18/04/2011 by lizit.

A colleague on #phdchat has drawn my attention to a chapter in Maxwell (2005) on conceptual frameworks. I found this an interesting, informative and challenging read, particularly enjoying the use of diagramming techniques to understand the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of a research project. This reflected some of my experience in refining my ideas and I will return to using mapping in the near future. As interesting, and in some ways more challenging, was the recognition of personal experience being an important part of a conceptual framework. Maxwell cites a number of writers including Reason (1989) and C. Wright Mills (1959) to support the view that life experience is valid. Reason’s introduction of the term “critical subjectivity” lends weight to the view that it is possible to be both subjective and objective.

Amongst the many suggestions made in the chapter is one of writing a note, or identity memo, reflecting on the development of ones own interest in the research topic, or aspects of the research topic. This seemed a helpful notion to me as a couple of aspects of my research are tapping areas which I have had a long term interest in. This posting reflects on the first of these, the whole area of what I have referred to as ‘ownership’ but which in academic speak seems to be ‘agency’ - but it may be that ownership is just a facet of agency - let’s see.

I am not sure whether my thinking about ‘ownership’ belongs initially to undergraduate days or first employment. My first degree was a combination of academic and professional education, leading to a degree in Applied Social Studies and a Certificate of Qualification in Social Work. There was a strong emphasis on psychodynamic psychology, which I realise now was focusing on ‘deficits’ in people with problems, rather than their strengths. I reacted quite strongly to this approach, being unable to reconcile it with the real world people were living and struggling in. Perhaps fortunately, one of my placements was more concerned with societal change than with changing individuals, and when I graduated, it was perhaps inevitable that I gravitated towards community development. It seemed to me that the basic tenets of community development - not doing things for people, but working together to achieve change - made more sense and also fitted better with my personal faith position as a Christian.

Through a series of community work posts, I became more increasingly convinced that it was important for people to both own their problems (wherever they came from) and also to own the means of tackling those problems and resolving them. I was influenced by the disability movement and the insistence that disabled people were not to be pitied but were perfectly able and capable of doing more or less anything given appropriate resources and removal of the attitudinal and physical barriers which restricted them. As a social services team leader in the early 1980s, I insisted on holding meetings bringing together people, who were our clients only because of age or impairment, and the service providers, from my own organisation and others, to agree together on appropriate ‘care packages’ - if somebody wanted to use the 3 hours a week home care service we could offer to get their house cleaned rather than their shopping done, that was their decision and right and we did not have the right to tell them what they needed. I did not see why professionals should make decisions for adults who were capable of making their own decisions if given the opportunity to do so.

Moving on, I held senior positions in 2 voluntary organisations. In one of those, the primary focus was on negotiating a contract for the provision of services - a notion which has become normal, but was then being trialled by a few local authorities with a few voluntary organisations. My concern was that this would lead to a commercialisation of the voluntary sector, removing some of its scope for innovation and challenge of the state, but also an awareness that underpinning the transfer of services from the state to the voluntary sector was an economic imperative to save money and I was not prepared to engage in fund-raising in order to do the work of the statutory sector. In the second organisation, the situation was more complex. It was a pan-London, church-based organisation with a network of projects throughout London. Funding was a mixture of local authority grants, money given by churches and a diocesan grant. Over the years, the projects had become more professional and local church groups were questioning why they should fund these activities, especially when they were unable to gain much information about what was being done in their name because of client confidentiality. Although the work was of high quality, it was removed from the churches with the unintended consequence that local churches neither owned the work nor felt any obligation to engage in social action themselves as they were already funding the projects to do this on their behalf. My view was that it was essential to return ‘ownership’ to the local churches and to enable them to identify what was appropriate social action in their areas, if necessary reconfiguring the professional projects. It was a very difficult time as it felt as though I was dismantling rather than building.

Time moved on. I became a mother and spent a few years living abroad. When I returned to the UK, I knew I could not realistically return to my previous career. I retrained, gained new interests, and developed an interest in educational technology. But my personal life was taking me in a different direction as it became clear my son had SEN. I was able to use my knowledge and skills to gain an understanding of the system and to ensure my son got the help and support necessary for him to achieve his potential - I owned the problem and exercised my agency. I knew other parents were not necessarily able to do this - they were effectively disabled - and became involved in voluntary initiatives to enable other parents to act.

