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Skills approaches intended to assess and train discrete individual competencies have figured prominently in national policies designed to increase citizens’ employability and productivity. A substantial critique has developed around such instrumental approaches, exposing problems in both their fragmented understanding of human capability and their failure to achieve their practical objectives. Despite these critiques, a large-scale policy initiative has been recently released in Canada to measure and develop workers' Essential Skills. The speakers in this symposium each bring a particular perspective to the dialogue: feminist, labour, new immigrant/critical racism, critical HRD [human resource development], and international policy. They trace some early problematic consequences of this initiative, compare it to VET [vocational education and training] and NVQ [National Vocational Qualification] skill schemes, explore reasons why these skill agendas command substantial commitment and resources despite their problems, and suggest possible roles for educators in challenging them. Our ultimate purpose is to open generative directions, where possible, for the application of these policies.

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The last 15 years have seen much conceptual and methodological innovation in research on education and learning across the lifecourse. This innovation was initially fuelled by the growing influence of conceptual framings often named as either post-structural or postmodern. As part of and also in response to the influence of post-structuralism and postmodernism in the social sciences, there have emerged and developed a further range of conceptual and methodological framings which are more relational, system and practice-focussed. Several of these framings work with a non-linear understanding of causality and embrace unpredictability in the world and undecidability in people’s understanding of it. They also challenge any notion of a strong boundary between the social and natural sciences. This book explores the most significant four of these framings, how they are being taken up in research in education and learning across the lifecourse, as well as their possibilities and limitations: (1) complexity science; (2) cultural historical activity theory (CHAT); (3) actor-network theory (ANT); and (4) spatiality theories. The book is illustrated throughout with examples drawn from educational contexts across the life courses, including schooling, post-compulsory education and training, educational policy, workplace and community-based education in North America, the UK, and Australia. The contents are: Why sociomateriality in education?; Emergence and perturbation: understanding complexity science; Complexity theory in educational research; Contradiction and expansion: understanding cultural historical activity theory; Cultural historical activity theory in educational research; Translation and network effects: understanding actor-network theory; Actor-network theory in educational research; Spatiality and temporality: understanding cultural geography; Spatial theory in educational research; Sociomaterial approaches: contributions and issues for educational research. Show less

This article undertakes a critique of problem-based learning (PBL) as it has become established in the processes of professional education. The authors wish to examine how the problems are constituted and to question how epistemic authority is reinforced in their construction. The paper first examines the problem based perspective in terms of its construction of particular subjects and relations. Secondly, it questions the suppositions and procedures of problem-based pedagogy. The paper concludes by outlining alternative philosophical perspectives and approaches to curriculum. Show less

In studies of professional learning, the rise of sociomaterial accounts draw attention to the political importance of nonhuman as well as human actors, the material as well as discursive, as inter-related in knowing and action. Of particular relevance to the issue of inter-professional work in health services, some researchers have argued that multiple worlds - not just multiple worldviews - are produced through sociomaterial processes. This article focuses on the complex activities involved in combining the multiple worlds of different professions with what some term para-professions. Such arrangements may not be recognised as inter-professional by their practitioners, with problematic consequences for care. The case is emergency mental health care, involving paramedics, police, hospital admissions staff, psychiatric nurses and [accident and emergency] A&E consultants. A sociomaterial analysis is used to trace how knowledge and practice circulates (or doesn't) within and across different material worlds of practitioners, and the ontological politics produced at their boundaries.

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