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Volume 16 Numbers 6 2004
ISBN 0-86176-998-8
ISSN 1366-5626
The Journal of
Workplace Learning Incorporating special issue
The workplace as a learning environment Guest Editor: David Moore
www.emeraldinsight.com
The Journal of Workplace Learning
ISSN 1366-5626 Volume 16 Number 6 2004
The workplace as a learning environment Guest Editor David Moore
Abstracts and keywords ___________________________ 306 Editorial __________________________________________ 308 Guest editorial ____________________________________ 309 Workplace participatory practices: conceptualising workplaces as learning environments Stephen Billett __________________________________________________
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Curriculum at work: an educational perspective on the workplace as a learning environment David Thornton Moore __________________________________________
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The workplace learning cycle: a problem-based curriculum model for the preparation of workplace learning professionals Bridget N. O’Connor_____________________________________________
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OTHER ARTICLE Communities of domination? Reconceptualising organisational learning and power Tony Huzzard __________________________________________________
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Internet editorial Michelle Wallace ________________________________________________
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CONTENTS
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The Journal of Workplace Learning Vol. 16 No. 6, 2004 Abstracts and keywords q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1366-5626
Workplace participatory practices: conceptualising workplaces as learning environments Stephen Billett Keywords Workplace learning, Employee participation 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.
Curriculum at work: an educational perspective on the workplace as a learning environment David Thornton Moore Keywords Curriculum development, Workplace learning, Experiential learning The term “curriculum” has been used almost exclusively in educational circles to refer to plans for the conduct of learning lessons in school classrooms. This paper argues that the concept can be productively expanded to describe learning processes in workplaces, including those in which learning is not the intentional outcome of an interaction. The article first reviews conventional conceptions
of curriculum, and then draws on theories of cognition and learning base in phenomenology, symbolic interactionism and situated learning to identify some of the features of a naturally-occurring curriculum in the workplace: the socio-technical and pragmatic elements of the knowledge used in the work environment, the classification and framing of knowledge-use, and the extent to which participants are expected to use the various forms of knowledge. That is, curriculum is essentially a sociallyconstructed ordering of the knowledge-use in a social context. These concepts are applied to two settings in which high school interns were supposed to be learning something: a history museum and a veterinary clinic.
The workplace learning cycle: a problem-based curriculum model for the preparation of workplace learning professionals Bridget N. O’Connor Keywords Curricula, Training, Higher education, Business studies Building on the conceptual foundations suggested in the previous two papers in this issue, this article describes the application of a workplace learning cycle theory to the construction of a curriculum for a graduate-level course of study in workplace education. As a way to prepare chief learning officers and heads of corporate universities, the piece argues, one can engage students in the process of analyzing the learning and knowledge-use in a work environment through the lenses of the pedagogical and curricular concepts in these and other writings. Moving beyond the traditional concept of “training” for specified competencies, the graduate program aims to enable students to understand and use the more generative concepts of workplace knowledge-use, and to promote learning as an essential feature of organizational life.
Communities of domination? Reconceptualising organisational learning and power Tony Huzzard Keywords Workplace training, Management power, Change management In identifying a bias within situated learning theory towards routine work practices, this paper develops a theoretical framework for assessing the relationships between learning, sensemaking and power in the non-routine practices of temporary organising. The paper locates processes of sensemaking and learning
in a model of organisational change that attempts to render power in communities of practice more visible than has been the case in theorising hitherto, by focusing on sensegiving in change projects. Change is conceived in terms of an oscillation between the routines of permanent organising and the more experimental, innovative actions of temporary organising, where leaders mobilise actors to explore new ideas. The role of sense-giving in such processes, it is argued, helps shed light on the political nature of micro-processes of change.
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Editorial This is a different sort of issue of the Journal of Workplace Learning. It comprises three papers around the theme, “The workplace as a Learning Environment”, and a fourth, not unrelated, paper on organizational learning. The first three papers are grouped because they were all presented at a panel discussion at a conference in the USA. One of the presenters, David Moore, has acted as Guest Editor for this special collection, and he discusses the theme and the papers in his guest editorial below. The fourth paper, by Tony Huzzard, of Sweden, presents an intriguing examination of the relationship between organizational learning and power. Sent for double blind refereeing, Tony’s paper came back with such comments as: “This is conceptual analytic work of high order, and it represents exemplary work for the readers of this journal”, and “The topic will interest Journal of Workplace Learning’s international readership, particularly the research community, because it should stimulate empirical inquiry into the relationship between workplace learning and power”. I have no doubt all four articles will provide stimulating reading for the discerning audience of this journal. Darryl Dymock Editor
The Journal of Workplace Learning Vol. 16 No. 6, 2004 p. 308 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1366-5626
Guest editorial About the Guest Editor: David Thornton Moore teaches interdisciplinary social sciences in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University; his courses focus on concepts like community, learning and experience. An educational anthropologist by training, he has done research for 25 years on the process of learning in the workplace: experiential education, service-learning, internships, field study, community learning. His work has been published in the Harvard Educational Review, the Anthropology and Education Quarterly, the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, and other journals; he is co-author, with Thomas R. Bailey and Katherine L. Hughes, of Working Knowledge: Work-based Learning and Education Reform (Routledge Falmer, 2004), a study of high school and college interns in 25 work sites. E-mail:
[email protected]
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The workplace as a learning environment In the spring of 2003, North-eastern University in Boston sponsored a special conference on what that school calls practice-oriented education (POE). Other communities of discourse use different terms for similar kinds of programs: . internships; . experiential learning; . work-based education; . service-learning; . cooperative education; . field study; and . apprenticeships. The common element among all these programs is that they are school- or university-based enterprises in which students learn something by engaging in first-hand activity in “real-world” work environments. Sometimes the students reflect on their experience back at school – write journals and final papers, do readings, have discussions with teachers and classmates – and sometimes they do not. In any case, the programs rest on the implicit premise that substantial and significant forms of learning can and do occur when young people participate in work activities in real productive organizations. This special issue emerged from a panel discussion at the north-eastern conference called “The Workplace and Learning from Experience”. Four separate presenters addressed the question of how learning happens in the course of workplace activity – and what educators and researchers need to think about in order to make that process most effective. The original plan for the panel was to explore the ways theorists in several different academic disciplines approached the basic problem: say, a sociologist, and anthropologist, a psychologist and a philosopher of education. Revealingly, the people we invited to the panel could not sustain that discipline-based perspective: all of us found ourselves plumbing the phenomenon of work-based learning with clearly interdisciplinary tools. We could not pretend to explain anything meaningful or
The Journal of Workplace Learning Vol. 16 No. 6, 2004 pp. 309-311 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1366-5626
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productive from one angle without distorting and truncating our ideas. So we agreed to drop that conceit – as appealing as it was in a logical and esthetic sense – and to represent our research and pedagogy on workplace learning environments in any way we found useful. Three of the four papers presented at the POE conference are expanded in this special issue (it is a symptom of the rigors of the world outside the university that the one person who could not take the time to re-write her paper is a freelance practicing anthropologist who consults with a number of corporations on work systems design; she makes her living by active work, not by reflective writing, and could not afford the time). The general charge each of us faced was to explore the ways in which people (especially students in high schools and universities) learn in the course of direct experience in workplaces, to analyze the ways in which work environments structure participants’ access to various kinds of knowledge-in-use. We took different paths in addressing that charge. Stephen Billett, an associate professor in adult and vocational education at Griffith University in Australia, has been doing important research and pedagogical development for years on workplace learning. He has done studies in workplaces as varied as coal mines and hairdressing salons. In 2001, he published a book called Learning in the Workplace: Strategies for Effective Practice (Independent Publishers Group, 2001), in which he both developed a theoretical framework for understanding our basic problem and outlined a pedagogical strategy for maximizing learning. In this issue, he proposes that we focus on “workplace participatory practices” as a way of understanding learning at the intersection between features of organizational structures and processes on the one hand – affordances, constraints, and so on – and the agentic actions of participants on the other. What people learn is not exhaustively determined by the structures and practices of workplace environments, he argues, but must be understood as emerging as well from choices individuals make about how to participate in those environments. My own contribution to the issue examines the utility of using a concept based in education studies (curriculum) in the analysis of learning processes in non-school contexts like workplaces. The article is based on two major ethnographic studies of work-based learning programs, the more recent one represented in Working Knowledge: Work-based Learning and Education Reform (RoutledgeFalmer, 2004), which I co-authored with Thomas R. Bailey and Katherine L. Hughes. I argue that the concept of curriculum can be redefined in ways that reveal interesting and important elements of the workplace as a learning environment, structures of knowledge-use that constitute paths for learning in the midst of work activity. I also explore some of the factors that shape the curriculum of any particular work environment. Bridget N. O’Connor, a professor of business education, approaches the problem from a very different perspective: that of the university educator charged with helping graduate students understand the nature of workplace learning so they can become chief information officers or heads of corporate universities. She proposes a concept called the workplace learning cycle as a tool for organizing the curriculum of a program for work educators, and connects some of the more theoretical ideas from the previous two articles to the content of the graduate-level program.
In sum, these three articles identify some conceptual tools through which we can understand the complex ways in which learning happens in workplace environments, and propose some schemes through which educators can enhance and direct that learning. A great deal more can be said, of course – but we hope to contribute to this ongoing conversation. David Thornton Moore Guest Editor
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The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at www.emeraldinsight.com/1366-5626.htm
Workplace participatory practices Conceptualising workplaces as learning environments Stephen Billett Adult and Vocational Education Studies, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia Keywords Workplace learning, Employee participation Abstract 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.
The Journal of Workplace Learning Vol. 16 No. 6, 2004 pp. 312-324 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1366-5626 DOI 10.1108/13665620410550295
Workplaces as learning spaces This paper discusses workplaces as learning environments emphasizing workplace participatory practices as conceptual foundations. These practices comprise the kinds of activities and interactions workplaces afford learners, on one hand, and how individuals elect to participate in workplace activities and interactions, on the other. Underpinning both workplace affordances and individuals’ participation are the associated concepts of intentionality and continuity. Workplaces intentionally regulate individuals’ participation; it is not ad hoc, unstructured or informal (Hodkinson and Bloomer, 2002). This regulation is a product of cultural practices, social norms, workplace affiliations, cliques and demarcations. Those who control the processes and division of labour, including interests and affiliations within the workplace, regulate participation to maintain the continuity of the workplace through regulatory practices (Grey, 1994). Similarly, individuals will engage in ways that best serve their purposes, such as assisting their career trajectory (Bloomer and Hodkinson, 2000), securing opportunities, or even locating easy work options. There is no separation between engagement in thinking and acting at work, and learning (Lave, 1990, 1993; Rogoff, 1990, 1995). Therefore, the kinds of opportunities the workplace affords individuals in terms of the activities they engage in and interactions with others, and how individuals elect to engage are salient to their learning through participation in the workplace. Commencing by arguing for fresh appraisals of workplaces as learning environments, the paper challenges some current assumptions about workplaces as learning environments. Then, through a consideration of workplaces as historically, culturally, and situationally-shaped environments in which individuals elect to engage in particular ways, workplace participatory practices are advanced as premises for understanding and organising learning through work. Central here are the relational
interdependent processes shaping individuals’ learning in workplaces. These comprise the negotiations occurring between individuals’ desire for continuity through engagement and how opportunities are afforded on the basis of the continuities of affiliations, interests and particular workplace goals.
Workplace participatory practices
Critiquing some existing conceptions of workplaces as learning environments To conceptualise workplaces as legitimate learning environments, it is necessary to transform the current discourse on learning through work. Describing workplaces as being informal, non-formal or unstructured learning environments is negative, imprecise and ill-focused (Billett, 2002). These descriptions do little to assist elaborate understanding or improve the status of workplaces as learning spaces. Describing something by what it is not (e.g. “informal” means not formalised, or “unstructured” means not structured) does little to illuminate its qualities or characteristics, in this case, workplaces as learning environments. Moreover, concepts and assumptions associated with educational institutions are often used uncritically as premises for what constitutes the formalisms and structures of legitimate learning experiences. As teaching and learning are commonly, albeit erroneously, held to be synonymous, the absence of qualified teachers and classroom-like interactions in workplaces leads to the assumption that learning, if it occurs at all, will be inferior to that arising in educational institutions (e.g. Collins et al., 1989; Prawat, 1993; Ericsson and Lehmann, 1996). The absence of written curriculum documents used to plan teachers’ actions and learners’ experiences, qualified teachers and didactic teaching practices, all raise the concern that learning through work will be at best ad hoc, weak, concrete and incidental (Marsick and Watkins, 1990; Resnick, 1987). So, from perspectives privileging the practices of educational institutions, learning experiences in the workplace might well be viewed as being ad hoc and weak because they are inconsistent with these practices. Yet, it is imprecise and misleading to describe individuals’ engagement in work activities as being unplanned or unstructured, as they are highly structured and intentional. Moreover, there are pedagogical qualities to participation in work. Indeed, rather than being incidental, these experiences are often central to the work practice’s continuity. The degree by which workplace experiences produce concrete outcomes (i.e. those that are only applicable in the circumstances of the acquisition) is often important for this continuity. Of course, concerns about the development of transferable knowledge through experience outside of educational institutions are legitimate (Evans, 1993; Prawat, 1993) and easy to identify. However, learning arising from experiences within education institutions is also far from immune from these reservations (e.g. Scribner, 1984; Raizen, 1994). There is evidence of both adaptable learning occurring outside of educational institutions (Rogoff and Gauvain, 1984) and concrete learning arising from experiences inside educational institutions (Raizen, 1994). Such evidence challenges easy assumptions about workplace learning experiences being inherently weak. Instead, it suggests that the qualities of experiences (i.e. activities and interactions) afforded by either educational institutions or workplaces, shape the potential richness of the learning outcomes. Importantly, it is a mistake to assume that learning environments outside education institutions lack these qualities, while somehow being privileged in those institutions.