I am not anti-professional - I have been involved in professional employment of one sort or another most of my adult life. I am against professionals disabling others when they could be informing and enabling people to take control of their own lives and own their problems and difficulties so as to engage in action to become the people they want to be. I still remember the amazement expressed by a social worker on a holiday project when she saw ‘inadequate parents’ organising activities and taking responsibility for large groups of children. By focusing on the positives, the difficulties can be overcome, albeit with struggle.

So my perspectives on ownership/agency are a mixture of personal belief, gut feeling, work experience, observation…

Maxwell, J. A. 2005. Qualitative Research Design: An Interactive Approach, Sage Publications, Inc.

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14/12/2010 by lizit.

I am currently reading Clandinin and Connelly’s book ‘Narrative Inquiry’. A section on the place of theory has caught my eye. I think I can see its relevance to me, but just testing it out.

The scenario Clandinin and Connelly use to introduce the topic, is a book review, where one of the authors worked with another reviewer on the task of writing a review. Clandinin suggested approaching the review from the perspective of stories of school life and linking these to themes from the book to examine how the ideas within the book might be relevant in practice. Her colleague’s approach was to establish an interpretive frame and to examine the book’s ideas in the light of this framework. This inevitably led to tension.

Clandinin and Connelly then discuss more generally the tension over the place of theory in narrative inquiry, using literature review as an example. Traditionally, doctoral theses contain a literature review chapter near the beginning of the work. This chapter is used “to structure the inquiry, identify gaps in the literature, outline principal theoretical lines of thought, and generate potential research possibilities.” In other words, the literature review provides a structure and framework for refining the research question, designing the study and analysing and interpreting the data. Clandinin and Connelly suggest that rather than privileging existing literature in this way, an alternative approach is to “weave the literature throughout the dissertation from beginning to end in an attempt to create a seamless link between the theory and the practice embodied in the enquiry.”

Reflecting on this, I am reminded of some of the discussions taking place under the #phdchat hashtag on Twitter. These discussions have drawn together a number of research students from different disciplines and institutions on different continents. While much of the discussion has been of a very practical nature, there is also discussion around methodologies, managing and analysing data, etc. One such question has been whether or not literature is data. My instinctive response to this is in the affirmative. Reading Clandinin and Connelly is making me think this through a bit - and making me look at my own approach.

Over the past two and a half years, I have read far more academic literature than at any other time in my life. What I have read has varied from some quite dense theoretical tomes to case studies and descriptive pieces. However, my research area is one that I have a familiarity with through my own experiences over several years involvement in the domain. In deciding my general research focus, I am as much, or more influenced, by what I know experientially as by what I can learn from literature, but the literature has raised questions and issues that I would not have been aware of from a purely experiential position.

Having started with a fairly general research focus, exploring the learning journeys of those responsible for supporting and caring for children and young people with a diagnosis of Aspergers or HFA, I am finding there is a theme emerging from interviews, which is also present in the literature, namely that of a metaphor of fight or struggle. From some perspectives, this struggle can be seen as part of the learning journey, and from others, learning in its various guises, can be seen as one of the roots of struggle. So rather than taking a particular framework or theoretical model from the literature and applying it to the context - and this would be a legitimate option - I am identifying an emerging issue and identifying a number of related themes from the narratives. These themes are leading me to return to the literature to examine them in more depth. Although what I am doing is emerging from the narrative, the theoretical concepts are providing a framework to attach those themes to and to explore them further, thus weaving together experience and theory.

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07/12/2010 by lizit.

Every so often I read something and suddenly begin to realise that not only do I understand some at least of what I’m reading but I can actually apply it to my own work! Today was one of those days!

Through a message and link in CPsquare - an online community exploring communities of practice - I came across a couple of pieces written by Martin Packer. I hadn’t come across him before, but he had worked with Jean Lave around 1990 and had taught a course ‘Everyday Learning and Life’ with her. The pieces I was looking at were a conference paper presented at an AERA meeting in Montreal in 1999 and an article co-written with Jessie Goicoechea and published in Education Psychologist in 2000. Both explored the ontology of learning, though, as might be anticipated, the journal article had a more in-depth theoretical base.

The first thing I got from this reading was actually beginning to understand what the terms ontology and epistemology mean. I’ve encountered them enough times in various publications and I’ve looked them up in dictionaries, but never really felt confident that I understood what either term actually meant. In the context of these two pieces, both of which were concerned with learning, it became clear that epistemology had to do with knowing and to describe a learning theory as epistemological meant that it had to do with the process of gaining knowledge that could be tested - OK, it’s probably more complex than that, but that will do for me for the moment. Ontology is not about knowing but about being and becoming and learning approaches that can be described as ontological have to do with who a person is becoming through the learning experience. This in turn opens up the notion of learning being about personal change and finding an identity.

