Workplace 'learning' and adult education

Abstract

If a field called 'workplace learning' can be argued to exist, it would need to embrace research and interventions now proliferating within a wide range of fields. Adult education is only one of these regions, itself a highly multi-disciplinary, conflictual and elusive group of activities and actors. Adult education finds itself tackling issues of workplace learning alongside fields which often operate with fundamentally different starting points and purposes, yet share equally strong interest and investment in workplace learning. These fields include, at the minimum, human resource development with its focus on developing organizations and individual careers; organization and management studies with primary interests in understanding and improving organizational performance and culture; professional and vocational education concerned with training individuals; and labour studies oriented to workers' well-being and collective empowerment. While the same terms -'learning', 'development', 'pedagogy' and 'education' -are visible in the discourses of all of these fields, they bear radically different meanings, framed by different logics and questions. These terms

Examining work-education intersections: the production of learning reals in and through practice

“…An additional dimension was provided in terms of relations of power as the trade teachers were under the jurisdiction of the senior manager's workgroup at a particular college. The project ran between 2001 and 2004 and while some time has elapsed since the collection of the data, the analytic approach illustrated in this paper for exploring the realisation of subjectivity in and through practice remains topical (Fenwick, 2010;Fenwick & Edwards, 2013;Fenwick et al, 2012).The project provided a site for the practices of various workgroups, including the practices of the research group, to intersect. Furthermore, these intersections were made possible through broader contextual factors.…”

“…Taking up Latour's call to get closer to 'matters of fact' rather than moving away from them (2004, p. 246), this paper examines assemblages that work to produce and maintain particular learning reals (Fenwick, 2010;Fenwick & Edwards, 2011). This is connected with a broader concern with who and what are able to be present in research accounts of workplace learning, the performative practices of both researched and researchers, and the politics of learning at work (e.g.…”

“…Ontological politics enables a shift beyond thinking of multiplicities as multiple perspectives on a single object to the more provocative concept of multiple reals, which Mol argues are produced through the enactment of different practices. Mol discusses the production of different reals in relation to medicine and health practices, and Fenwick (2010) has suggested this may be a fruitful concept for examining the heterogeneous field of workplace learning. The notion of ontological politics enables how learning is 'made up' to be examined, rather than assuming learning always takes the same form.…”

A sociomaterial model of the teaching-learning continuum

“…(Fenwick et al, 2013, p. 53) To transform the learning continuum into a teaching-learning continuum, the basic concepts of so-called sociomaterial theories are best suited (Beckett et al, 2002;Fenwick, 2010a;Fenwick, 2010b;Fenwick et al, 2013). For this reason and with a focus on teaching and learning, I will briefly repeat their most important features here.…”

“…4-17), and on the other hand in the rather arbitrary attribution of specific learning processes to these contexts. Moreover, real learning processes have proved to be of enormous complexity, they are hybrid, indeterminate, deal with fluid boundaries and 'messy objects' (Fenwick, 2010b), and their status of formalization cannot be described through static and more or less subjective definitions of informal, non-formal and formal learning, for which the definitions of the Commission of the European Union (2001, pp. 32-33) are a well-known example.…”