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A complex set of relational factors shape adult students' transition to higher education. Through accounts provided by adult vocational education students, a set of related interdependencies between what the university and other forms of support (e.g. family, friends) afforded these students and their agency, capacities and engagement were identified as shaping their transition to higher education. Bases for these students' engagement in their studies were found in their intentions and previous experiences that together shaped how they construed what is afforded by the university and other sources of support. Consequently, beyond what universities provide to support these transitions, considerations for promoting successful student transition into higher education necessarily require accounting for students' experiences, access to different kinds of support outside the university and their previous experiences. Therefore, rather than proposing general prescriptions about what universities need to do to promote successful transitions, [these] complex factors likely [play] out in quite person-particular ways. All of this reinforces the view that successful transitions to higher education are quite individual processes, and not just wholly dependent upon what educational institutions provide, and those affordances need to be [informed] by and aligned with different kinds of student needs.

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This chapter proposes workplace learning in terms of participatory practices. Learning through work is interdependent between the individuals' participation and workplace affordances. Rather than being informal, workplace activities, opportunities and support for learning are directed towards its continuity and in ways often inherently pedagogical. Individuals, likewise, engage and learn in workplaces as directed by their personal goals and directions. Core tensions in this relationship are between these two sets of continuities. A critique of the current discourse on workplace learning is used as a basis to propose an alternative view of workplace learning environments as participatory practices.

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The volume from which this chapter is taken is indexed at TD/TNC 82.297. Selected chapters are indexed from TD/TNC 82.298 to TD/TNC 82.311. Show less

This paper discusses theorising and empirical work which proposes that the dispositions underpinning cognitive activity need to become more central to deliberations about how individuals think about and engage in skilful vocational practice. Such activity has consequences for how and what is learnt, as well as individuals’ ongoing development. Having reviewed ideas about the dispositional underpinnings of skilful knowledge, the paper reports a study examining how individuals construct knowledge associated with their vocational practice. This study provides tentative findings about the source of dispositions and their role in vocational activity. The paper concludes by advancing some implications for instruction. Show less

This paper reports a pilot study which aims to understand further how experts think, act and learn. The study, focusing on three vocational experts (a painter, a midwife and a mechanic), comprises an investigation of the characterisation of experts, their ways of knowing and the knowledge deployed when engaged in work. The study suggests that current accounts of expertise are narrowly defined and that situational factors and dispositional attributes need to be included, further suggesting that goals for and curriculum practice within vocational education need to account for situational factors and the range of experiences of individuals in developing expertise. Show less

This chapter critically appraises the potential of action learning as a professional development strategy for teachers. Using the case of a professional development programme that prepared vocational teachers to become industry consultants, the chapter examines the potential and the impediments of this approach to managing change in technical and vocational education. The chapter commences with a brief commentary on individual change or learning from cognitive and social constructivist and change-theory perspectives. Next the case study is described and findings from an evaluation of the programme are discussed. Finally, some conclusions are drawn about how the action learning-based approaches to educational change might be best enacted and evaluated.

Published introduction.

The book from which this chapter is taken is indexed at TD/TNC 100.51. Individual chapters are indexed from TD/TNC 100.52 to TD/TNC 100.244. Show less

The origins and focuses of adult education across Western countries are often about meeting adults' needs, and for purposes they have nominated, not those compelled by others. Unlike other sectors (e.g. schools, vocational colleges and universities) that were mainly initiated and sustained by church or state, adult education has long been grounded in communities and provided through hybrid institutions. Across Western countries, the term 'movement', is often associated with adult education's origins, and it is sometimes regarded as a 'fourth sector' of education, apart from schools, vocational education and training and university studies. In recent times, the concept has expanded and diversified, however, making it more amorphous and less distinctive as an educational 'sector'. Nevertheless, one of the continuing features of 'adult education' has been its concern for adults' learning needs and preferences.

This paper proposes that the formation and continuity of adult education have been based particularly on three key premises: (i) meeting adults' specific but heterogeneous learning needs; (ii) educational purposes and purposes being understood in the local context; and (iii) the enactment of adult education being shaped by local considerations. Furthermore, the values underpinning 'traditional' adult education have not only been sustained in what is now more commonly known as Adult and Community Education (ACE) but have expanded into other educational contexts. Informed by considerations of selected research projects the authors have been involved with in recent years, this paper identifies how the three premises have emerged as features of other educational provisions for adults.

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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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Maintaining and improving the capacity to be effective in work is held now to become an important social goal in order to maintain, individual, local and national well-being, including standard of living (Organisation of Economic and Cultural Development [OECD], 1996). Yet, without knowing more about how individuals are able to engage in work and learn through that work, and are motivated to continue to learn, there can be no certainty about whether the expectations upon individuals are realistic. This paper reports the initial findings of an investigation that aims to understand something of these relations through understanding the working lives of five individuals. It aims to explore these individuals’ working lives including how they exercised their agency ethically at work. In doing so, it aims to identify how this agency is shaped by individuals’ identity and subjectivity, and how these shape their participation in, and learning through, work.

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The volumes from which this paper is taken are indexed from TD/TNC 77.351 to TD/TNC 77.353. Individual papers are indexed from TD/TNC 77.354 to TD/TNC 77.437. Show less

This paper outlines the potential roles for vocational educators in developing workplace learning arrangements. The author discusses a series of activities referred to as developing the ‘learning curriculum’ which is a central task for vocational educators. These activities include: establishing a learning pathway; organising support and guidance; structuring access to authentic activities; and recognition of skills acquired in the workplace. Show less

This article examines how different forms of vocational knowledge are constructed from social sources. Using a Vygotskian framework it is claimed that in different ways vocational knowledge is shaped by history, community and ontogeny through microgenetic development. This process of ongoing problem-solving links social circumstances to the development of cognitive structures necessary to conduct vocational practice. It is held that such findings help explain the limitations of transfer and also the need to conceptualise expertise at the particular community of practice, rather than at some disembedded level of practice. Show less