As this was dawning, I began to get excited. The initial focus of my research was exploring the learning journeys of those who care for and support children and young people with diagnoses of Aspergers or HFA. From the data I already have, I know that parents undergo a transformation from being a parent to becoming the parent of a child with an ASC to being the parent of a child with an ASC and that part of that transformation is about identity and part of it is about acquiring knowledge about the condition and support infrastructure. Similarly, teachers choosing to specialise in this area move from being a teacher to becoming a specialist teacher. The routes taken may be different, but there is a change. I would expect to see a similar move in other specialists and carers involved with young people on the spectrum. Obviously, not everybody will undergo that identity change. Some may acquire knowledge without any kind of transformative learning or change.

There have been a number of research studies examining the coping strategies of parents of children with Aspergers. Many of these have focused on parents’ perceived needs after receiving a diagnosis and principle amongst these is generally a need for information. Some have also looked at parents’ coping styles and identified different ways in which parents have coped physically, emotionally and spiritually with having a child who is different. One of my interests is the use of the metaphor of struggle within the literature and discourses and I have been tentatively wondering if there is a connection between struggle and coping. I can now see that both are in some ways connected with the process of becoming the parent of a child on the spectrum.

I’ve got a lot more thinking to do, but I have a sense of having got hold of a piece of the jigsaw and found where it fits.

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07/12/2010 by lizit.

Wrote this weeks ago and forgot about it - hmm

An almost throwaway comment in a discussion the other day got me thinking about how pervasive labels are - and how we don’t necessarily understand the labels we regularly use.

The that started this train of thought was that few people, if any, change their fundamental position, or worldview, as a result of their doctoral work. As the context was an informal discussion with fellow DPhil students in sociology, the assumption was that we knew what mix of post-modern, feminist, Marxist, etc, etc, we considered ourselves. On reflection, I found myself struggling. I am quite sure it is possible to label and categorise me, but I am unsure what the labels would be. It made me think of the Myers-Brigg questionnaires and it struck me something similar could be useful in this area. By ticking the correct boxes, I would then know if I was a post-structuralist or whatever - and I might even know what it meant.

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20/03/2010 by lizit.

Since my last post I have been reading quite a lot around biographical methods (Harrison & Lyon, 1993; Merrill and West, 2009; Miller, 2007; Stanley, 1993; West, et al, 2007). This is beginning to earth some of my earlier reading of learning biography and digging into the TLRP Learning Lives materials and more recent reading of a number of studies of the experience of diagnosis of families with children on the autistic spectrum. These studies have relied heavily on life history approaches of varying kinds, some of which allow the researcher and their personal story and perspectives to be part of or to focus the research study.

My reading of Patton (2002) helped me to realise that my own story is relevant to my research; my reading of these texts is showing me that not only is my story relevant but it is an integral part of the research I want to undertake.

In reading Miller (2007), I was interested to see reference made to the first sociological text I ever read, though I did not recognise it as such at the time. Richard Hoggart’s “The Uses of Literacy” was recommended to me by one of my sixth form teachers at about the time I decided not to continue directly from school into HE, but to take some time out. Also there was Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden’s “Education and the Working Class” which I stumbled across as an undergraduate and began to understand something of the role education had played in my extended family - my grandfather was a skilled craftsman (a tailor), my father went to the grammar school but had to leave early to help support the family financially and then gained his degree through ‘night school’ and became (eventually) a headteacher but always considered himself working class, and my brother and I both grew up with the expectation that we would go to university. One of my father’s brothers followed a similar route and another brother passed various Civil Service exams to gain a senior post, but his other brother led a varied but interesting life as a butcher, betting shop manager, delivery driver while his sister remained at home until late middle-life to look after her father and whichever siblings still occupied the family home, earning some income from casual work and cleaning jobs.

Growing up in the 1960s and working in social and community work during the 70s and 80s, I was inevitably aware of, and influenced by, feminism and later by the disability movement and race awareness. What I had not realised was the influence of those movements, particularly feminism, on developments in sociology, though I was well aware of the affect on public policy. The reading I have been doing raises both the positive and the problematic of including oneself in a research study.