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Second, rather than being without structure and intent, workplace activities and interactions are highly structured and regulated, and have inherent pedagogical properties. In a similar way, educational institutions’ goals, norms and practices frame the activities students participate in, who is allowed to participate in those activities, and on what basis and how they will be judged. Bernstein (1996) referred to these as regulative practices. Similarly, workplace goals and practices determine the tasks and activities in which workers engage, what support they receive and how their efforts are appraised (Billett, 2001a; Lave, 1990; Scribner, 1988-1997). Rather than being unstructured and ad hoc, participants’ engagement in different kinds of social practices is often central to the continuity of that practice. Whether participating in weaving (Childs and Greenfield, 1980), coal mining (Billett, 2001a), midwifery (Jordan, 1989), teaching (Hodkinson and Hodkinson, 2003), hairdressing (Billett, 2001a) or tailoring (Lave, 1990), this activity is intentionally organised to structure workers’ access to the knowledge needed to sustain the particular practice. This structuring has been referred to by Lave (1990) as the “learning curriculum” – a pathway of experiences that leads to full participation in the social practice. Of course, as in learning within education institutions, there will be unintended participation and unintentional learning in workplaces – a hidden curriculum, if you like. The key point is that participation and learning are central to the on-going existence of these practices and are regulated by the workplace. Third, to describe learning environments as being either “informal” or “formal” assumes a deterministic relationship between the circumstances in which the learning occurs and changes in individuals. This constitutes situational (social) determinism and ignores the role of human agency in the construal of what is experienced and what learning arises from that experience. Even the most structured learning experiences can only shape individuals’ learning. It seems that individuals have to ignore most of social suggestion in order to maintain their own sense of purpose and direction (Valsiner, 1998). Wertsch (1998) notes how unwelcome social press may lead to a superficial kind of learning, referred to as mastery. He distinguishes this kind of learning from appropriation (Luria, 1976), where individuals embrace as their own the knowledge that they are engaging. Knowledge constructed through mastery is less likely to be exercised voluntarily and effortfully than that which is appropriated (Wertsch, 1998). All this emphasises the important role of human agency in the negotiation of individuals’ knowledge construction. Thus, much of the learning that arises may be different from what is intended by the exercise of the workplace’s norms and practices, for instance. These three propositions suggest the need to avoid terms such as “informal” or “formal” when describing workplaces as learning environments. In the following section, the concepts of participation and participatory practices are advanced as more effective and precise terms to elucidate the process of learning through work. Participation and participatory practices at work The concept of learning can be understood as permanent or semi-permanent changes in how individuals think and act. When individuals engage in everyday thinking and acting, more than merely executing a process or task, their knowledge is changed in some way, however minutely, by that process. Learning is not reserved for particular settings or interludes, although some experiences may provide richer learning
outcomes than others (Bloomer and Hodkinson, 2000). So, when individuals engage in workplace activities they are doing more than merely deploying their capacities in engaging in those tasks. A cognitive legacy in the form of change arises from engagement in even the most routine of activities. The most likely change arising through everyday thinking and acting in workplaces will be to reinforce or hone what is already known. Drawing on cognitive perspectives, engaging in routine or familiar work tasks reinforces and refines what is already known (Anderson, 1982). This kind of learning is nevertheless important for refining procedures and rendering tasks to be undertaken with minimum resort to conscious thought. This then frees up working memory to focus on other tasks. This permits individuals to use their cognitive resources more selectively and strategically. For instance, they can focus on parts of a task that are difficult to perform or are highly complex, requiring the simultaneous consideration of a variety of factors. So when cognitive processes are engaged, even the most apparently familiar experience is always new in some way (Valsiner, 2000), which generates new learning. However, when engaging in activities that are new to the individual there is a potential to extend what the individual knows, through the creation of new cognitive structures. When engaging in new work tasks new learning might arise. Cognitive learning theories hold that in overcoming problems, new learning arises (Anderson, 1982). Piaget’s (1976) notion of overcoming disequilibrium, the unknown in what is encountered, through the processes of assimilation (i.e. reconciling what is experienced with what individuals already know) and accommodation (i.e. inciting new categories of knowledge from experiences) similarly positions thinking and learning as one process. Also, Mead (1934) proposed learning as an ongoing stream of conscious thought that constitutes and contributes to individuals’ cognitive processes over a lifespan. This view is shared by accounts from anthropology proposing associations between practice and learning (Lave, 1993; Pelissier, 1991). Lave and Wenger (1991) and Rogoff (1995) refer directly to participation in social practice as being analogous to learning. Rogoff (1990, 1995) refers to the moment-by-moment accrual of knowledge through encounters with the social world as micro-genetic development. Collectively, these perspectives on learning, albeit with different emphases, hold that more than an end in itself, participation in activities, such as those in workplaces, incites change in individuals’ understandings and capacities – that is, it constitutes learning. While some cognitive theorists associate learning only with encountering novel problems, this association fails to account for the person-dependent nature of what constitutes a novel task and the different ways of engagement with the same “new” task. In keeping with ideas of the ongoing processes of knowledge construction advocated above, it is proposed that learning and participation in work are inseparable. However, these processes are not individual acts of cognition. Most of the knowledge humans learn is not wholly new, although it may be novel to the individuals encountering it. Vocational practices and work activities have historical, cultural and situational origins (Billett, 1998). The same goes for domestic tasks in the home (Goodnow and Warton, 1991) or parenting (Rogoff, 1990) and those practices privileged in educational institutions. They are all practices that have evolved over time to meet the requirements of particular cultural needs (Scribner, 1985) and are constituted in particular ways in each setting – including workplaces (Billett, 2001b). So, engaging in workplace activities interdependently links individuals’ thinking and acting and their
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learning to social sources. Workplaces provide interactions with human partners and non-human artefacts that contribute to individuals’ capacity to perform and to the learning that arises from their performance. These contributions to learning are conceptualised as being inter-psychological – between individuals in the social world, before becoming intra-psychological attributes – a cognitive attribute (Vygotsky, 1978). These inter-psychological processes are interdependent. Learning inter-psychologically is not a passive process of socialisation or enculturation, of the person’s being filled up with local knowledge. Instead, individuals engage actively in the process of determining the worth of what they experience and how they might engage with it and learn from it (Goodnow, 1990). Valsiner (1994, 2000) refers to the co-construction of knowledge: the interdependent process of individuals’ constructing of knowledge through relational interaction with a social source. That is, individuals will elect how they engage and what they construct from that engagement, while social practices are able to provide different levels of pressure for individuals to engage with particular knowledge. Similarly, Rogoff (1995) suggests that in the reciprocal process of learning both the object and the subject are transformed through interaction. The concept of co-participation at work (Billett, 2001a, 2002) has been used to account for the reciprocal processes of learning shaped by interactions between what is afforded by the workplace and how individuals elect to engage with what is afforded. In this view, workplace affordances are shaped by local negotiations (Suchman, 1996) and orderings (Engestrom and Middleton, 1996). These localised needs constitute the particular requirements for work performance. These cannot be appraised other than in the situation where tasks are undertaken and the conditions for and judgements about those performances are exercised. However, situational factors alone are insufficient to understand workplaces as learning environments. What is required is an understanding of the way individuals’ agentic action and intentionalities (Bloomer and Hodkinson, 2000; Somerville, 2002) shape how they participate in and learn through work. This agency has social as well as cognitive geneses. The kinds of social experiences individuals have throughout their life history contribute to what constitutes their subjectivity and identity and shapes their exercise of their agentic actions. In considering learning as participation in work, it is important to stress that engagement in and what is learnt from socially-determined practices are not determined by the social practice. Instead, individuals decide how they participate in and what they construe and learn from their experience. Workplace participatory practices Considering learning in workplaces as participation is important for key reasons. First, if learning is seen as a consequence of participation in social practices (such as those involved in the production of goods or services), rather than as something privileged by participation in educational institutions, this may broaden the bases to understand and legitimate learning generally and learning through work in particular. Learning occurs in circumstances other than educational institutions. Neither Piaget’s (1976) process of overcoming disequilibrium nor the sociocultural concept of micro-genesis is reserved for particular kinds of social or physical settings. They constitute responses to everyday encounters and experiences, such as those occurring in workplaces.
Therefore, considerations of the consequences of individuals’ engagement in workplace activities and access to its affordances may inform a broadened view of learning experiences and their enhancement. Certainly, the widening acceptance of learning as an inter-psychological process (i.e. between individuals and social sources of knowledge) prompts a consideration of learning as engagement with the social world generally, and not only through close personal interactions as Vygotsky (1978) implies, but also through engagement in the physical and social environment that constitutes the workplace. There are also worthwhile procedural reasons for making participation and participatory practices a central foundation of a workplace pedagogy. The development of and consideration of a workplace pedagogy seems important in order to have a basis by which to understand and evaluate the kind of experiences that workplaces can and do provide. For most workers, the workplace represents the only or most viable location to learn and/or develop their vocational practice (Billett, 2001a). This goal has become urgent given current lifelong learning policies and practices (OECD, 1998). In these policies, the responsibility for maintaining the currency of vocational practice is being increasingly transferred to workers. Consequently, understanding how the opportunities to engage in work, the kinds of tasks individuals are permitted or invited to engage in (that is, afforded) and the guidance provided become key to evaluating how and what individuals are able to learn through work and their working lives. As work sites are the prime source of the knowledge required for work, how opportunities to participate are distributed across workers or cohorts of workers in often-contested workplaces becomes an important factor in learning throughout working life. Moreover, workplace affordances also likely influence how individuals elect to engage in goal-directed activities and to secure direct guidance through close (or “proximal”) interpersonal interactions between experts and novices or more indirect (i.e. “distal”) kinds of guidance, for example, through opportunities to observe and listen (Billett and Boud, 2001). Both these kinds of guidance have consequences for the knowledge individuals construct. Close guidance is important for learning knowledge that would be difficult to learn without the assistance of a more knowledgeable partner (Rogoff, 1995). Learning the concepts underpinning vocational practice (e.g. service requirements, force factors, hygiene) or processes and concepts that are hidden (e.g. electronic processes, past practices that shape current approaches) likely require close interactions with more experienced co-workers who can make these concepts and practices accessible. Indirect guidance contributes to how tasks are undertaken and completed. However, as with participation in activities, the contribution of guidance is dependent on learners’ engagement (Hodkinson and Bloomer, 2002). What directs individuals to engage in the demanding tasks of learning new knowledge and refining what they already know is premised on their interest and agency. Participation and learning need to be seen as the interdependent processes in which individuals exercise their agency, hence the term participatory practices. But what of the quality of learning through participation? A key basis by which learning environments are judged is the degree to which they are able to support the development of robust learning outcomes; that is, knowledge that can be applied elsewhere. As noted, it is often assumed that learning in social settings, other than those specialising in teaching, will lead to highly specific and concrete outcomes (e.g. Resnick, 1987; Marsick and Watkins, 1990; Prawat, 1993; Evans, 1993). That is, the
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scope of the application of what has been learnt is thought to be limited to the circumstances of its construction. Rogoff (1982) and Rogoff and Gauvain (1984) found that the potential for transfer from non-schooling kinds of activities was as great as that from school-based activities. Indeed, the development of what Vygotsky (1978) refers to as scientific concepts, which are held to be more robust than everyday concepts, is not dependent on where they were learnt, but whether the concepts and procedures were made accessible in ways that incite their adaptation to other circumstances (Glassman, 2001). Moreover, assumptions about widespread transfer need to be challenged, given the paucity of transfer of learning from educational institutions, whose claims include the development of robust knowledge (e.g. Raizen, 1994). In all, the idea that there are inherently transferable capacities that can be learnt and applied universally seems fanciful. The requirements for what constitutes a problem and the bases for judging performance, such as elegance of solution, are often highly situational (Billett, 2001b). Given the need to account for diverse situational factors and requirements for performance of tasks, it is unlikely that capacities that have universal applicability can ever be realised. Put plainly, expectations of high levels of transfer from learning in any social practice, and particularly between different practices, are unrealistic. The exceptions are perhaps specific procedures; for example, keyboarding and wiring a power point, whose enactment can be transferred directly, although even here the goals to which they are directed and their top-level heuristics, such as “look-before-you-leap” and “think-before-you-act” (Evans, 1993) will differ. Taking this view, conceptualising adaptability and expectations for transfer might shift from a focus on capacities to perform across broad domains of activities (e.g. an occupation) to a focus on situational performance requirements (e.g. in a particular workplace): that is, to practice. Following up on this case for understanding learning as participation, the next section elaborates the bases for participation in workplace settings. Bases for participation in workplaces As proposed above, the invitational qualities of a workplace are constituted by factors associated with its norms and practices and directed to secure its continuity. These include those associated with the continuity of the work practice itself and the maintenance of particular interests within the workplace. Workplace affordances as continuity of and interests within the practice The basis for participation and learning in work practices and their regulation is the continuity of the workplace or work practice. As noted, there is evidence of the deliberate structuring of learning experiences within workplaces in order to maintain their continuity. The evidence refers to both the overall structuring of learning experiences (i.e. the learning curriculum) and the intentional development of specific procedures and concepts through pedagogic strategies (e.g. modeling, explanations, guiding) (see Pelissier, 1991). The structuring of these kinds of learning experiences is essential to the continuity of the workplace, as it needs these capacities to produce goods and services and respond to new challenges. Moreover, participation more generally is structured and regulated by workplaces’ norms and practices. Yet, although primarily concerned with the continuity of work practice, rather than with individual learning, the structuring of these experiences is often inherently
pedagogic, because they are concerned to secure continuity through participants’ learning. However, the regulation of workplace learning experiences is not benign. It serves the needs of particular interests. To preserve their standing, full-time retail workers in pharmacy chain stores deliberately constrain what activities part-time workers engaged in and the degree of support that they were afforded (Berhhardt, 1999). Coal miners provide access to support to co-workers on the basis of their industrial affiliations and seniority (Billett, 2001c). Hence, workplace participatory practices are often contested. This contestation arises between “newcomers” who are seeking to participate more fully and “old-timers” who fear displacement (Lave and Wenger, 1991) and attempt to regulate participation. Similarly, seniority in workplaces (Dore and Sako, 1989) and work demarcations (Danford, 1998) influence the bases of the regulation and access to work-tasks and guidance, particularly for prized opportunities that can lead to individual advancement or high levels of remuneration. There is also contestation between institutionalised interests, such as those of workers and management (Danford, 1998), which leads to the regulation of workers’ participation. Alternatively, the regulation of opportunities may also reflect employers’ attempts to maintain control of the workplace’s activities and thereby limit the range of tasks and decision making in which certain workers are permitted to engage (Danford, 1998). Consequently, work practices can deliberately regulate individuals’ participation in the workplace (Billett, 2001a) in order to best suit the enterprise’s goals and continuity. This regulation of participation might be directed to maintain the work practice’s viability, in terms of its required level of skill utilisation or quality of service. Overall, these regulatory practices (Bernstein, 1996) serve to distribute opportunities for engaging in new or prized work activities (from which new learning might be derived) and access to guidance and support. Consequently, individuals or cohorts of individuals may experience different kinds and degrees of affordances, depending on their affiliation, associations, gender, language skills, employment status and standing in the workplace, because of these regulatory practices. The bases for maintaining continuity of practice are multi-faceted, complex, negotiated, regulated and contested. Given that learning arises from the kinds of participation in work and support to secure what cannot be learnt alone, how work practice and interests within it regulates these opportunities will influence the quality of individuals’ learning experiences. In all these, the exercise of power and control is evident in the regulation of opportunities. Therefore, workplace learning experiences are not ad hoc, informal or unstructured. They are structured by power and interests (Bierema, 2001; Solomon, 1999). In these ways, workplaces represent a socially constituted and contested learning space whose participatory practices are key pedagogical devices. Individual engagement Despite the regulation of participation, decisions about engagement in and the learning that arises through work are not determined solely by the situation. Individuals’ agency and intentionalities also mediate and shape their engagement in work practice and what is learnt through that engagement. This represents the other dimension of workplace participatory practices. Individuals are not passive in their participatory practices and learning (Hodkinson and Bloomer, 2002; Bloomer and Hodkinson, 2000)
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or the construction of occupational identities (Somerville, 2002). Instead, their agency determines how what workplaces afford is construed and judged worthy of participation. Individuals’ agency also determines how they engage in the process of learning, with rich learning being particularly effortful. Individuals’ socially constituted personal histories or ontogenies (Scribner, 1985) engender identities and subjectivities that incite particular ways of knowing, understanding and engaging with the social world. These personal histories are uniquely socially-shaped through participation in different social practices throughout life histories (Billett, 1998; Bloomer and Hodkinson, 2000; Hodkinson and Bloomer, 2002). Consequently, individuals’ engagement in and learning through work will always be unique in some ways (Valsiner, 2000). This is made so by the inevitable negotiation that will transpire between the workplace’s norms and practices and individuals’ subjectivities and identities as the two intersect during participation. Therefore, not surprisingly, individuals sometimes elect to dis-identify with social practices in which they engage (Hodges, 1998); workers will resist engaging in team work when it clashes with their cultural mores (e.g. Darrah, 1996) or training that compromises their employment options (Billett, 2001a) and new recruits will ignore and deny affordances intended to assist their participation (Billett, 2001a). To illustrate this last point, one new worker treated his assigned workplace mentor with belligerence and scoffed at the affordances of the workplace, as he believed he was more competent than his mentor and his vocational practice more sophisticated than that being enacted in his new workplace. The tension here is between the goals and intended continuities of the work practice and those of the individual. Much of the above has argued against an unquestioned privileging of educational institutions as sites for learning. However, a distinction between workplaces and educational institutions may reside in learners’ identities. Individuals participating in educational institutions may hold kinds of identities and subjectivities whose purposes are to engage deliberately in knowledge construction, different from those who are positioned as workers in workplaces. Hence, there may be different bases for agentic action for some individuals. For instance, Somerville (2002) reported cathartic incidents had to occur in workers’ lives (e.g. work accidents or serious health problems) before they embraced an identity associated with deliberate learning (e.g. to work more safely, to live healthier). Therefore, learners’ personal workplace experiences are likely to incite the agentic actions that are central to learning through work. In sum, workplace learning experiences represent an interaction between the enactment, even the regulation of the social practice of the workplace and individuals’ agency as they engage in paid work activities. Whether considering workplace learning through participation in everyday work or through intentionally organised learning activities, these interdependent participatory practices are likely to shape both the learning process and outcomes. Workplaces, learning and participatory practices This paper proposes workplaces as learning environments that are negotiated and constructed by individuals, albeit mediated by what is afforded and regulated by the workplace, as well as the cultural norms and practices being exercised through the work practice. Central to the conception proposed here is the interdependent and possibly contested process of participation in workplace activities and interactions.
