Toward a Workplace Pedagogy: Guidance, Participation, and Engagement

Abstract

This article proposes bases for a workplace pedagogy. Planes of intentional guidance and sequenced access to workplace activities represent some key workplace pedagogic practices. Guidance by others, situations, and artifacts are central to learning through work because the knowledge to be learned is historically, culturally, and situationally constituted. However, the quality of learning through these planes of activities and guidance is ultimately premised on the workplace's participatory practices, which shape and distribute the activities and support the workplace affordance workers and from which they learn. Situational and political processes underpin these workplace affordances. Yet participatory practices are reciprocally constructed because individuals elect how to engage in and learn from what workplaces afford them. A workplace pedagogy is founded in these coparticipatory practices and needs to account for how workplaces invite access to activities and guidance and how individuals elect to participate in what the workplace affords.Over the past decade or so, interest in workplaces as learning environments has intensified. Much of this interest is founded in pragmatic concerns associated with reducing the cost of vocational skill development and enhancing its access and relevance to industry sector needs as well as pertinence to particular enterprise requirements (Boud & Garrick, 1999). Other, perhaps more enduring, interests, however, are now pressing for the formulation of a workplace pedagogy directed at developing expert vocational practice through work and throughout working lives. ), where he holds the position of associate professor. His research has focused on the requirements for work practice and how vocational expertise can best be developed in workplace settings and educational institutions.

In-service Initial Teacher Education in the Learning and Skills Sector in England: Integrating Course and Workplace Learning

“…This section proposes rethinking the approach to integrating LSS ITE course and workplace learning, in order to address the issues and therefore improve trainee learning. Firstly, the potential of an intentional workplace curriculum (Billett, 2002) as part of a more holistic and integrated ITE experience is explored; and secondly, the potential of using practical theorising (Hagger and McIntyre, 2006) to enable trainees to better integrate course and workplace learning is considered.…”

“…To redress this neglect Lucas (2007) has called for the development of a 'pedagogy of the LSS workplace', based on Billett's (2002) conceptualisation of a workplace pedagogy. This comprises: the intentional structuring of participation in workplace activities and interactions; guided participation; and recognition that trainees will differ in how they elect to participate.…”

“…The second aim is to propose ways of improving trainee learning. It is argued that trainee learning can be improved by better integration of course and workplace learning where teacher educators and mentors work collaboratively, to guide trainee participation in an intentional workplace curriculum (Billett, 2002) and engage trainees in practical theorising (Hagger & McIntyre, 2006).…”

Distributed and relative nature of professional expertise

“…Beckett & Hager, 2000, 2002Fenwick, 2001) we propose an interactive model of professional expertise that involves four broad factors: cultural dispositions; tools/artefacts; substantive content knowledge; and strategies. This model is summarized in Figure 1.…”

“…Amongst the significant emerging learning theories are situated cognition and, more recently, the distributed cognition model of human learning and performance (see Salomon, 1993). While the situated cognition proponents contributed to relocating the locus of learning agency from the individual to the context and culture of a professional practice, it is still viewed as a single position rather than accommodating it as an expansion of our understanding of the varied and legitimate views of learning (see Billett, 2002). Alternatively, distributed learning models propose an interaction model in which individuals connect with a number of different cognitive systems, such as the individual's mind, the context (including cultural values and dispositions), the strategies, and the artefacts or tools (Pillay & Elliott, 2001).…”