The issues, identified by Stanley (1993), are those of:

• Self/other - it is impossible for me to tell my story without also telling the stories of some others who may or may not have consented to their story being shared;
• Public/private - most textual material, even if written ostensibly as personal reflections and accounts as in a diary, also assumes an audience, whether that audience is external or an aspect of myself (”self who writes”, “self who was” and “self who is”. This assumption of an audience takes away distinctions between different forms of life writing;
• Immediacy/memory - although there is an assumption that some forms of life writing such as diaries are equivalent to reportage, in reality writers apply filters which select what is written about and offer their own interpretations of events and actions. Although there is a tendency to differentiate between written accounts which are true because they were written at the time of the event and those which are less likely to be as factual because they are written from memory, all life accounts raise the issue of what is ‘true’ in an absolute sense, but also serve to contextualise and situate what is written about.

My reading of Patton (2002) helped me to realise that my own story is relevant to my research; my reading of these texts is showing me that not only is my story relevant but it is an integral part of the research I want to undertake.

When I started these blogs and was looking for a name for the site, I recognised that I was going on a journey. The more I read and the more I think, the more I am aware of the twists and turns of that journey and the unexpected encounters on route. The goal is still there, but quite often the journey feels as though it may hold far more meaning than achieving the goal!

Harrison, B., & Lyon, E. S. (1993). A note on ethical issues in the use of autobiography in sociological research. Sociology, 27(1), 101-109.
Merrill, B., & West, L. (2009). Using Biographical Methods in Social Research. London: Sage.
Miller, N. (2007). Developing an auto/biographical imagination. In L. West, P. Alheit, A. S. Andersen & B. Merrill (Eds.), Using Biographical and Life History Approaches in the Study of Adult and Lifelong Learning: European Perspectives (pp. 167-186). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Patton, M. Q. (2002). Qualitative research and evaluation methods (Third ed.): Sage Publications.
Stanley, L. (1993). On auto/biography in sociology. Sociology, 27(1), 41-52.
West, L., Alheit, P., Andersen, A. S., & Merrill, B. (Eds.). (2007). Using Biographical and Life History Approaches in the Study of Adult and Lifelong Learning: European Perspectives. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

Posted in feminism, methodology, concepts | Print | 1 Comment »

08/02/2010 by lizit.

Wynne’s (1988) study on people with MS raises some interesting thoughts for me. As I understand it, the study was essentially about how people with MS understood their diagnosis, the process leading up to the diagnosis, and the possibility of science being able to provide ‘a cure’ at some time in the future.

Although some parallels can be drawn between MS and autism in terms of how far it is/was understood what the causatory factors are/were and the varying symptoms which are not common to all ’sufferers’ in the same ways, I am less interested in this than in the methodology and some of the observations.

Firstly, methodology.  The study was based on 12 interviews with people who had diagnosis of MS (in two cases, this was still in the process of being confirmed).  The interviews themselves were unstructured, and the researcher describes them as more of a conversation. Her aim was “to explore what having MS meant to individuals and to allow them to tell their stories in their own ways rather than in terms assumed relevant beforehand by the researcher.” Wynne acknowledges that it was inevitable that the researcher approached each interview, not as a blank canvas, but with an awareness of what had been said in the course of previous interviews and that this meant that in the ‘conversation’ some of these extraneous factors were introduced.  From my perspective, it also suggests that the interview itself became a reflective learning experience for both the participant and the researcher. One of the aspects I have been discussing with my supervisor is how many participants I need to recruit and it is useful to find a study where the number of participants is given.

The chapter is in a book about reflexivity and the importance of reflecting on what we write, how data is used, etc. One of Wynne’s observations concerns the use of quotations from interview data. She observes that the meaning of such quotations can easily be distorted by removing them from their original context. For example, in talking about why people approached their GP, she quotes examples of people seeking an explanation for their symptoms, but she chooses not to use a quotation about somebody looking for a repeat prescription for medication they had found helpful in relieving symptoms.

There are some interesting ideas about the relative expertise of the doctor and the patient, especially in relation to diagnosis. Although many of the participants initially received different diagnoses, and were sometimes treated initially for different ailments, this was regarded as acceptable by patients on the basis that the doctor at that time was not aware of all the information necessary for a correct diagnosis. On the other hand, when the patients began to wonder whether they actually had MS, perhaps as the result of seeing a TV programme or meeting somebody already diagnosed and recognising the similarity of their symptoms with those being portrayed or described, they were hesitant to raise this possibility with medical professionals, sometimes only mentioning their thoughts retrospectively or some considerable time after first suspecting the condition. From the text, it would appear this was not due to the seriousness of a diagnosis of MS, as the same patients were also wondering whether they might be suffering from other, more serious illnesses or conditions. There was a firm belief held by patients that diagnosis had to be confirmed by an expert, a consultant who had greater medical knowledge and expertise than the GP who had been initially consulted. In terms of autism, I recall many times being asked by different professionals who had diagnosed my son - the diagnosis by the NHS consultant in consultation with an NHS clinical psychologist carried far more weight than an earlier diagnosis by a consultant in private practice.