Ongoing participation may be essential for individuals to secure the capacities required for work. More than once-off sources of initial learning, participation in work practices is increasingly becoming an ongoing requirement to maintain competence as work practices and goals transform (OECD, 1998). The kinds of activities and interactions individuals participate in will be central to their learning, transformation and elaboration of these capacities. However, their engagement in workplaces is subject to interests within it and the continuities of the social practice, as manifested in the regulation of participatory practices. Changes in an individual’s participation are likely to have consequences for other workers (Billett et al., 2004). This participation may be actively supported, welcomed, resented or actively opposed. Conversely, despite efforts to regulate participation, there can be no guarantee that these intents will be fully realised. Individuals will decide how they will participate in and what they learn from what they experience. So, more than seeing workplaces as physical and social environments, they need to be understood as something negotiated and constructed through interdependent processes of affordance and engagement. The concept of workplace participatory practices has been advanced here to begin to account for these interdependent processes. It is held that, whether learning through engagement in everyday work activities or through intentionally organised learning processes in the workplace (e.g. mentoring, guided learning, action learning), this interdependence will shape the processes of learning. Moreover, workplace participatory practices provide a platform on which to construct a workplace pedagogy. References Anderson, J.R. (1982), “Acquisition of cognitive skill”, Psychological Review, Vol. 89 No. 4, pp. 369-406. Bernhardt, A. (1999), “The future of low-wage jobs: case studies in the retail industry”, working paper, No. 10, Institute on Education and the Economy, New York, NY, March. Bernstein, B. (1996), Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity: Research Critique, Taylor & Francis, London. Bierema, L.L. (2001), “Women, work, and learning”, in Fenwick, T. (Ed.), Sociocultural Perspectives on Learning through Work, Jossey Bass/Wiley, San Francisco, CA. Billett, S. (1998), “Situation, social systems and learning”, Journal of Education and Work, Vol. 11 No. 3, pp. 255-74. Billett, S. (2001a), Learning in the Workplace: Strategies for Effective Practice, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Billett, S. (2001b), “Knowing in practice: re-conceptualising vocational expertise”, Learning and Instruction, Vol. 11 No. 6, pp. 431-52. Billett, S. (2001c), “Learning throughout working life: activities and interdependencies”, Studies in Continuing Education, Vol. 23 No. 1, pp. 19-35. Billett, S. (2002), “Critiquing workplace learning discourses: participation and continuity at work”, Studies in the Education of Adults, Vol. 34 No. 1, pp. 56-67. Billett, S. and Boud, D. (2001), “Participation in and guided engagement at work: workplace pedagogic practices”, 2nd International Conference on Learning and Work, Calgary, 26-28 July, pp. 321-8. Billett, S., Barker, M. and Hernon-Tinning, B. (2004), “Participatory practices at work”, Pedagogy, Culture and Society, Vol. 11 No. 3.
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Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991), Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Luria, A.R. (1976), Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Marsick, V.J. and Watkins, K. (1990), Informal and Incidental Learning in the Workplace, Routledge, London. Mead, G.H. (1934), Mind, Self and Society: Works of George Herbert Mead, Vol. 1, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (1998), “Lifelong learning: a monitoring framework and trends in participation”, Educational Policy Analysis, OECD, Paris, pp. 7-24. Pelissier, C. (1991), “The anthropology of teaching and learning”, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 20, pp. 75-95. Piaget, J. (1976), Behavior and Evolution, translated by D. Nicholson Smith, Pantheon Books, New York, NY. Prawat, R.S. (1993), “The value of ideas: problems versus possibilities in learning”, Educational Researcher, Vol. 22 No. 6, pp. 5-16. Raizen, S. (1994), “Learning and work: the research base”, Vocational Education and Training for Youth: Towards Coherent Policy and Practice, OECD, Paris. Resnick, L. (1987), “Learning in school and out”, Educational Researcher, Vol. 16 No. 9, pp. 13-20. Rogoff, B. (1982), “Integrating context and cognitive development”, in Lamb, M.E. and Brown, A.L. (Eds), Advances in Developmental Psychology, Vol. 2, Laurence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 125-70. Rogoff, B. (1990), Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Development in Social Context, Oxford University Press, New York, NY. Rogoff, B. (1995), “Observing sociocultural activities on three planes: participatory appropriation, guided appropriation, and apprenticeship”, in Wertsch, J.V., Del Rio, P. and Alvarez, A. (Eds), Sociocultural Studies of the Mind, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 139-64. Rogoff, B. and Gauvain, M. (1984), “The cognitive consequences of specific experiences: weaving versus schooling among the Navajo”, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Vol. 15 No. 4, pp. 453-75. Scribner, S. (1984), “Studying working intelligence”, in Rogoff, B. and Lave, J. (Eds), Everyday Cognition: Its Development in Social Context, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 9-40. Scribner, S. (1985), “Vygostky’s use of history”, in Wertsch, J.V. (Ed.), Culture, Communication and Cognition: Vygotskian Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 119-45. Scribner, S. (1988-1997), “Mental and manual work: an activity theory orientation”, in Tobah, E., Falmagne, R.J., Parlee, M.B., Martin, L.M. and Kapelman, A.S. (Eds), Mind and Social Practice: Selected Writings of Sylvia Scribner, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 367-74. Solomon, N. (1999), “Culture and difference in workplace learning”, in Boud, D. and Garrick, D.J. (Eds), Understanding Learning at Work, Routledge, London, pp. 119-31. Somerville, M. (2002), “Changing masculine work cultures”, 10th Annual International Conference on Post-compulsory Education and Training, Envisioning practice – implementing change, Vol. 3, pp. 149-55.
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Curriculum at work
Curriculum at work
An educational perspective on the workplace as a learning environment David Thornton Moore
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Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University, New York, New York, USA Keywords Curriculum development, Workplace learning, Experiential learning Abstract The term “curriculum” has been used almost exclusively in educational circles to refer to plans for the conduct of learning lessons in school classrooms. This paper argues that the concept can be productively expanded to describe learning processes in workplaces, including those in which learning is not the intentional outcome of an interaction. The article first reviews conventional conceptions of curriculum, and then draws on theories of cognition and learning base in phenomenology, symbolic interactionism and situated learning to identify some of the features of a naturally-occurring curriculum in the workplace: the socio-technical and pragmatic elements of the knowledge used in the work environment, the classification and framing of knowledge-use, and the extent to which participants are expected to use the various forms of knowledge. That is, curriculum is essentially a socially-constructed ordering of the knowledge-use in a social context. These concepts are applied to two settings in which high school interns were supposed to be learning something: a history museum and a veterinary clinic.
Regular readers of this journal must encounter a multitude of ways of thinking about the workplace as a learning environment: the T&D practitioner’s perspective on what workers need to know and be able to do; the psychologist’s conceptions of learning as an intracranial process; the anthropologist’s exploration of the culture of the workplace, and the process of inducting newcomers into it. All of these are useful – indeed, this special issue tries to represent several of those approaches. My own contribution here is to consider ways in which we can think about learning as a function of a naturally-occurring curriculum in the workplace. I will try to demonstrate how that term, embedded pretty thoroughly in the theory and practice of education, can be expanded profitably to reveal some of the complex dynamics of workplace life that make learning possible. The structure of the paper is fairly simple. First, I will examine some of the ways educators use the term curriculum, and then suggest a way of reconceptualizing it so that it can be productively applied to non-classroom processes. Then I will explore the features of curriculum as a naturally-occurring workplace phenomenon, using data from two major studies of high school and college interns. Finally, I will identify the factors that shape the curriculum of work experience, the dynamics that influence what kinds of learning people engage in during organized, productive activities. My comments here emerge from two large-scale research projects: the School for External Learning (SEL) study of high-school interns in 35 different work sites in a large city (Moore, 1981, 1986); and the Working Knowledge study at the Institute on Education and the Economy (IEE/Columbia), an investigation of work-based learning (WBL) programs in high schools and colleges (Bailey et al., 2004). Between them, I am drawing on ethnographic studies of student-interns in 60 work sites, ranging from
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museums to community newspapers, from hospitals to law offices, from veterinary clinics to municipal agencies. In each case, researchers spent many hours observing interns at work, interviewing them and their colleagues and supervisors, and collecting such artifacts as office memoranda, manuals and work products. Both project groups moved from these observations to an analysis of learning in the workplace: where and how it happened, what organizational processes shaped it. In previous published work, we focused first on defining and documenting learning in the workplace: the acquisition, construction and transformation of knowledge-in-use by an activity system in the environment; and then on pedagogy: the social organization of the process by which newcomers encountered, engaged and used new forms of knowledge. In this paper, I look at the obverse of that same educational coin, at what I will call the “curriculum of experience”. Imagine scenarios such as these: . Jose´, a young man in a high-school travel and hospitality academy, sits in the maintenance office of an airport hotel, answering calls from guests (requests for more towels, complaints about cleanliness, warnings about suspicious persons wandering the halls), tracking the work-completion reports from the housekeepers, and dispatching engineers to make repairs. Later, he conducts inspections of a number of hotel rooms, writing a report to his supervisor indicating where light fixtures are out, rugs are stained, or plumbing needs attention. . Heather, a junior at a big-city high school where students get most of their credits for doing internships, works as a tour guide in a state history museum, leading tours of elementary school groups. She greets the classes at the entrance, takes them to an auditorium for a short film and a discussion of colonial artifacts, then conducts them through a few exhibit halls, answering questions and putting the kids through a drawing exercise. . Fred, a high-school senior, interns at a rural veterinary clinic that works primarily with small pets (cats, dogs), doing check-ups, vaccinations, neutering, and occasional surgical procedures. He functions at the margins of the clinic: cleaning cages, walking dogs, cleaning up after operations, replenishing supplies, filling in for the receptionist to answer phones and make appointments. He rarely participates directly in medical-veterinary activities, though once he administered a shot to a cat. How can one examine these kinds of scenes reasonably and productively through the concept of curriculum? If their work is not planned and executed according to some rational understanding of how these student-interns can best learn, if the primary focus of their activities is not their learning but the production of a good service, then where does curriculum come in? I will argue, in this paper, that there is in fact a sense in which a naturally-occurring curriculum exists in these work sites, and that one can better understand the workplace as a learning environment if one accounts for that phenomenon. Mainstream conceptions of curriculum Traditional and mainstream conceptions of curriculum are numerous and somewhat varied, but virtually always refer to aspects of theory and practice in schools. Beauchamp (1975) calls curriculum:
A written plan depicting the scope and arrangement of the projected educational program for a school.
Lewis and Miel (1978) review several notions of curriculum: as “subject-matter”, as a “printed or mimeographed course of study”, as the “experience the children do indeed have under the guidance of the school” (cf. Caswell and Campbell, 1935), and as “a structured set of intended learning outcomes” (cf. Johnson, 1967, p. 129). They then propose their own definition: The curriculum is taken to be a set of intentions about opportunities for engagement of persons-to-be-educated with other persons and with things (all bearers of information, processes, techniques and values) in certain arrangements of time and space. The opportunities which the planners of curriculum intend to provide are so selected, structured and ordered as to foster a desired quality of present and future living and are to be made available under the auspices of the school (Lewis and Miel, 1978, p. 21).
Several theorists see curriculum in the experience that children have in school. Oliver (1978) cites a Kansas curriculum guide as claiming that “basically the curriculum is what happens to children in school as a result of what teachers do. It includes all the experiences of children for which the school should accept responsibility”. Van Maanen (1978) reviews the “reconceptualist” school of curriculum thought, which focuses on the existential question of the experienced life-world of the child and of the pedagogic situation – but still assumes that curriculum happens in schools, and that it is structured in the first instance by teachers. Hazlett (1979) agrees that: The “lived” curriculum of the school and classroom is a level of inquiry that has suffered the most neglect.
