. The article commences by outlining the basis for situated learning. The nature of the research method and sample is described next. Three types of formal findings are subsequently reported, through perceptions of the utility of different components of the learning arrangements, providing a comparative analysis among these arrangements and a basis to speculate how types of knowledge are likely to be generated within these arrangements. These findings are then discussed, along with concerns about the development of conceptual understanding through workplace learning and some observations about the role of personal values and epistemologies associated with engaging in learning arrangements.

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This paper attempts to identify and understand the bases for workplace pedagogic practices which, it is suggested, are central to developing workplaces as effective learning environments. Initial outcomes of an investigation of guided learning in a workplace are described, highlighting how contextual factors determine the nature and quality of workplace pedagogic practices, which in turn encourage or inhibit participation in workplace learning.

The complete volume, with papers from sections 1-5 listed, is indexed at TD/TNC 71.26; the complete volume, with papers from section 6-10 listed, is indexed at TD/TNC 71.27; selected individual papers are indexed from TD/TNC 71.28 to TD/TNC 71.75. Show less

Recently the meaning of lifelong learning has been transformed by economic imperatives from a focus on securing personal development to individuals’ maintenance of their vocational practice throughout their working lives. This paper proposes an account of learning at work as a component of individuals’ development across their lifespan. It argues that learning throughout working life is an inevitable product of everyday thinking and acting, shaped by the work practices in which individuals participate. However, the quality of learning is contingent on the kinds of activities individuals engage in and the guidance they can access. These contributions are referred to as the activities and interdependencies afforded by the workplace. Continuities and discontinuities in development through working life can be understood in part by patterns of participation in these social practices. Yet there is tension between individuals’ interest in participation and the affordance of the work practices in which they act. It is proposed that, although able to regulate their participation, ultimately individuals’ ability to maintain their vocational practice is constrained by the way workplaces afford opportunities for engagement and interactions.

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The transitions adults negotiate across their working lives need to be further understood for governments, workplaces, and the community to effectively support these adults. Through analyses of worklife history interview data with 30 working age adults, distinct kinds of changes comprising these transitions have been delineated as representative of changes that have person-particular meanings and impacts. This delineation represents understandings of processes and outcomes for adults' learning and development. These transitions have specific kinds of scope, duration, and impacts in terms of continuity/discontinuity with individuals' earlier activities and knowing. Transitions can be objectively observed, captured, and represented by a complex of personal, institutional, and/or brute factors. Understanding the changes comprising these worklife transitions and how they can be supported and facilitated requires accounting for societal factors as well as individuals' personal histories and legacies and impacts of maturation. A schema representing six kinds of changes is presented and illuminated.

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Arguing against a concept of learning as only a formal process occurring in explicitly educational settings like schools, the paper proposes a conception of the workplace as a learning environment focusing on the interaction between the affordances and constraints of the social setting, on the one hand, and the agency and biography of the individual participant, on the other. Workplaces impose certain expectations and norms in the interest of their own continuity and survival, and in the interest of certain participants; but learners also choose to act in certain ways dependent on their own preferences and goals. Thus, the workplace as a learning environment must be understood as a complex negotiation about knowledge-use, roles and processes - essentially as a question of the learner's participation in situated work activities.

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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-contextualised 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.

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Drawing upon recent studies of individuals’ participation and learning through their working lives, this seminar argues that a greater acknowledgment of the interdependence between individual and social agency is warranted within current conceptions of learning, and policy and practice about learning throughout working life. Currently, some accounts of learning such as communities of practice, activity systems and distributed cognition, tend to overly privilege situational agency to the detriment of the more widely sourced, relational and negotiated contributions of individual and social agency. In particular, personal agency guided by individuals’ intentionalities and subjectivities stands as being denied in these accounts. A consideration of individual intentionality and agency and its interdependence with social and historical contributions is proposed to balance views that privilege particular social influences in current conceptions of learning for work and throughout working life. Perhaps most emblematic of this concern is discussed in terms of the distinct concepts of self which are adopted in literature on work and working life.

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Reports and discusses the findings of an investigation that examined the efficacy of guided learning in the workplace. The investigation comprised the trialing of guided learning strategies and an analysis of the learning occurring in five workplaces over a period of six months. The guided learning strategies selected for investigation were questioning dialogues, the use of diagrams and analogies within an approach to workplace learning emphasising modelling and coaching. Throughout the investigation, critical incident interviews were conducted to identify the contributions to learning that had occurred during these periods, including those provided by the guided learning. As anticipated, it was found that participation in everyday work activities (the learning curriculum) was most valued and reported as making effective contributions to learning in the workplace. However, there was also correlation between reports of the frequency of guided learning interactions and their efficacy in resolving novel workplace tasks, and therefore learning. It is postulated that some of these learning outcomes could not have been secured by everyday participation in the workplace alone. Further, factors associated with the readiness of enterprise and those within it were identified as influencing the likely effectiveness of guided learning at work.

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Learning in the circumstances of practice stands as the commonest and most enduring way occupational capacities have been learnt across human history, and, likely, are currently learnt. Yet, a comprehensive account of this means of learning remains absent, which limits the legitimacy of workplaces as sites of learning, the learning arising from them and understandings of how to organize, promote and evaluate that learning. When advancing this account, it is necessary to avoid being constrained by the discourse of schooling and orthodoxies of schooled societies, which can distort considerations of learning through practice on its own terms. When reviewed, anthropological and historical literature on learning occupational practices outside of educational provisions offers fresh suggestions including that such an account likely comprise elements of practice curriculum and pedagogies and personal epistemologies, albeit set within particular complexes of cultural, societal and situational factors. A key distinction arising from such a review is the emphasis on individuals' active processes of learning and how these are enacted in the circumstances of practice, rather than on teaching or instruction. Such a distinction runs deep in this literature and has consequences for conceptions of understandings and efforts to promote and improve learning through practice.

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As there is a growing interest in experienced workers mentoring co-workers in workplace settings, it is necessary to understand its impact on those who are nominated as mentors. Here, data from eight mentors who participated in a year-long trial of guided learning in a workplace are used to illuminate the demands upon and benefits for workplace mentors. In the study, all mentors noted the efficacy of guiding learning in the workplace. However, guiding the learning of others made considerable demands on these individuals. Finding time for mentoring and the low level of support by management were reported as making the mentors' work intense. Moreover, although workplace mentoring was found to have the capacity to improve learning, much of that improvement was centred on the mentors' actions and energies. For some mentors, it was a worthwhile and enriching experience. For others, the demands were not adequately offset by benefits that they experience in assisting co-workers to learn.

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