One of my foci is how far the expertise of ‘experts’ and ‘others’ is similar. Wynne notes that “The axiomatic distinction between expertise and non-expertise enabled the maintenance of faith in a medical science disembodied as it were from both practitioners and its subjects. Their scepticism was confined to their own abilities to be expert, either about themselves or about what science could do.” It will be interesting to see whether 20 years on in a different domain there is the same confidence in the medical profession and other experts.

Wynne, A. (1988). Accounting for accounts of the diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis. In S. Woolgar (Ed.), Knowledge and Reflexivity (pp. 101-122). London: Sage.

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25/01/2010 by lizit.

Thought it was about time I posted a catch up on what I am actually doing!

The focus of my DPhil is now the learning journeys of the various participants involved in the support and care of children and young people on the autistic spectrum. There are many different people involved from parents and carers to support staff in schools and residential establishments to education, health and social service professionals - and probably a few others as well. Although there is a notion of partnership in the provision of care and support, this partnership can be uneven because of the different levels and types of expertise different partners bring to the table, the way this expertise is or is not valued by other partners and the relative power of the different partners in providing access to resources.

I am planning to focus specifically on learning - which in practice means how people develop knowledge and expertise about autistic spectrum conditions/disorders (the terminology is currently in flux).

I have written an outline of what I hope to cover in my study and am in the process of re-drafting and getting this into a format appropriate for applying for the appropriate ethical clearances.

Another strand I am working on at the moment is trying to clarify what I understand by learning and which learning theories and ideas inform my understanding. This exploration has taken me through formal and informal learning, situated learning, communities of practice and currently metaphors of learning, as well as along a number of interesting side turnings.  I have read lots of interesting stuff and am slowly learning to sift out the things that have less relevance to my proposed study, however interesting they may be. Other posts in this blog summarise some of those explorations.

The other area I am beginning to explore is that of how disability is seen by society and the effect of disability on a family. This is not a major focus for me, but there is a fair bit of evidence showing that families with a disabled member are disadvantaged in lots of different ways and there is other evidence pointing to people with disabilities forming an underclass. If it can be shown that parents caring for children and young people on the spectrum have a great deal of knowledge and expertise in a number of different areas, this might challenge the power structure and also empower parents.

At the moment it feels as though there are a lot of different threads in something of a disarray and my task is to try to identify them and put them in some sort of order so that I can progress. A bit like sorting out lace bobbins and threads after the cat has knocked the lace pillow on the floor yet again. I’ll be more than happy if I can get these threads organised and begin to make something of them.

Posted in lace, ASD, empowerment, research ideas, concepts, learning, reflections, creativity, planning | Print | 1 Comment »

04/01/2010 by lizit.

Finding lots of interesting ideas in papers written some years back. Getting the background seems to involve a constant moving backwards. I can’t possibly read everything ever written, but I can read a lot of stuff and get a sense of big picture.

Brown, Collins & Duguid (1989) present some useful contrasts between different types and contexts of learning in developing their ideas about situated cognition.I find their description of the learning of ‘just plain folk’ (JPF) relates to the questions I am asking about the learning of parents of children and young people with ASDs and how they learn to provide appropriate support and care for their children.

Brown, et al, start from the “distinction between mere acquisition of inert concepts and the development of useful, robust knowledge” citing Whitehead’s 1929 treatise on the aims of education. The implication is that it is possible to possess a tool, or knowledge, and not have a clue how to use it. Similarly it is possible to have good working knowledge of the use of a tool without knowing why it works as it does. In the real world, we learn how to use tools from others and through practice. The same tool may be used differently by different communities of users - example is given of chisel which is used differently by carpenters and cabinet makers, Just as we need to learn how to use physical tools, the same is necessary with conceptual tools. As with physical tools, the conceptual tools only really make sense in the context of practice. It is suggested that learners learn through enculturation or socialisation into a community of practice.

As tools are used in authentic context they gain meaning & relevance. Brown, et al, comment that “the process may appear informal, but it is nonetheless full-blooded, authentic activity that can be deeply informative - in a way that textbook examples and declarative examples are not.” This is illustrated using Lave’s example of the apprenticeship of tailors.