Some recent studies of curriculum theory have remedied that neglect to an extent (cf. Pinar, 2004). Margaret Tipper, my colleague in the SEL research, points out that these various conceptions of the term curriculum locate it in three very different and problematically related phenomena: (1) The plans participants in a supposedly educational encounter have for someone’s learning, or before-the-fact intentions, images and mandates for the educative process. (2) The actions and experiences in which participants (especially student-learners) engage during that encounter. (3) The outcomes intended to result from the experience (Tipper, 1982, p. 3). Aside from Tipper and a few other authors (cf. Schubert, 1982; Watkins, 2004), almost every conception of curriculum reported in these mainstream, traditional texts implicitly or explicitly restricts the use of the term to the context of schools. Even the reconceptualists (cf. Pinar, 1975, 2004), although they discuss many forms of life-worlds and social forces, tend to bring the issue back to school-based curriculum. This trend leaves both the experiential educator and the workplace educator in a dilemma: by implication, we must either abandon altogether the concept of curriculum as a matter of study and practice, or we must attend only to those interventions designed and executed by professional educators as an adjunct to the primary educational experience. I reject both of those implications, and argue that there is, in
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fact, a naturally-occurring curriculum of experience, one which professional educators, both in and out of schools, need to understand. An alternative: the situated curriculum The approach to the concept of curriculum proposed here emerged both from our encounters with real people in real workplaces and from our readings in educational sociology, anthropology and psychology. On the observational side, we were struck repeatedly by the powerful sense that many – though not all – of the student-interns we watched did indeed learn something as they worked. They got better at a huge variety of situation-specific tasks: leading tours of a history museum; teaching music to fourth-graders; writing capsule summaries of legal cases; organizing the housekeepers’ assignments in a hotel; helping senior citizens avoid eviction from their apartments. Moreover, these interns clearly were not incompetent one day and competent the next, but rather grew in their display of knowledge and skill – sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, sometimes gradually, sometimes in fits and starts. On the theoretical side, our definition of curriculum emerged from our reading of various forms of interactionist sociology and constructivist psychology (cf. Moore, 1999; Bailey et al., 2004, for a more thorough review of these ideas). When combined with several of the articles in such curriculum studies reviews as Gress and Purpel (1978) or Pinar (2004), these stances toward the study of social life gave a particular form to our conception of educational process. Interactionist sociologists and anthropologists believe (see e.g. Mead, 1934; Blumer, 1969; Mehan, 1978), among other things, that the participants in any face-to-face social situation, use various kinds of knowledge to organize their actions together. By knowledge, I mean what people take to be facts, skills, procedures, strategies, social norms, interpretive principles, values, beliefs and world-views: agreements on a number of levels about the way the world is and ought to be, about the way things get done and the meanings of events, relations and ideas. By use I mean (following such theorists as McDermott and Gospodinoff, 1978) that they formulate this knowledge (assert it, cite it, invoke it), orient their actions toward and around it, employ it in the definition and solution of local problems, hold each other accountable for its display, and even work at transforming, expanding or overthrowing it. They read situations, interpret the behavior of others in light of those readings, and produce appropriate actions themselves on the basis of this knowledge (cf. Bremme and Erickson, 1977). Participants share what Berger and Luckmann (1966) call the social stock of knowledge to manage their interactions and accomplish mutual goals. In part, this social stock of knowledge is what constitutes the context in which it is used (cf. Mehan, 1978). More recent theories have elaborated these conceptions of thinking in settings like workplaces. Sternberg and Wagner (1986) offer the notion of practical intelligence, arguing that people think differently in situations outside of schools and laboratories; Resnick’s (1987) well-known article, “Learning in school and out” popularized that stance. Lave (1988) and others (cf. Kirshner and Whitson, 1997) pioneered the theory of situated cognition, which says that cognitive processes have to be understood as embedded in and functions of specific situations; and Salomon (1993) and others extended that concept to distributed cognition, the idea that cognitive activity is not only situated, but shared, that thought and problem-solved are usually distributed across a complex system of persons, tools and symbols. Hutchins’ (1993) brilliant
analysis of a team of quartermasters collectively navigating a ship through a river illustrates that position well. Drawing on this phenomenological, interactionist and constructivist conception of the use of knowledge in the organization of concerted, situated activities, then, we move toward a useful conception of the curriculum of experience. We define pedagogy as the social organization of the process by which members of the situation encounter, engage and participate in this social stock of knowledge. Curriculum, therefore, can be seen as the obverse of that learning coin, as the socially organized stock of knowledge in use in the particular environment as it is experienced by the participants, especially newcomers. That is, curriculum is not merely the static body of information, ideas and procedures that might be written into a training manual: “newcomers need to know X, Y and Z; they need to be able to do one, two and three”. Rather, discovering the curriculum of a workplace (or a classroom, or a family dinner table) means identifying the dynamic process by which members define, organize and use various forms of knowledge. That knowledge emerges, evolves, and changes over the course of its use and, therefore, the curriculum analyst must track its transformation as well as its form. The curriculum is a cultural production (cf. Applebaum, 1984; Wenger, 1998), and a situated accomplishment (cf. Lave and Wenger, 1991): a matter of the emergent, shared conception of the way this particular world is and should become. The distinction between pedagogy and curriculum in this approach is one of perspective, not phenomenon. That is, in both cases, the educator-analyst is examining the situated use of various kinds of knowledge. In the case of pedagogy, the focus is on the social organization of the means by which newcomers (learners) come to encounter and use knowledge. For instance, in the case of Jose´, the hotel intern, the analysis reveals processes like these: the supervisor introduced Jose´ to the task of responding to guest calls by: . having him observe her while she did that job; . showing him how to use the technology involved (the phone, the log, etc.); and . having him answer some calls while she sat with him and coached him through unfamiliar requests. These are pedagogical tactics. The curriculum analyst, by contrast, looks at the same phenomenon – Jose´ working in the hotel maintenance office – but asks different questions about it: . How do people who do that job categorize the types of guest problems (e.g. requests for materials (matches, pillows) or for services (cleaning, repair, security concerns, etc.)? . How do they need to manage phone interactions with the customers (what constitutes sufficient politeness, or how can they be efficient without being rude)? . What do they need to know about the operations and culture of the engineers (when is it acceptable to reassign a worker during a task, or who is willing to work with whom)? . How are these forms of knowledge-in-use constructed, shared and transformed in the course of situated activities?
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These curricular matters have several sets of features. Some of them are essentially technical: they are about knowledge related to the mechanical performance of a task, often entailing the use of technology. Jose´ needed to use both a telephone (with hold and forward buttons) and a computer-like device that tracked and organized the assignments of the housekeepers and the engineers. There were certain techniques that he had to employ, given the design of the machines, to accomplish the necessary tasks; they might be called algorithms. But some of the features of the curriculum were more accurately described as social: they were about how participants interpreted the behavior of others, and how they produced behavior themselves. In the case of Jose´, for instance, he needed to know how to deal with different kinds of guests: angry and demanding ones; polite, even apologetic ones. While he clearly had to deal with those questions, the solutions were just as clearly not algorithmic: they were variable across specific instances, open to interpretation, and, to some extent, matters of style. The hotel might have trained workers to interact with guests in a way that conveyed happiness and respect – but even those terms left lots of room for variation. Solutions and strategies emerged and changed as participants encountered and worked through problems. They could not have said exhaustively in advance what everyone needed to know. Another category of curriculum features might be called pragmatic: they refer to the meaning of the particular task-knowledge in the larger content of the organization. Some forms of knowledge are central to the operation, and carry more weight in the constellation of knowledge-use; others are more peripheral, and allow for less vigilance. Some kinds of knowledge bestow prestige on their carriers, and some have less positive status connotations. The shaping of newcomers’ encounters with these different types of curriculum may vary substantially according to these pragmatic features of the knowledge. Basil Bernstein, a sociolinguist, provides two more features of curriculum analysis in his classic book Class, Codes and Control (Bernstein, 1975). Although he is describing knowledge-use in school classrooms rather than in workplaces, the concepts help us understand the curriculum of experience. The first, classification, refers to the degree to which knowledge is clearly and firmly divided into categories. In a situation with strong classification, knowledge domains are kept separate from one another, so certain people know certain things and others do not. Weak classification exists in contexts where knowledge-forms intersect and melt into one another. The school case is clear: in a university, sociologists and economists may see their disciplines as clearly and powerfully distinct; they might even argue about whether a given phenomenon or theory “belongs” in their camp. In the hotel, classification was organized not around academic disciplines, but around job functions: the engineers knew certain things about technologies in the building that the housekeepers did not, and vice versa. Bernstein’s other concept is frame: the determination of who controls access to that knowledge. If, in the case just mentioned, the engineers were unionized, they might resist efforts by housekeepers to learn how to fix air conditioners or bathtubs. This feature of knowledge-use in the workplace is really more about pedagogy than about curriculum, in the sense that it describes the social organization of participants’ encounters with knowledge; but it also refers to the micro-politics of knowledge definition, and is, therefore, about curriculum as well. Finally, we identified demandedness as another feature of the situated curriculum. In the course of participating in situated activities, different members of a work system
are expected to display different levels of engagement with, and competence in, certain kinds of knowledge. As situated cognition theorists maintain, people learn particular kinds of knowledge and skill better and more deeply when they actually have to use it in the performance of their work. Thus, the curriculum analyst needs to inquire into the extent to which the putative learner actually engages and utilizes particular forms of knowledge and skill. It is one thing to observe certain knowledge at work, another to help out as it is being applied, and still another to perform that knowledge-use as a principal actor in the activity. In summary, thinking about curriculum as a feature of workplace learning, means thinking about the way people involved in a particular situation construct a more or less shared conception of the knowledge through which they organize their interactions and activities. This is not the same as identifying the “hidden curriculum”, a term that has been used both in schools and in workplaces to refer essentially to the social lessons a learner takes through experience, or to the way she becomes familiar with the culture of the workplace (Wren, 1999; Russell, 1992). The knowledge constructed in this form of curriculum may be about the social order of the situation, but it may also bear on technical, intellectual and theoretical issues. Studying this form of curriculum means examining the social and technical means by which activities get accomplished: what one needs to know, how one needs to think, in order to do the work. It means considering the pragmatic weight of the particular task-related knowledge: whether it is central to the operation or peripheral, whether displaying it confers status on the actor. It means assessing the classification and frame (Bernstein, 1975) of knowledge-in-use in the setting: how strongly participants conceive of the knowledge in categorical as opposed to intersecting terms, and who controls access to the various kinds of knowledge. And, finally, it means determining the extent to which use of the knowledge or skill is demanded by the activity system. But the reconceptualists (cf. Pinar, 1975, 2004) are correct in insisting that the curriculum, even in the sense described here, must be understood as experienced, as emergent and evolving, as part of the phenomenal life-world of the participants in the organization, not as a static, immutable body of codified and planned learning. People adjust their conceptions of knowledge to the fine details of their situated activities. They interpret situations variably, within broad guidelines, rather than replicate each other’s thinking identically. This conception of curriculum focuses on the dynamic process of members’ engagement with knowledge, not on an idealized content or inventory of data and procedures. What makes the workplace different from the school classroom as an educational environment, obviously, is that its primary concern is production and not learning. While the same framework can be used to analyze curriculum in both settings, in the school someone is supposed to be learning and someone else is supposed to be teaching; and there are usually formal, often written prescriptions for how that process ought to unfold. At work, however, people organize their activities around getting the job done, not around some rational, planful, intentional notion of how some members will learn. Therefore, the analyst of curriculum in the workplace has to search for the dynamic construction of knowledge-use and the members’ participation in that knowledge without the benefit of lesson plans, learning objectives or texts. Rather, one must explore the emergent character of these knowledge-use activities, and ferret out their characteristics as outlined earlier. In the next section, I will illustrate that analytic
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process with reference to two sites from our research projects. In the final section, I will propose some factors that shape the ways in which situated curricula emerge. Case studies Heather, whom the reader met earlier, interned as a tour guide in a state history museum. Obviously, the museum did things other than provide tours for elementary school classes (constructing exhibits, preserving and studying artifacts, sponsoring educational programs for adults), but for the purpose of illustration we will concentrate on that element of the operation. By the end of her term at the museum, Heather was able to conduct an entire tour: she greeted the class at the door; escorted them to the auditorium, where she ran an introductory film and then led a discussion about items from an artifacts cart (candle-makers, bedwarmers, etc.); guided them through several exhibit halls (colonial housing and transportation, etc.); set up an exercise in which the children drew their images of, for instance, a family at home; and, finally, saw the class off at the door. What constituted the curriculum of Heather’s internship experience? First, the tasks she performed could be described in terms of their technical, social and pragmatic features. While there is insufficient space here to lay out those features exhaustively, a few examples will flesh out the concept. On a technical level, Heather had to know certain things: the names of some colonial governors; the uses of bedwarmers and looms; and how to operate the film projector. The conception of those forms of knowledge shared within the education department provided categories or structure for Heather’s encounters with them. Heather experienced that element of the curriculum as she observed senior guides, as she explored the exhibits in the museum, and as she read books and pamphlets in the department library. The social element of the curriculum arose in Heather’s interactions with the elementary school guests and their teachers. She had to learn to handle those encounters tactfully and efficiently, to manage the children’s behavior (keep order in the auditorium, make sure they stayed together in the exhibit halls), to speak clearly, simply and informatively. That is, she experienced the process of becoming a museum-based teacher. She moved into that role gradually, in manageable stages, so that she could master one task (e.g. helping kids with the drawing exercise) before taking on a more complex one (e.g. doing the artifacts cart). So the social curriculum was shaped by the structure and content of the tour as an activity. But the specific contours of the situated curriculum was not determined by that structure, but rather by the interaction between that more-or-less persistent format and the emergent qualities of the actual events; Lave (1988) refers to this phenomenon as activity-in-setting. In pragmatic terms, Heather’s work was at the core of what the education department did. Since she was able to hang around in the department office with other, more senior guides, as well as with the department director, she was able to pick up both the lore and the identity of the job. As she became more proficient in the full range of tour skills, she took on the status and prestige of the tour guide, and learned what that meant in the museum. The classification of knowledge in the education department was what Bernstein (1975) would call weak: within the larger role of the tour guide, all sorts of knowledge-use merged and intersected – the historical information, the teaching techniques, the attitudes about history and the state, the social performance of the role. Every tour guide was expected to master the full array of knowledge displayed in that
activity; there was no compartmentalization, no division of labor, no monopoly of knowledge. Similarly, the frame was weak: although the director clearly coordinated the activities and resources of the tour guides, she gave access to knowledge to anyone who wanted it; guides would determine that they needed to explore certain topics, and would go ahead and do it. Finally, given Heather’s status in the education department as a social unit, virtually all of the knowledge and skill constituting the role of the tour guide was highly demanded: she needed a considerable repertoire of technical knowledge (dates, names) and skills (managing kids) to perform the tour guide function at a minimally acceptable level. So her engagement with that knowledge was intense, prolonged and meaningful. Thus, the Heather’s experienced curriculum in the history museum comprised an impressive range of content and process, of technical skills and social interaction skills. But the knowledge was not pre-packaged and set in stone; rather, she was able to develop her understanding and interpretation over time: to try out different concepts and theories related to historical questions (what were the lives of African Americans like in the colony?); to explore different styles of classroom management; to find more elaborate ways of discussing candlestick makers and bedwarmers. She experienced, as well, a growing identification with the role of the tour guide, sensing the status of that person and the importance of that work in the organization (cf. Wenger, 1998). All this learning emerged gradually, and took shape from her experience with the director and other guides, as well as with the material and informational resources in the museum. It was not designed in advance to further Heather’s learning, though; rather, the activity-in-setting was a vehicle by which the education department could provide its core service to teachers and kids. In any case, by the time she left at the end of the school term, Heather had essentially become a full-blown tour guide, steeped in the knowledge embedded in the situated activities of that role. Fred, a high-school senior, worked for a full academic year as an intern in a rural animal clinic. The curriculum of his experience emerged from his encounter with the knowledge-in-use in this small but hierarchical organization. A considerable variety of knowledge constituted this workplace culture as a whole. On a technical level, of course, some members used highly-specialized information about the medical conditions of animals – the biochemical bases of disease, the normal patterns of development in cats, the physiology and anatomy of various kinds of pets, and so on – and about procedures for maintaining animal health and treating disorders. The veterinarians themselves possessed the most sophisticated and complex knowledge and skill sets. Some other members were veterinary technicians, sort of animal nurses, and understood some but not all of that technical repertoire. Still others were office functionaries: they answered the phones, made appointments, handled insurance claims, ordered supplies, and so on. And Fred, the intern, stood clearly at the bottom of this knowledge-use ladder: he fed and walked the animals, replenished materials, cleaned the operating area after surgeries, sat in for the receptionist when she was at lunch – and observed a good deal of what went on in the clinic. But the technical knowledge that he engaged during his work was essentially fragmentary and episodic: he learned about the anatomy of a cat’s tail when the vet was performing an amputation; he learned a little about reproduction by asking questions during spaying
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procedures. He did not engage much of the more sophisticated stock of knowledge carried by others. On the social plane, Fred encountered and used a good deal of knowledge about the general rules for behavior and interaction in the clinic: for getting along with his colleagues, for talking with owners about the condition of their pets, for showing proper deference to the vets. The operations of the animal clinic, that existed within the context of a fairly complex social nexus – and knowledge about how that system worked – was crucial for the intern. For Fred, the pragmatic features of his curriculum reflected his status in the organization. While most of what he did was necessary to the smooth functioning of the clinic, it was almost always marginal to the “real” work: setting up, cleaning up, tending to things at the periphery of the animal care. He was treated respectfully by everyone from the vets down – one reason he liked the internship was that “they treat me like an adult” – but it was clear that his position was rather lowly. On more than one occasion, he asked the technician or veterinarian if he could help out during a surgical procedure, but they demurred and suggested that he just watch and ask questions. One key feature of Fred’s curriculum in the clinic, in other words, was that while there was a great deal of important and complex knowledge being used by some participants, his position in the system gave him little access to engaging most of it. In Bernstein’s (1975) terms, the curriculum of the clinic displayed strong classification: though there were not a lot of members, each had a role fairly rigorously defined in terms of appropriate and necessary knowledge. That is not the same as distinguishing chemistry from physics in the high-school curriculum; in fact, much of the work required what in school would be considered an interdisciplinary perspective. But the classification of knowledge was strong in terms of relation to the structure of social roles in the setting. And, for various reasons, the frame was also strong: the higher-up figures carefully controlled Fred’s encounters with certain types of knowledge. Over the course of an academic year at the animal clinic, Fred encountered and engaged a fair range of knowledge – he could watch, ask questions, help out at the edges – but not much of consequence was demanded of him. Although he worked at the clinic for a total of 350 hours over the course of the year, he could well have learned what he did in less than a tenth of that time. He did develop a feel for what goes on in a rural animal clinic, and he did strengthen his commitment to becoming a vet – but we could not say that he learned much about physiology or anatomy, about disease or about treatment. That is not to say that the experience was educationally useless, simply that Fred’s experienced curriculum did not take him far into that body of knowledge-in-use. Factors shaping the curriculum at work Finally, we suggest that curriculum analysts need to examine the various factors that shape the experience of knowledge-use by learners in a workplace. In our studies of 60 sites, we discovered a number of such factors, falling into three major categories: internal features of the organization; personal features of the participants; and features of the external environment. The actual unfolding process of the experienced curriculum, we believe, is a function of the dialectical interaction among these three sets of factors.
Internal features of the organization The work setting which the intern enters is far from a blank slate. On the contrary, the organization represents a set of patterned activities, structured relations and shared beliefs that persist over time and shape the behavior and thought of its members. These features constitute what Lave (1988) calls the “arena”, a more or less durable socio-political-historical entity. For the purposes of curriculum analysis, the arena can be examined along three dimensions. Organizational structure: roles. The participants in any persistent institution structure their relations in terms of roles and their attendant rights, obligations and perquisites. One thing a role structure does, is allocate knowledge among members; in fact, knowledge-use is one crucial element of the definition of roles. In studying role structures, then, the curriculum analyst should ask such questions as these: . What range of knowledge is each role expected to display? . What degree of flexibility or choice does each have in terms of these displays? . How is competence defined and determined in each role? . How do the knowledge-displays of each role articulate with and depend on those of other roles? Another thing the role structure does is distribute and maintain power and authority among participants. Here the curriculum analyst should ask: . Who controls the allocation of knowledge across the organization? . Who gets to know what, and who does not – and who decides? . What are the consequences of that power distribution for participation, prestige and rewards? In Heather’s case, the role structure of the education department was simple and almost flat: a director selected, trained and coordinated the activities of a corps of tour guides, all of whom had essentially the same functions and the same access to various kinds of knowledge-use. In Fred’s situation, by contrast, roles were distinctly and firmly defined, creating a role-based classification of knowledge. Moreover, passage between the roles was virtually impossible, at least in the short term. Production process. The logic of the process by which the organization generates its goods or services also shapes the learner’s experience of knowledge-in-use, of curriculum. Since learning has to accommodate and emerge from the production process rather than the other way around, the curriculum analysis should ask questions such as these: . How much of the overall process can the focal person participate in, and how much is the labor process rigorously divided? . How is production organized in terms of sequence, timing and pacing, and spatial arrangement? . How do tasks articulate with one another (does starting one depend on the completion of another, for example)? . Are elements of the process performed in different spaces at different times? All these factors point to reasons why a putative learner would encounter and engage some forms of knowledge and not others.
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The logical and technical complexity of the production process also affects workers’ access to knowledge. Certain components of the work cannot be performed by a neophyte; that person must acquire requisite skills beforehand. The social, spatial and temporal organization of those prerequisites also varies across work settings, and thus shapes the experienced curriculum. Finally, elements of the production process have different error costs (Lave, 1988): the price paid by the organization if the worker/learner makes a mistake. That cost may be in money, in time, in energy or in reputation. In any case, a newcomer is not likely to be assigned a task with a high error cost before being adequately prepared. Heather’s curriculum was shaped by the logic of production of the tour in powerful ways. If one thinks of the tour as comprising a series of segments – the auditorium lecture and film, the artifacts cart, the gallery walk, the drawing exercise – then one can identify different points at which it makes sense to introduce the newcomer to a performing role in each slot. That, in fact, is what happened: she started by observing veteran guides doing the tour; then she began to help out in the drawing exercise, working with small groups of kids; then she did the artifacts cart, and gradually took on the entire role. Fred, on the other hand, worked in a shop with highly-fragmented activities and roles, with considerable technical demands for some of the work, and with high error costs. As a result, he generally stayed at the margins of the production system, and thus learned from a distance. Culture and ideology. Each workplace, as a social system, creates, maintains, enforces and transmits beliefs and practices concerning the work process, the organization, its members and its environment (cf. Applebaum, 1984; Martin, 1992). These micro-cultural features of the setting may originate in the broader society or in the particular histories of the organization and its participants. They are embedded in and transmitted through the variety of social interactions in the organization. Members formulate these beliefs explicitly at times, and tacitly enact them at others; some are manifested in rituals, little ceremonies of initiation, advancement, completion or celebration. The culture of a workplace has a developmental, emergent quality of its own, changing as participants and conditions change, but also persisting to some extent. That culture, then, shapes the way a newcomer is initiated into membership and into the knowledge-use system. The education department at the history museum displayed a culture that encouraged Heather’s full participation, recognized and facilitated her learning, and impressed on her the meaning and seriousness of history as a way of thinking and education as a social process. The student came to share in all sorts of ideas about the institution, about the guides, about kids and schools. Similarly, Fred participated in the culture of the animal clinic – but in a more peripheral status. He also learned to care (more) about animals, to respect deep knowledge and skill, and to value the regard of his colleagues. In that sense, the culture of the clinic did help him learn, even though he could not pick up the more complex and technical knowledge. Personal features of the participants The people who take part in the work setting, including the newcomer, display individual characteristics not fully defined or determined by that participation. They enter the scene with dispositions, histories and patterns of activity. The unfolding experience of the intern, then, while strongly constrained and shaped by the internal
features of the organization, must be seen as also emerging from the interaction between those individuals and the environment. Educational history. It goes almost without saying that the knowledge the newcomer brings into the site will to some extent determine the knowledge to which she gains access there. Some of that knowledge may derive from schooling (e.g. reading and computation skills), but much of it may come from experiences in other settings: family, peer groups, other institutions (Scouts, 4-H, religious groups), or previous jobs. These kinds of existing knowledge clearly shape the experience of the situated curriculum by the learner. Heather, for example, knew museums before she chose the internship, by virtue of her family’s frequent visits. Moreover, she had done well in history classes, and rather enjoyed the subject. Similarly, Fred was fond of animals and had pets; but he did not do well in his high-school science classes. It is conceivable that had he demonstrated a higher-level familiarity with biology, for instance, the curriculum of the clinic might have opened up to him more fully. Personality. Students at the SEL often claimed that success in an internship depended primarily on what they called “chemistry”: the interaction of the personalities of the student and her supervisor. I have suggested here that they overstated their case – there are clearly other factors at work, too – but there is considerable truth to it, as well. In a number of our observations, interns handled situations in a way that had to be seen, at least partly, as based in personality. Taking initiative, for example, is partially a function of contextual factors (e.g. power relations, error cost), but also partially a matter of the person’s willingness to take risks in new situations. The relationship a newcomer forms with her supervisor stems in part from her own feelings about authority, her willingness to take orders and accept criticism. These factors clearly shape the learner’s experience of the curriculum in the workplace. External environment of the organization The last major category of factors shaping the intern’s journey of learning comprises the organization’s relationships with other institutions and with the broader society. These factors create economic, political, social and cultural forces within which the work gets done and, therefore, within which knowledge gets defined, distributed and used. Some of these factors – e.g. market pressures and government regulations – are relatively easy to identify and trace; others – e.g. cultural beliefs about education and work – are more elusive. Nonetheless, the curriculum analyst must try to locate their operations in the lived experience of the new worker. Market relations. The placement organization has various relationships with other people and institutions: suppliers, clients or customers, funding sources, competitors. These relations can easily shape the nature and use of knowledge within the organization, as well as the student’s access to it. Economic pressures and competition may, for example, place a premium on efficiency and productivity – thereby limiting the role of the inexperienced and incompetent newcomer. Similarly, technological developments in the organization’s field may change the location and structure of knowledge-use. The state history museum was one of several in its city, but it did not regard itself as in competition with others. Nor was technology changing in the field so rapidly that roles and processes would be affected. In the animal clinic, by contrast, veterinary
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medicine was evolving all the time, and it took all the doctors’ energy to keep up with the field; they could hardly be expected to share much of it with Fred. Broader culture. Perhaps the most intangible set of factors shaping the curriculum of experience stems from the wider culture, from broader patterns of social relations, beliefs and historical forces. What might be called the “dead hand of the past”, as well as the living interactions of participants, operates on the settings and shapes encounters with knowledge. One such factor is social class. As Paul Willis demonstrates brilliantly in Learning to Labour (Willis, 1977), that system operates in minute ways to perpetuate the distribution of jobs and rewards, as well as knowledge. By that standard, it is no accident that Heather came from a highly-educated, upper-middle-class background, while another SEL student, who dropped her placement at the same museum, came from a poor, immigrant family. In some respects, the experienced curriculum at work can be seen as another mechanism of what Passeron and Bourdieu (1990) call “reproduction”: the tendency of social institutions and practices to reproduce the class relations underlying them. The same might be said of gender relations. These factors are inevitably difficult to nail down, but are worth looking at as one tries to understand why a learner experiences the curriculum of a workplace in certain ways.
Concluding remarks This essay lays out a conception of curriculum at work, a conceptual framework for understanding the newcomer’s experience of the knowledge-use system in a workplace. By means of theoretical exposition and empirical description, we have tried to suggest ways to examine the situated, emergent and yet not random process by which a student-intern or, for that matter, a new employee encounters, engages and participates in the use of various kinds of knowledge. The framework complements earlier descriptions of the analysis of the pedagogy of experience (cf. Moore, 1981; Bailey et al., 2004), which focuses on the social means by which newcomers gain that access to learning. Our attention in the curriculum concept is on the sorts of knowledge people come to use, but the difference is only one of perspective, not of phenomenon. Pedagogy and curriculum, that is, are two lenses for examining the same thing: the socially-shaped process of learning. Although curriculum at work is a dynamic, emergent, experiential process, it is not haphazard or random. It is not true, as some experiential educators claim, that anyone can learn anything anywhere. Some knowledge-rich settings are not good learning environments. Rather, the curriculum of experience is planful or systematic in the sense and to the degree that the use of knowledge in the particular setting is orderly and accountable. The more or less durable quality of the environment – the arena – presents structured, patterned opportunities, constraints and demands to its members, and represents the social organization of various cultural and cognitive resources (cf. Vygotsky, 1978). The curriculum analyst who understands the knowledge-use system in a setting can predict, in a probabilistic sense, what learning opportunities may be available to a newcomer in a given role. That understanding creates the possibility of productive interventions – not determine plans, not lessons, but strategies that might increase the likelihood of someone’s learning something.
References Applebaum, H. (1984), Work in Market and Industrial Societies, SUNY Press, Albany, NY. Bailey, T.R., Hughes, K.L. and Moore, D.T. (2004), Working Knowledge: Work-Based Learning and Education Reform, Routledge-Falmer, New York, NY. Beauchamp, G.A. (1975), Curriculum Theory, Kagg, Wilmette, IL. Berger, P. and Luckmann, T. (1966), The Social Construction of Reality, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Bernstein, B. (1975), Class, Codes and Control: Volume 3: Towards a Theory of Educational Transmission, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Blumer, H. (1969), Symbolic Interactionism, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Bremme, D.W. and Erickson, F.D. (1977), “Relationships among verbal and non-verbal classroom behaviors”, Theory into Practice, Vol. 16 No. 3, pp. 153-61. Caswell, H.L. and Campbell, D.S. (1935), Curriculum Development, American Book Company, New York, NY. Gress, J.R. and Purpel, D. (Eds) (1978), Curriculum: An Introduction to the Field, McCutchan, Berkeley, CA. Hazlett, S.J. (1979), “Conceptions of curriculum history”, Curriculum Inquiry, Vol. 9 No. 2, pp. 129-35. Hutchins, E. (1993), “Learning to navigate”, in Chaiklin, S. and Lave, J. (Eds), Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY. Johnson, M.J. (1967), “Definitions and models in curriculum theory”, Educational Theory, Vol. 17 No. 2, pp. 127-40. Kirshner, D. and Whitson, J.A. (1997), Situated Cognition: Social, Semiotic and Psychological Perspectives, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ. Lave, J. (1988), Cognition in Practice, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991), Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY. Lewis, A.J. and Miel, A. (1978), “Key words relating to curriculum and instruction”, in Gress, J.R. and Purpel, D. (Eds), Curriculum: An Introduction to the Field, McCutchan, Berkeley, CA. McDermott, R.P. and Gospodinoff, K. (1978), “Criteria for ethnographically adequate descriptions of concerted activities and their contexts”, Semiotica, Vol. 24 No. 3/4, pp. 245-75. Martin, J. (1992), Cultures in Organizations: Three Perspectives, Oxford University Press, New York, NY. Mead, G.H. (1934), Mind, Self and Society, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Mehan, H. (1978), Learning Lessons, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Moore, D.T. (1981), “Discovering the pedagogy of experience”, Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 51 No. 2, pp. 286-300. Moore, D.T. (1986), “Knowledge at work: an approach to learning by interns”, in Borsman, K. and Reisman, J. (Eds), Becoming a Worker, Ablex Publishing, Norwood, NJ. Moore, D.T. (1999), “Toward a theory of work-based learning”, IEE Briefs, No. 23, pp. 1-6. Oliver, A.I. (1978), “What is the meaning of ‘curriculum’?”, in Gress, J.R. amd Purpel, D. (Eds), Curriculum: An Introduction to the Field, McCutchan, Berkeley, CA. Passeron, J.C. and Bourdieu, P. (1990), Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, Sage, Newbury Park, CA.