Brown, et al, then consider the learning of JPFs, students and practitioners. When a JPF wants to learn something they can become an apprentice or a student. As the former, they enculturate into the community of practice. As the latter they go to school where “the general strategies for intuitive reasoning, resolving issues, and negotiating meaning (…) are superseded by the precise, well-defined problems, formal definitions, and symbol manipulation of much school activity.” Brown, et al, suggest the JPF is closer to the practitioner in learning & practice than students whose learning & practice is abstracted from real life, implying that contextualisation is vital for learning to be meaningful.

The discussion can be related to the current educational policy debates where politicians are demanding more focus on vocational education in higher education. Brown, et al, suggest that it is only in post graduate study that students begin to become practitioners through an apprenticeship process embedded in the supervisory relationship with an experienced researcher. However, there is no discussion of the thinking and analytical skills developed through the education system.

They suggest more work is needed on understanding the “relationship between explicit knowledge and implicit understanding”.
Brown, J. S., Collins, A., & Duguid, P. (1989). Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning. Educational Researcher, 18 (1), 32-42.

Posted in Government policy, education, concepts, community, learning | Print | 1 Comment »

24/12/2009 by lizit.

I’ve been struck by the number of articles I seem to be encountering which are discussing workplace learning as informal learning. Very few writers apart from possibly Billett (2002) seem to suggest learning at work can be seen as formal learning. Given the range of learning and training that is undertaken within the workplace this seems odd, and again suggests that the formal and informal labels are less than helpful. Seeing learning in the workplace as a mixture of intentional, incidental and serendipitous seems to make more sense (to me at least).

As an aside, I have been struggling a bit with how to differentiate incidental and serendipitous as I sense they are different. It seems to me that incidental learning is where something is learned while engaged in an activity, so undertaking a word processing task may include discovering how to change default font styles for a particular document. This is not intentional in the sense of being engaged in a learning task and it is not serendipitous in the sense of being stumbled across by chance, but it is a by-product of engagement in a task.

In thinking about workplace learning, I have been thinking about what is meant by workplace. Virtually everything I have read appears to envisage the workplace as a place of paid employment. I have not encountered any articles which recognise the home as the workplace - though this is self-evidently the case for some many parents and for others who are not in paid employment for whatever reason. For some reason, the workplace is seen as somewhere separate from the other environments people engage with during their daily lives.

Some of the work concerned with biography of learners appears to acknowledge the importance of other environments. For example, Hodkinson, et al, (2004) engage in a somewhat complex philosophical discussion about the relationship between the person and their social world, before identifying 4 principles (the comments in italics are mine):

• Workers/learners bring prior knowledge, understanding and skills with them, which can contribute to their future work and learning; (this reminded me of the illustration I often use in training contexts of having a ruc-sac of knowledge, skills and experience garnered from the totality of our life experience which we take with us from place to place and add to and adapt as we go)
• The habitus of workers, including their dispositions towards work, career and learning, influence the ways in which they construct and take advantage of opportunities for learning at work; (why just at work - surely the same applies in other environments people engage in)
• The values and dispositions of individual workers contribute to the co-production and reproduction of the communities of practice and/or organisational cultures and/or activity systems where they work; (again this could apply in other communities and environments people are part of)
• Working and belonging to a workplace community contributes to the developing habitus and sense of identity of the workers themselves. (ditto)

Although workplaces are easily identifiable environments from the perspective of study of learning, the observations drawn from workplace learning appear to be transferable in many circumstances to other environments where people learn, communities of interest being a fairly obvious example. One of the areas I need to consider as I read these various articles on workplace learning is the extent to which the findings are only relevant within the workplace or are equally relevant in other contexts where people learn. Given that people spend much of their time learning in one way or another, this could mean virtually any context.

On the surface at least, it appears that by favouring some forms of learning and some contexts above others, there is a danger that we fail to notice what different forms of learning have in common.

Billett, S. (2002). Critiquing workplace learning discourses: Participation and continuity at work. Studies in the Education of Adults, 34(1), 56-67.
Hodkinson, P., Hodkinson, H., Evans, K., Kersh, N., Fuller, A., Unwin, L., et al. (2004). The significance of individual biography in workplacelearning. Studies in the Education of Adults, 36(1), 6-24.

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21/11/2009 by lizit.

This will no doubt need more work, but is an attempt to capture something of the bigger picture and context against which thinking about adult learning is happening.

Posted in social learning, self-directed learning, informal learning, education, concepts, learning | Print | No Comments »