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Pinar, W.F. (1975), Curriculum Theorizing: The Reconceptualists, McCutchan, Berkeley, CA. Pinar, W.F. (2004), What Is Curriculum Theory?, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ. Resnick, L. (1987), “Learning in school and out”, Educational Researcher, Vol. 16 No. 9, pp. 13-20. Russell, G. (1992), “Accountability: the hidden curriculum”, CMA, Vol. 66 No. 6, p. 4. Salomon, G. (1993), Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY. Schubert, W. (1982), “The return of curriculum inquiry from schooling to education”, Curriculum Inquiry, Vol. 12 No. 2, pp. 221-32. Sternberg, R.J. and Wagner, R.K. (1986), Practical Intelligence: Nature and Origins of Competence in the Everyday World, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY. Tipper, M.O. (1982), “The creation of curriculum in internship settings”, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia Teachers College, New York, NY. Van Maanen, M. (1978), “Reconceptualist curriculum thought: a review of recent literature”, Curriculum Inquiry, Vol. 8 No. 4, pp. 365-74. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978), Mind in Society, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Watkins, A.P. (2004), “Learning from life’s curriculum: the informal education of black girls”, in Reynolds, W.M. and Webber, J.A. (Eds), Expanding Curriculum Theory: Dis/positions and Lines of Flight, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ. Wenger, E. (1998), Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY. Willis, P. (1977), Learning to Labour, Routledge & Kegan Paul, New York, NY. Wren, D.J. (1999), “School culture: exploring the hidden curriculum”, Adolescence, Vol. 34 No. 135, pp. 593-6.
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The workplace learning cycle A problem-based curriculum model for the preparation of workplace learning professionals
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Bridget N. O’Connor Business Education, Steinhardt School of Education, New York University, New York, New York, USA Keywords Curricula, Training, Higher education, Business studies Abstract Building on the conceptual foundations suggested in the previous two papers in this issue, this article describes the application of a workplace learning cycle theory to the construction of a curriculum for a graduate-level course of study in workplace education. As a way to prepare chief learning officers and heads of corporate universities, the piece argues, one can engage students in the process of analyzing the learning and knowledge-use in a work environment through the lenses of the pedagogical and curricular concepts in these and other writings. Moving beyond the traditional concept of “training” for specified competencies, the graduate program aims to enable students to understand and use the more generative concepts of workplace knowledge-use, and to promote learning as an essential feature of organizational life.
Introduction What does a workplace educator need to know about the workplace as a learning environment? How might higher education address this question? This paper will describe how one large, urban, private university in the USA has developed a master’s program to prepare individuals for positions and careers as workplace educators. Using the framework of the workplace learning cycle, the entire program will be described, and workplace learning concepts, a cornerstone course in the program that has a basis of learning theory and organizational theory, will be discussed. The paper will conclude by suggesting the desirability of preparing workplace educators through a cross-disciplinary graduate education program. The rise of the chief learning officer It has been said that training is like plumbing – you never know you need it until something is not working, and you never have lunch with your plumber (Delaney, 1990). Workplace learning professionals may have image problems, because training is often perceived as a helping/support profession and, therefore, is often seen as an expense rather than as a capital investment. Moreover, as a professional field, it is new – training was not even identified as a specific field until after the Second World War when it was discovered that adults could learn to become productive in a short period of time (Chalofsky, 1996). Because training is such a new field, and because the educational and work background of those in training is extremely diverse, no standard professionalization routes exist. The debate about the desirability for such routes usually centers on whether or not trainers really can be certified or hold professional licensure. Central to this debate are the problems that arise when considering how to do this, including identifying the
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appropriate skill-set to certify, as well as the appropriate accrediting body (Lee, 1998). Moreover, as the primary purpose of professional licensure is to ensure that the public is protected from incompetent practitioners, to enhance the prestige of the profession, and as a means to compare job applicants, questions continue to arise as how licensure could possibly encompass a field as diverse and complex as training (Gilley, 1996). No one outside of the training field today really knows the multiple levels and complexity of skills that a training professional uses and the myriad of roles he/she may play within a career. However, attempts have been made to document these work roles and their complexity. In an often-cited research report published by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), the competencies and roles of human resource development (HRD) specialists in the federal government were identified (McLagan and Suhadolnik, 1989). One outcome of this report was a comprehensive listing of the roles and competencies needed by training practitioners (McLagan, 1989). The roles were researcher, marketer, organizational change agent, needs analyst, program designer, career advisor, HRD materials developer, instructor/facilitator, individual career development advisor, administrator, evaluator, and HRD manager. The 35 common competencies ranged from adult learning understanding to business skills, to coaching skills, to visioning skills (McLagan, 1989). Today, this skill-set is expanding even further. Higher education and business realize the value of developing the leadership needed to help plan and deliver workplace learning through secondary- and post-secondary-level work-based learning initiatives, including career education, internships, apprenticeships, and cooperative education programs. Workplace educators must know why, when, and how best to partner with colleges and universities as well as how they and their organizations can contribute to society via the development of work-based learning opportunities for K-12 education: And, during the last decade, many education reformers have argued that learning in the workplace should be a much more significant part of the country’s basic education system (Bailey et al., 2004, p. 3).
At the same time, businesses developing a corporate university model to deliver training are adapting higher education models to the way they operate. These trends result in new opportunities for higher education, including expanded roles for their schools of education, business, and continuing education. Additionally, as organizations rightsize, merge, and globalize, individual learners are taking more responsibility for their own learning needs. Bridges (1994) said that jobs as we know them are disappearing. Citing job security as a “fragile hope that too often becomes a fragile promise”, Johansen and Swigart (1994) suggested that workers best take care of themselves. Workers are concerned about their personal and career growth, and, increasingly, a corporate strategic recruiting and retention strategy includes learning opportunities within and/or supported by the corporation, putting workplace educators in yet another vital business role. The leadership position which encompasses these tasks is sometimes referred to as the chief learning officer (CLO) or president of the firm’s corporate university. This position is equivalent to the highest executive in finance or marketing (Kimmerling, 1993). For the new digital enterprise, knowledge is the principle basis for competitive advantage (Tapscott, 1998), and “the ability to embody and embed knowledge and
learning must be at the heart of organizational strategy” (Tapscott, 1998, p. 105). These workplace learning specialists are education-wise and business-savvy. Like their counterparts in finance and marketing, they put business results and customers first. As CLOs, training professionals would, like their counterparts in finance and marketing, put business results and customers first (O’Connor et al., 2002). In a qualitative study of best practices, CLOs did not have formal job descriptions, reporting instead that their jobs had evolved and no two work days were ever alike (Bonner and Wagner, 2002). Core competencies reported were business literacy, strategic thinking, having a vision, advocacy for learning as a business imperative, cross-functional work skills, an understanding of technology, and communications skills. Thus, the practice of workplace education includes, but has come a long way from developing and providing short-term training programs as workplace educators are increasingly playing the role of corporate partner, of a change agent who leads workplace learning efforts that are to benefit the organization, the individual, and society at large. Such education professionals are important because competitive organizations initiate new strategies or reorganize frequently. Pushing for change are critical issues, including mergers and acquisitions, global competition, new communications technologies, the changing demographics of the workplace, and shifting value systems. Peter Senge says that in the long run, the only sustainable source of competitive advantage is an organization’s ability to learn faster than its competition (Senge, 1994). This suggests that the practice of corporate education calls for a reconceptualized way to prepare individuals for these important roles. Starting-points for curriculum development A number of models depict the curriculum development process. These include learner-centered designs, subject-centered designs, and problem-centered designs (Ornstein and Hunkins, 1998). Learner-centered designs are humanistic designs, typically aimed at developing programs of learning for children. Subject-centered or content-based designs are organized around distinct disciplines. Problem-centered designs are more constructivist in nature and are geared to supporting learning around issues or problems. Academic programs related to corporate education which are based on a subject-centered design model, tend to focus on a given component of corporate education. Examples are adult education, instructional design, and human resource management. A subject-centered approach to curriculum has been critiqued as: Linear and fail(ing) to deal with the complexity and constraints of the human condition . . . [T]hose teaching in these areas (Vitale, 1986) [tend to be] trained in [business] disciplines that take linear, compartmentalized and piecemeal approaches to the complex problems of management (Gates and Cookley, 1998).
In an attempt to make corporate education a business discipline, the National Association for Business Teacher Education (NABTE) commissioned a task force to develop a model curriculum for a master’s degree in training and development. The task force shaped the skills identified by McLagan into a comprehensive model curriculum, consisting of technical competencies, business competencies, interpersonal competencies, and intellectual competencies. However, the resultant undergraduate
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level curriculum did not see the light of day as reviewers saw it, lacking the flexibility needed for adult learners and without a firm grasp of the learning content and context. The workplace learning cycle: a problem-centered approach The workplace learning cycle views the preparation of workplace learning specialists as a means to address individual learning needs as a problem-solving/learning process. Based on Kurt Lewin’s action research model – a problem-solving model – the key stages of assessment, design, implementation, and evaluation are cyclical, in that one stage follows another, the stages are continually evaluated with feedback from each stage, and then one cycle informs the next. The problem-solving cycle supports the notion that a workplace educator is actually a researcher and change agent, involved in an organization’s continuous learning, not one-shot program development. An additional premise of action research is that those who are affected by any problem are involved in its solution – in this case, course selection. Because adult learners come with diverse educational and experiential backgrounds, a problem-centered design could be an appropriate way to conceptualize a model degree program. An advanced degree could be the answer, as it could be flexible, innovative, and student-centered. No two students come into an advanced degree program with identical educational backgrounds or have the exact same life and work experiences. A dynamic master’s program could allow specialization, be learner-focused, and yet include the breadth of the field. Thus, an advanced degree, a master’s degree, is suggested as an appropriate credential to bring together the myriad of skills that put a workplace educator on the road to becoming the CLO or president of a corporate university. It could offer the professionalization that comes from theory and research: the why instead of just the how to (Chalofsky, 1996). An advanced degree can be interdisciplinary yet focused on developing an expertise in specific training competencies, including the educational and management foundations on which they rest. Following is a discussion of the workplace learning cycle, around which a master’s degree could be built; it will be followed by an example of how it has been operationalized within a particular school of education. Using the workplace learning cycle, a curriculum planner can help ensure that learning opportunities encompass the multiple and complex roles training professionals play – or could play – at all stages of the cycle. Figure 1 shows the cycle within a context and including content. Context can be defined as industry; content, as subject matter expertise. Sometimes the two are tightly woven, as in the banking industry and finance. Sometimes context and content are complementary, as when a training professional in the banking industry specializes in end-user information systems. The cycle assumes that both context and content are important, and that a student and his or her advisor would select those learning experiences which would result in competencies in those areas that are lacking or need development. Workplace learning professionals should have both context and content if they are to be regarded as learning professionals and business partners in their organizations, rather than viewed as supporters or helpers. Figure 1 also shows a sampling of academic foundations related to assessment, design, implementation, and evaluation. These foundations are at the heart of the training profession and the offering program could organize those competencies in which it sees itself being “expert” into required courses and make available as electives
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Figure 1. Broad view of the workplace learning cycle
those that are outside its academic realm. Few academic programs have faculty expert in all stages of the workplace learning cycle; it is assumed that learners would benefit from having the ability and flexibility to make informed choices about learning opportunities from other areas. An advanced degree for workplace learning professionals It is proposed that a master’s degree could be an appropriate route for the professionalization of the education/learning professional who is an educator first and foremost, but who also has the skill set to take the lead in the overall management of an organization’s training function. At the top of the career path would be the goal of becoming an organization’s CLO or president of its corporate university. Such a degree would focus on the development of research skills and adult learning, with a heavy dose of organizational theory. The entire practice of workplace learning may be seen as action research, whereby assessment and evaluation strategies are as critical as the actual design and implementation of learning experiences. It is important to do the right things right, but more important to have an overall strategy for developing human capital. This is accomplished only by ongoing evaluation, and learning from successes as well as mistakes. Figure 2 shows how a master’s degree program within a school of education has been framed around the workplace learning cycle (www.nyu.edu/education/ alt/be_wel.html). Titles are offered for those core courses that are geared specifically to the corporate education specialization. Foundational and content/context elective areas are broad categories that allow a student and his or her advisor to choose areas that support individual learning and career goals.
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Figure 2. Applied view of the workplace learning cycle
An interdisciplinary course The heart of this sample program is the course entitled here Workplace Learning Concepts. Unlike other core courses, its emphasis is on understanding the workplace itself as a unique learning environment – on grappling with issues and ideas such as those raised in the previous two articles in this special section (Billett, Moore). Student outcomes include the development of problem-based workplace scenarios with analysis of how theory can be used to understand and address the problems exposed, and a review of the literature around a practice of informal or tacit learning. Informal or tacit learning includes mentoring programs, coaching, internships, networking, and communities of practice. Most adults learn to do their jobs in doing. The adult learning component of the course emphasizes the role of life experiences in learning (Dewey, 1938), as well as learning styles and transformative learning (Mezirow et al., 1990). We also discuss the more recent work of Stephen Billett and Etienne Wenger and the concept of knowledge management (KM). Billett (2002) suggested that describing workplaces as informal is inappropriate, an argument building on his earlier proposition that participation in everyday work activities contributes to learning and that some everyday work activities can be guided learning – an arena that takes the workplace educator out of the classroom and into the workplace and is particularly useful in solving novel workplace tasks (Billett, 2000). Wenger (2003) posited that learning is embedded in practice, and is not just a matter of personal ability, but a process of positioning yourself in a community. Such perspectives transform the workplace into a learning environment. Considering workplace learning as KM – whether it takes place on the job, in vocational and/or pre-professional education – takes us on yet another turn in
determining how to ensure that new knowledge is generated, captured, and disseminated. KM mandates an understanding of how technology can support learning while doing – which includes the application of technologies to support individual learning as well as communication and discourse or collaborative learning. The organizational theory component of the course is based on Weisbord’s (1988) retrospect on the role of the “expert” – from scientific management, where experts solve all problems, through systems thinking to socio-technical design, to group problem solving to business process reengineering, to the learning organization, a management philosophy where everyone’s ideas count. All this is about where the expertise to do business exists. Productive workplaces are all about creating an environment that supports learning. Learning theories and organizational theories help us understand that workplace learning is multi-dimensional. A focus on learning – not instruction – helps us think about how to support learning when there are no answers or expertise (e.g. Y2K). How do managers motivate their workers to be proactive, to learn with each other as well as from each other? How can the workplace itself be exploited as a learning laboratory? What happens to perceived responsibilities of “the expert” when people solve problems together, and when individual competencies clash (Wenger, 2003)? What happens when “what we know” does not work, such as the desirability of involvement in decision making when the individual worker’s self-efficacy or time constraints or simply interest in the issue can negate the value of participation? A student once asked if workplace learning concepts was a course in management or a course in adult learning. Then, she answered the question herself – that it was both. However, at her organization, the learning division was separate from the management division and the management side did not know they were in the business of supporting workplace learning. And, the learning side, she reported, did not know until that minute that they were all about management!
Concluding comments What schools of education do best is create forums for exploring how individuals learn and experiment with ways to develop and structure learning opportunities. Graduate-level education can be a forum for the discussion of the appropriate role of the workplace educator in supporting work-based education as well as workplace learning. Teacher educators realize the benefit of developing the corporate partners but are unsure as to how to do so. Corporations, likewise, often want to participate in workplace learning initiatives, yet often have little success in creating quality programs (Bailey et al., 2004). The workplace educator must understand how adults learn, how to create learning initiatives and assess why, when, and how best to partner with school systems and higher education. These important questions, as well as the skill set for designing effective learning solutions that are both classroom-based and embedded in work, can be examined in a more formal way through this problem-based, flexible curriculum model. The premise at the core of the curriculum is the notion that the work environment or climate is largely established by managers. It is a diverse skill set that the workplace learning professional needs to be able to help create productive, learning workplaces. Moreover, not every individual needs the exact same advanced training. Primary is a need to
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learn how to set the stage for employees’ motivation to learn as well as the development of scaffolding for formal and informal learning to take place. For those of us who are teaching and advising in such academic programs, we need to continually help our students determine what their learning needs are, and at the same time prepare them in professional content and guide them toward lifelong education and learning opportunities. The premise here is that those practices engage the learner in problems and practice and, as Peter Jarvis says: Make learning more significant than teaching – and writing, design, and formatting skills as important as lecturing techniques (Jarvis, 2001, p. 27).
Adding that the situation in which learning happens is important is nothing new, but it is worthy of more discussion and inquiry to note that management practices and the workplace itself add many mitigating variables to the understanding of the workplace as a learning environment that includes, but is not limited to, classroom-based learning opportunities. Use of the workplace learning cycle can result in a flexible master’s program that practices what it preaches: the individuality and participation of each learner, his or her educational, work, and life experiences, and an understanding of not only content but the context in which learning occurs.
References Bailey, T.R., Hughes, K.L. and Moore, D.T. (2004), Working Knowledge: Work-based Learning and Educational Reform, Routledge-Falmer, New York, NY. Billett, S. (2000), “Guided learning at work”, Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 12 No. 7, p. 272. Billett, S. (2002), “Critiquing workplace learning discourses: participation and continuity at work”, Studies in the Education of Adults, Vol. 34 No. 1, pp. 56-67. Bonner, D. and Wagner, S. (2002), “Meet the new chief learning officers”, Training and Development, Vol. 56 No. 5. Bridges, W. (1994), Job Shift, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA. Chalofsky, N. (1996), “Professionalism comes from theory and research: the why instead of the how to”, New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, Vol. 72, pp. 51-6. Delaney, C. (1990), oral presentation at New York University, New York, NY. Dewey, J. (1938), Experience and Education, Macmillan, New York, NY. Gates, G.R. and Cookley, R.W. (1998), “Learning to manage and managing to learn”, Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 10 No. 1, pp. 5-12. Gilley, J.W. (1996), “Human resource development practitioners should resist professional licensing”, New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, Vol. 72, pp. 67-74. Jarvis, P. (2001), Universities and Corporate Universities, Kogan Page Limited, London. Johansen, R. and Swigart, R. (1994), Upsizing the Individual in the Downsized Organization, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA. Kimmerling, G.F. (1993), “A place at the top for trainers”, Training and Development, Vol. 47 No. 3, p. 44. Lee, C. (1998), “Certified to train”, Training, Vol. 35 No. 9, pp. 32-8. McLagan, P. (1989), Models for HRD Practice: The Models, American Society for Training and Development, Alexandria, VA.
McLagan, P. and Suhadolnik, D. (1989), Models for HRD Practice: The Research Report, American Society for Training and Development, Alexandria, VA. Mezirow, J. et al. (1990), Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood: A Guide to Transformative and Emancipatory Learning, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. O’Connor, B.N., Bronner, M. and Delaney, C. (2002), Training for Organizations, 2nd ed., South-Western Educational Publishing Company, Cincinnati, OH. Ornstein, A.C. and Hunkins, F.P. (1998), Curriculum Foundations, Principles, and Issues, 3rd ed., Allyn & Bacon, Needham Heights, MA. Senge, P. (1994), The Fifth Discipline, Doubleday, New York, NY. Tapscott, D. (1998), Blueprint to the Digital Economy, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY. Vitale, M.R. (1986), “Strategic systems are no fad, and MIS must lead the way”, Information Week, Vol. 72. Weisbord, G. (1988), Productive Workplaces: Organizing and Managing for Dignity, Meaning, and Community, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA. Wenger, E. (2003), oral presentation at Practice-Oriented Education Conference, Boston, MA.
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OTHER ARTICLE
Communities of domination? Reconceptualising organisational learning and power Tony Huzzard Department of Business Administration, Lund University, Lund, Sweden Keywords Workplace training, Management power, Change management Abstract In identifying a bias within situated learning theory towards routine work practices, this paper develops a theoretical framework for assessing the relationships between learning, sensemaking and power in the non-routine practices of temporary organising. The paper locates processes of sensemaking and learning in a model of organisational change that attempts to render power in communities of practice more visible than has been the case in theorising hitherto, by focusing on sensegiving in change projects. Change is conceived in terms of an oscillation between the routines of permanent organising and the more experimental, innovative actions of temporary organising, where leaders mobilise actors to explore new ideas. The role of sensegiving in such processes, it is argued, helps shed light on the political nature of micro-processes of change.
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Introduction: learning and power in organisations Despite a plethora of conceptual work over the years on organisational learning, the links between learning and power/politics have aroused only relatively recent interest (Coopey, 1995; Blackler and MacDonald, 2000; Easterby-Smith et al., 2000; Vince, 2001; Contu and Willmott, 2003). Many authors are critical of the learning perspective in organisational studies, in that it allegedly conceals aspects of power and politics in organisations and fails to ask the question of whose interests are being served (Svensson, 1997; Easterby-Smith et al., 1998; Huzzard, 2000a). We can make a similar critique of sensemaking (Weick, 1995). Yet while the inherently unartistic prescriptive notion of the “learning organisation” is indeed vulnerable to the charge of disregarding micro-political factors, descriptive accounts of organisational learning need not necessarily be so, as demonstrated, for example, by the work of Duncan and Weiss ¨ stergren (1995). (1979) and Mu¨llern and O Nevertheless, the reconciliation of sensemaking and learning with power remains an underdeveloped area of organisation theory. Accordingly, this paper attempts to take up the challenge of Contu and Willmott (2003) and addresses the apparent disappearance of power in “mainstream” accounts of sensemaking and learning. The paper locates processes of sensemaking and learning in a model of organisational change that attempts to render power in communities of practice more visible than has been the case in organisational theorising hitherto. A central proposition advanced in the paper is that there is nothing inherent in Weick’s theory of sensemaking in organisations that makes it incompatible with a political process perspective. I argue, on the other hand, that sensemaking can be seen as a political process by focusing primarily on sense-giving rather than sensemaking or learning (Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991).
The clearest attempts in research to date to reconcile learning and power have been work associated with situated learning theory (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Contu and Willmott, 2003). Yet, it is argued here, that such efforts have had a narrow focus in that the notion of “communities of practice” in such work is restricted to expert-novice learning. Such a move limits us to expert-based power in routine labour processes to the apparent exclusion of other sources of power (French and Raven, 1959). Moreover, it also ignores other types of organisational practices, such as change projects that may not at all involve any task expertise with the possible exception of project management. The overwhelming bias in work to date on learning and power thus leans towards learning from exploitation rather than learning from exploration (March, 1991). Although we are informed that a balance between both exploitation and exploration is desirable for organisations (Ellstro¨m, 2001), it is arguable that the double-loop learning of exploration is at the heart of the discourse that seeks to normalise learning as a key organisational practice (Gherardi, 1999). The point of departure for this paper, however, is that the work on situated learning theory to date has yet to reconcile learning and power in such practices. Accordingly, the paper develops a conceptualisation of sensemaking, sensegiving and learning in a model of organisational change that focuses on learning through exploration in projects rather than learning through exploitation in routine activities. Such change is conceived in terms of an oscillation between the routines of permanent organising and the more experimental, innovative actions of temporary organising, where leaders mobilise actors to explore new ideas. The processes of learning and sensemaking are at the heart of such oscillation. The role of sensegiving in such processes, it will be argued, helps shed light on the political nature of micro-processes of change. Once more on situated learning theory Exposition Lave and Wenger’s situated learning theory was not the first recognition that learning was contextually dependent, social and embedded in particular practices. Nevertheless, it is generally acknowledged that their work on “communities of practice” was instrumental in generating a growing research interest in such an approach to learning at the workplace (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Brown and Duguid, 1991; Wenger, 1998). In their view, learning is an integral aspect of social practice, whereby: . . . the mastery of knowledge and skill requires newcomers to move toward full participation in the sociocultural practices of a community (Lave and Wenger, 1991, p. 29).
Learning is a social process that “. . . includes, indeed it subsumes, the learning of knowledgeable skills” (op cit). The authors go on to explain that: Knowledge of the socially constituted world is socially mediated and open ended . . . cognition and communication in, and with, the social world, are situated in the historical development of ongoing activity (Lave and Wenger, p. 51).
Situated learning theory departs from what might reasonably be termed “mainstream” accounts of learning (Gherardi et al., 1998), in that a contrary view is taken on the ontological status of knowledge. In mainstream accounts, knowledge is seen as something that is objective, uncontested and unproblematically diffused to learners.
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For Lave and Wenger, however, knowledge is socially constructed: when actors draw on new “knowledge” they attribute new meaning to it, contextualise it locally and translate it into practice through everyday interaction. New understandings are then generated retrospectively through collective reflection. Accordingly, learning has a relational character whereby the negotiation of meaning is pivotal. Although such learning can be triggered by information obtained from external sources, it is nevertheless more appropriately defined in terms of the (social) negotiation of meaning during its contextualisation rather than the receipt and storage of “facts”; for example, the content of training manuals. The radical departure of Lave and Wenger illustrated that learning in organisations is characterised by the two epistemologies of positivism and anti-positivism (interpretivism) that underpin organisation theory generally (Burrell and Morgan, 1979). Ford and Ogilvie (1996, p. 57) categorise the two approaches as the systems-structural view and the interpretive view. This distinction offers conflicting accounts of the links between learning and action. Traditional approaches see knowledge as objective and learnable through data collection routines, whereas situated learning sees knowledge as ambiguous and thereby subject to interpretation and trial-and-error application. The former view sees learning as uncertainty reduction whereby understanding leads to action, whereas the latter view sees learning as meaning creation whereby action leads to understanding (Addleson, 1996; Ford and Ogilvie, 1996; Spender, 1996). The central concept in situated learning theory is that of “legitimate peripheral participation”. By this the authors argue that novices, for example apprentices, participate in a community of practice when immersing themselves in a learning process. As they advance up their learning curve they acquire increasing degrees of belongingness and acceptance within the community over time. Short of full participation, a novice is not fully accepted within the community (is short of legitimacy), and lacks belonging (remains peripheral). Crucially, therefore, what the concept of legitimate peripheral participation brings to our theorising about learning processes is a recognition that learning is embedded in power relations and processes of identity formation, an insight markedly absent in mainstream accounts (Contu and Willmott, 2003). It has to be said, however, that this insight remains somewhat implicit as Lave and Wenger themselves admit to the “. . . problems of power and control on which these studies are on the whole silent” (Lave and Wenger, 1991, p. 86). Critique It should be acknowledged, however, that Lave and Wenger’s initial work was not integrated or even linked with the emergent literature on organisational learning, still less that on the learning organisation. Moreover, when attempts were subsequently made to do this by other authors, the power dimension was arguably lost in a process whereby the communities of practice became “popularised” to appeal to a management audience (Brown and Duguid, 1991). Such disappearance was a main motivation behind the work of Contu and Willmott (2003), who sought, from a post-structuralist perspective, to pay more sustained attention to how learning practices are embedded in relations of power. For them, power is articulated through social practices that produce the “truths” that make up our self-concepts and the institutions in which our selves are embedded. Power is not exercised by sovereign individuals, but is located in social
practices and the relationships on which such practices are built. Power relations accordingly operate to either facilitate or impede learning processes. Moreover, although Lave and Wenger, as has already been stated, mention the issues of power and control, their failure to treat these issues in any systematic fashion gives the impression that situated learning can be seen as a medium, and even as a technology, of consensus and stability (Contu and Willmott, 2003). As in Lave and Wenger’s original work, Contu and Willmott see organisational practices in terms of routine labour processes, such as the work of photocopier technicians explored in the work of Orr (1996). The main argument of the current paper, however, is that additional work is required to account for how power is connected to learning in non-routine activities. Work on situated learning to date has been characterised by a narrowness of focus, in that it assumes that in communities of practice both the “practice” and the “community” are ongoing. As pointed out elsewhere, however, there are other modes of organising, in particular labour processes that are non-routine, because either new tasks or new relations are envisaged, or both (Blackler and MacDonald, 2000). In such situations the generic subjectivities associated with routine work are broken down leading to ensuing moments of equivocality (Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991; Weick, 1995). Here, learning does not involve mastery over a particular task, rather, it involves challenging it and replacing it with something new. What is entailed is a switch in focus from learning through exploitation to learning through exploration (March, 1991). This suggests that situated learning theory requires augmentation through linkage to concepts of sensemaking and sensegiving as precursors to learning in non-routine situations such as projects (Ekstedt et al., 1999). The different modes of organising envisaged here are well illustrated in a matrix devised by Blackler and MacDonald (2000) to depict how organisational learning varies according to different organisational priorities. In categorising organisational practices as comprising either established activities or emergent activities and being undertaken either through established relations within (or between) groups or emergent relations within (or between) groups, Blackler and Macdonald arrive at the matrix in Figure 1. Of the four modes of organising depicted here, however, current versions of situated learning theory can only be said to occupy quadrant (i). Even at the initial stage of an apprenticeship the “community” is in practice that of established relations save those involving the new entrant. Given this shortcoming, the rest of the paper aims to address the task of extending situated learning theory to develop a framework for encompassing the linkages between learning and power in quadrants (ii), (iii) and (iv)[1]. As stated elsewhere in the literature, projects or temporary organisations are key arenas for learning (Ekstedt et al., 1999): it will be argued here that integrating situated learning theory and Weick’s conceptual framework of sensemaking can be a plausible means of pursuing such a task. Conceptualising power As Czarniawska-Joerges (1993, p. 45) reminds us, the study of power has preoccupied scholars across the disciplines for “over two millennia”. In general terms, power, loosely, can be understood as the capacity of individuals to exert their will over others (Buchanan and Badham, 1999). However, in organisational settings, power is far from straightforward; as with learning in organisations (Huzzard, 2000b, chapter 3), there is no consensus on conceptualisation (Clegg, 1989; Fulop and Linstead, 1999).
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Figure 1. Organisational priorities and the dynamics of organisational learning
Disagreements have surfaced on whether power is located in overt conflict (Dahl, 1957) or whether it can also be located in more hidden contexts where those deemed to be exercising power can manipulate agendas and encompass instances of “non-decision making” (Bacharach and Baratz, 1962). A third approach, originally attributed to Lukes’ “radical” view on power (Lukes, 1974), sees organisations as arenas of domination whereby the powerful are in control of socialisation processes and political agendas. Those in dominant positions wield power through shaping common ideologies, common definitions of issues and common beliefs. In each of these three views there is an implicit recognition that actors have real, material interests. However, in the radical view of Lukes, actors are not always aware of what their real interests are. Power, accordingly, can be exercised subconsciously – disconnected from any notion of intent. The radical view is, however, contested in a further approach, that associated with post-structuralism and the work of Foucault (1982). This view questions the tendency in the other approaches to power identified here to assume that individuals or groups are sovereign agents or possessors of power. Such sovereignty and agency are, rather, the product of regimes of “power/knowledge” (Contu and Willmott, 2003). Such regimes find their expression in discourses, and power is located in relationships. In this relational view, power is involved in everything we do and necessarily implies resistance. It is a capillary force and not the property of dominant groups (Fulop and Linstead, 1999). As with the radical view, there is an emphasis on social construction and non-intentionality; on the other hand, post-structuralists question not only whether it is possible to identify what “real” interests are, but also argue for the impossibility of our knowing the material world outside of our preferred discursive constructions. For some (e.g. Contu and Willmott, 2003), there is an implicit choice between accepting either the “radical” or the “relational” view of power as these have distinct
origins from the two opposing paradigms of critical realism and post-structuralism, respectively. It will be argued here, however, that this need not be so – essentially because a notion of power that is relational and unconnected with intentional forms of agency but finds its expression in the discourse through which parties to a relationship interact, need not be incompatible with a realist ontology. We do not need to buy into the metatheoretical assumptions of post-structuralism to adopt a relational view. Indeed, we do not need to subscribe to post-structuralism to draw usefully on the concept of discourse in the more general sense (see, for example, Watson, 1995; Reed, 2000; or, of course, Fairclough, 2001, on this point). The view taken here is that a material world exists, outside and independent of discourse, about which we can make plausible truth claims. On the other hand, there is also a socially-constructed world ontologically distinct from the real world. Such a view accepts that power may exist in either covert or overt forms; it may or may not involve agential intent that is associated with the perceived real interests of dominant groups. In unequal power relations, the dominant party may actively choose to communicate or construct reality by selecting certain linguistic formations, or may simply communicate in the taken-for-granted formations which seem appropriate in context. These alternatives envisage rather different notions of discourse: in the former, agency is attributed to the dominant party, whereas in the latter a sort of quasi-agency is attributed to discourse itself. But the effects of these alternatives, in terms of reinforcing the asymmetry of the relationship, are the same. Power is relational, but power resources are real and can be possessed to varying degrees by both the dominant and subordinate parties in the relationship. The framework developed here retains, therefore, the dualism between structure and agency. Such a view is alluded to in the words of Weick himself: Sense may be in the eye of the beholder, but beholders vote and the majority rules (Weick, 1995, p. 6).
However, given the emphasis on change processes at work rather than continuity, the framework developed in the next section of the paper necessarily foregrounds agency as being central in the contexts of learning that the paper specifically aims to address. The framework sees the concept of discourse as being particularly useful in analysing power in the specific context of sensemaking and sensegiving that are the foundation blocks of collective learning from a constructivist view. Learning, sensemaking and power in organisational change processes: a model Both the infusion of new management ideas and organisational innovation, more generally, can be understood as actions deemed necessary as a result of sensemaking. For social constructivists, the new shared understandings that arise from reflection on innovative actions are often considered as a process of experiential learning. Such learning is thus closely related to sensemaking in organisations (Daft and Weick, 1984; Ford and Ogilvie, 1996). Sensemaking involves the construction of texts in the heads of leaders in the emergent communities of practice when equivocality arises. This is the consequence of a disruption in the predictability and taken-for-grantednesses of routines, a process coined in the literature as sensebreaking (Pratt, 2000). When the sense associated with a routine is broken, a new situation arises when there are “too
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many meanings” for the actor rather than “too few” (Weick, 1995). This is a problem of equivocality rather than uncertainty. In order to cope in such situations, people require values, priorities and clarity about preferences rather than more information: Clarity on values clarifies what is important in elapsed experience, which finally gives some sense of what that elapsed experience means (Weik, 1995, p. 28).
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Sensemakers, having constructed texts in order to reduce equivocality, subsequently subject them to interpretation; that is, the texts are then read, and such interpretations or readings prompt and give direction to non-routine action (Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991; Ford and Ogilvie, 1996). In such a view, meaning is being created and directed; that is, it is being managed (Nonaka, 1994). In other words, sensemaking is undertaken by leaders, in the first instance, being guided by their creation of meaning and definition of the situation (Smircich and Morgan, 1982). “Sense” is then disseminated to other actors to define and shape subsequent (non-routine) action. This is sensegiving – but a slightly different definition of sensegiving is being used here to that originally introduced by Gioia and Chittipeddi (1991). Their concept was psychological, in that sensemaking and sensegiving were seen in tandem as processes of thought (sensemaking) and action (sensegiving) that were ongoing, reflexive and at the level of the individual. The current paper uses a more sociological or relational view whereby sensemaking is an act of thinking by (project) managers (the dominant) and sensegiving is the acts they undertake to mobilise other (subordinate) actors and thereby establish collective activity in the emergent community of practice. The concept of sensegiving opens up the possibilities of making more transparent the role of power and politics. It does this by focusing on how leaders/managers in emergent communities of practice define their situation and construct discourses such that alternative interpretations are closed off from subordinates. Organisational sensemaking is collective; that is, it is related to generic subjectivity and interlocking routines, but practised by leaders and occurs in their heads. They then give sense to others through interaction, and followers/subordinates are thus sensetakers (c.f. Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991). Accordingly, sensegiving is inextricably bound up with issues of power and politics. Sensegiving occurs through discourse – and this confers power in three ways: (1) Through normalising. (2) Through constraining the way it takes place and where it originates. (3) Limiting access to the discourse itself (Fairclough, 2001). In such situations, discourse has a normalising function and acts as a means for closing down alternative interpretations. On the other hand, we might also ask when does such sensegiving fail, and why do certain attempts at developing new vocabularies fall on deaf ears? The answers to such questions clearly enable us to investigate instances of resistance in temporary organisations to the dominant forms of sensemaking. Further techniques through which dominant parties conduct sensegiving are metaphors (Hill and Levenhagen, 1995) and story-telling (Dunford and Jones, 2000). Sensegiving occurs at three distinct sites. First, it occurs when leaders attempt to engage support and allies when embarking on new, innovative actions within an emergent community of practice at the site of the temporary organisation – this occurs at the time of project initiation. Second, it occurs when evaluating outcomes and
embarking on new rounds of experimentation – this activity of reflection is ongoing during the course of the project. Third, it occurs when leaders engage support and allies in their attempts to translate learning outcomes to the permanent organisation with a view to changing routines, structures and augmenting organisational memory – this occurs at the time of project closure. At each of the three sites of sensegiving, the mobilising activities of leaders are aimed at generating collective action – the initiation of the project, the authorship of an agreed text on the project outcome, and incorporation of new knowledge from the project into the routines of the permanent organisation. Sensegiving can thus be seen as the mobilisation of requisite variety: a movement from diversity to equifinality at a particular moment in the project. Overall, the concepts of sensemaking and sensegiving can be located in a cyclical model of experiential learning, whereby change processes are conceived in terms of an oscillation between the routines of permanent organising and the more experimental, innovative actions of temporary organising where leaders mobilise actors to explore new ideas[2]. Learning is defined here as the process of collective sensemaking that generates adjustments to routines. Initially, the learning cycle is triggered by a cue received by the permanent organisation that “breaks sense” and generates sensemaking, leading to the establishment of a new activity – typically a project. This may be conducted either by an established or a newly-formed project team. Experimental action, takes place, is reflected on and new rounds of sensemaking occur in relation to the progress and outcomes of the temporary activities. A “preferred reading” of the project is then fed back into its ongoing activities, or, at the time of project closure, is fed onwards into the permanent organisation. These processes of filtering preferred readings are sensegiving activities, mediated by power relations, and articulated by those in dominant positions through discourse. The framework is depicted diagrammatically in Figure 2. Concluding reflections Ideas on sensemaking in organisations have generally been discussed in isolation from micro-political processes: in Karl Weick’s widely referenced text Sensemaking in Organizations (Weick, 1995) power and politics are barely mentioned. The choice of Weickian concepts to extend our knowledge about situated learning theory in general and the relationship between learning and power in particular is thus perhaps surprising – but there is nothing inherent in his framework that necessarily conceals power at the micro-level. The central argument in this paper, however, is that power is made more visible by switching our focus from sensemaking to a relational conception of sensegiving. What, then, can we conclude from this brief theoretical discussion on the relationship between learning and power? Three basic propositions for empirical investigation seem reasonable. As illustrated here and in previous work on situated learning theory, learning is an outcome of power. But this requires to be made more specific: do unequal relationships of power enhance learning or is learning enhanced when such inequalities are broken down and more equal relations prevail in a community of learners? One view might plausibly be that of proposition 1: Proposition 1. A degree of domination is required in projects to shape and direct learning processes in line with the project remit and its financial and time constraints.
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Figure 2. Sensemaking, learning and organisational change – a model
Alternatively, it can plausibly be argued that the latter view is a more accurate depiction of how learning and power are related. This would appear to have some support in the literature (Dixon, 1997) and has been a fundamental belief at the core of action research efforts aimed at generating learning in development projects through democratic dialogue (Gustavsen, 1992). Accordingly, we can formulate our second proposition thus: Proposition 2. Learning is enhanced when hierarchies are broken down and power relations are (temporarily) set aside. A fully-nuanced theory of the causal relations between power and learning, moreover, would require both these propositions to be investigated at all three sites of sensegiving. There is, furthermore, a third possibility that might be perfectly compatible with either of these propositions – that power, or rather newly-configured power relations, might be the outcome of learning. In the model developed in Figure 2, a possible (but by no means guaranteed) outcome of the experiential learning process is a change in the routines of the permanent organisation. This is in effect a new structure. Proposition 3 can thus be formulated as follows: Proposition 3. An outcome of learning processes can be new power relations. To sum up, this paper has addressed the under-theorised relationship between learning and power. It has identified, first, a shortcoming in situated learning theory in that it is
narrowly restricted to routine labour processes and, second, a shortcoming in work on sensemaking, in that this has been unrelated to micro-political processes and considerations of power. The paper has sought to combine these two theoretical approaches into a more robust single framework, thereby responding to the challenge of Contu and Willmott to theorise the links between learning and power in rather more depth than has been the case hitherto, albeit from a different metatheoretical positioning. The role of power in communities of practice was clearly identified by Lave and Wenger (1991) in their initial formulation of situated learning theory. Yet power has since become somewhat lost as the notion of communities of practice has been subsumed within the organisational learning literature. Hopefully, this paper will help bring the questions of power and politics back to the fore and raise the possibility that communities of practice might more accurately be understood as “communities of domination”. Moreover, the paper addresses the need for the role of power to be considered in processes of learning through exploration as well as learning through exploitation. The analysis here does not, however, touch on the issue of how learning processes in organisations are embedded in more macro power relations. Treatment of such matters must await further research. Notes 1. Contra Blackler and Macdonald, the term “community of practice” is retained here to describe activities in quadrants ii, iii and iv. In these quadrants, however, the communities, the practices or both are necessarily emergent in nature. 2. The model is a variant of that presented and applied in Huzzard (2000b). This was originally empirically grounded from research on change processes in Swedish trade unions. References Addleson, M. (1996), “Resolving the spirit and substance of organizational learning”, Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 9 No. 1, pp. 32-41. Bacharach, S. and Baratz, M.S. (1962), “Two faces of power”, American Political Science Review, Vol. 56 No. 4, pp. 947-52. Blackler, F. and MacDonald, S. (2000), “Power, mastery and organizational learning”, Organization Studies, Vol. 37 No. 6, pp. 833-51. Brown, J.S. and Duguid, P. (1991), “Organizational learning and communities of practice: toward a unified view of working, learning and innovation”, Organization Science, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 40-57. Buchanan, D. and Badham, R. (1999), Power, Politics and Organizational Change: Winning the Turf Game, Sage, London. Burrell, G. and Morgan, G. (1979), Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis, Gower Publishing, Aldershot. Clegg, S.R. (1989), Frameworks of Power, Sage, London. Contu, A. and Willmott, H. (2003), “Learning and practice: focusing on power relations”, Organization Science, Vol. 14. Coopey, J. (1995), “The learning organization, power, politics and ideology”, Management Learning, Vol. 26 No. 2, pp. 193-213.
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Internet editorial
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In recent years there has been an explosion of interest in the different “ways of knowing” and in theories regarding different types of intelligence, including emotional intelligence (EQ) and related learning styles.
Multiple intelligences http://tip.psychology.org/gardner.html The theory of multiple intelligences suggests that there are a number of distinct forms of intelligence that each individual possesses in varying degrees. Gardner proposes seven primary forms: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, body-kinesthetic, intra-personal (e.g. insight, metacognition) and interpersonal (e.g. social skills). Gardner also emphasizes the cultural context of multiple intelligences. Each culture tends to emphasize particular intelligences.
Exploring “The theory of multiple intelligences”: accelerated learning network www.acceleratedlearningnetwork.com/multiple.htm This site further unpacks the e mentioned above and offers an interesting test for you to ascertain your preferred intelligences.
The seven learning styles (Stacy Mantle) www.lessontutor.com/sm1.html This article examines learning styles and several of these can be seen to have links to the concept of intelligences.
Structure of intellect (J.P. Guilford) http://tip.psychology.org/guilford.html This site explore Guilford’s structure of intellect theory based around reasoning and problem-solving skills, memory, decision-making skills and language-related skills. These can be linked to both the concept of intelligences and also Edward de Bono’s “Thinking hats”.
The Journal of Workplace Learning Vol. 16 No. 6, 2004 pp. 362-363 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited 1366-5626 DOI 10.1108/13665620410550330
Emotional intelligence http://trochim.human.cornell.edu/gallery/young/emotion.htm#emotional%20intelligence This is a comprehensive site for those exploring emotional intelligence. It explains the concept, its importance and tests for EQ as well as exploring emotions and their effects on thinking. There are some good links to neuro-psychology sites.
Learning and context: connections in continuing professional education (Barbara J. Daley) www.coe.uga.edu/hsp/monographs1/daley.pdf This article, which opens in PDF format, offers insights into the situated knowledges that inform professional practice. The reader may wish to examine the issues explored in this article in the light of the multiple intelligences professionals can bring to the workplace and the implications for workplace learning. Michelle Wallace Internet Editor
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