Learning, Work and Practice: New Understandings

In the preface to this collection Professor Jonathan Garnett suggests that the authors that have contributed to this collection “make an important contribution to an increasingly mature field of study,” a field which has particularly developed over “the last 20 years.” And he is entirely right. Indeed, one could argue that the collection is setting out what a new paradigm of education, learning and training might look like or, at least, might begin to consider if we took these “new understandings” as our premise. The collection displays leading ideas by key thinkers in the field and it therefore displays the dominant interests and concerns of those who are thinking through fundamental concepts and issues in work-based learning today. Paul Gibbs has done a sterling job in bringing together one of the finest collections in the field. This text would, therefore, be of great help to teacher trainers, educationists, and policy makers in thinking through the complex relations of learning, work, and training as they determine practice, learner identity, and debates around curriculum design.

Indeed, looking further afield, one can only wonder how long other areas of education can let these debates go unchecked and not seek to widen the debates into associated and overlapping areas of interest. Anybody who has involvement in the areas of work experience, traineeships, and apprenticeships or the current revision of vocational education would benefit from a reading of this collection. If the debates about vocationalism, skills, training, and apprenticeships, are to lead to a renaissance of professional development, training, and skill levels, then this would be a good place to start.

The collection has a fourfold structure which does have a challenge to the reader in that parts II and III appear to be too closely related to deserve to be so distinguished. We have then three areas of debate. The first area of debate is focused on the workplace and covers the relations between learning and the workplace, as well as how knowledge is generated in such a context. The section then explores implications for learner identity. The second area of debate (as does the third) discusses more conceptual explorations, such as ontological processes and practice, epistemology, the application of Badiou's philosophy to work-based learning (Kent den Heyer) and the contribution pragmatism can make. The third area of discussion (fourth part to the collection) delves into ethical, political, and cultural dimensions of work-based learning and education. At this point it might be helpful to future readers that they begin with Paul Hager's tour de force for he takes the reader through the various approaches to work-based learning which would certainly help orientate a prospective reader to the complex debates and positions that would then follow. I would also alert the reader to read the editor's introduction as a piece in itself for it is incredibly helpful to be reminded of the philosophical concepts of work, labour, and life as derived from Arendt. Indeed, reflection on Arendt's distinction following a reading of the collection, certainly shows the significance of these debates for those fundamental human concerns. And, finally, suggest that Gibbs’ chapter be the culminating point of view to consider as it sets out, perspicaciously, the road ahead.

Christopher Winch begins the collection by alerting the reader to the complexity of defining a workplace, the practices related to work and, so, in turn, the multifarious uses that learning may be put to. He also defends the view that workplace learning, for best and most effective outcomes (mastery of one's techniques in a craft or art), has more general operational nuances than the notion of a series of standalone tasks, which notoriously underpins the UK National Vocational Qualification (NVQ). What is neglected, says Winch, are the operational dispositions that a skilled or proficient worker could draw on to deal with specific and unusual circumstances. This means that “off the job” or more general educational and occupational training and education is needed as well as work-based learning. There is much to be debated here about the nature of work, the nature of how learning fits into the world of work, and about curriculum design. A debate noted in the text specifically with Gerard Lum's view of a more immersive work-based learning framework. Lum's view is that the answer is not to distinguish “off the job” from “on the job” or give it any prioritising in terms of curriculum design at least, as we may understand those terms as being synonymous with “theory” and “practice”. The answer is to develop a more holistic view of work-based learning, qua “understanding,” rather than one that suffers from dichotomous thinking. It is also to distinguish antecedent and consequent conditions for learning, which could be what we term as theoretical or practical but are placed within the curriculum to help the learning, not any outmoded binary opposition. What is also crucial, I believe, is that Lum's distinction opens up the distinctive contribution that time can add to curriculum design and, once more, move us away from outmoded thinking around “linear” or “non-linear” (meaning simply “ad hoc”) knowledge transmission, particularly as understood in the current modes of “theory” and “practice”.

Such considerations show that definitions of learning have logical, and practical, implications that, ultimately, must be felt elsewhere in an educational and training system. One could see this as the main thrust of the contributions from Hager, Beckett and Lum, who set out proposals, in their own ways, for what might be called a “non-propositionally” based education and learning system (not that the authors may agree with this conclusion in whole or in part). That is to say, these authors appear to be rejecting a view of learning that is made up of three assumptions and has been most clearly articulated in the academic paradigm (as given in Hager's contribution): the view that learning is about the transmission of propositions; that these propositions are held in an individual mind; and that learning can be verified by the regurgitation of written propositions. It is not that these aspects do not have any truth to them, rather, that they do not make up the whole truth about human learning, nor, perhaps, the most significant.

In turn, one could propose that, in sum, they propose, each in their own way, alternatives to the assumptions of the academic paradigm: practice (Hager); understanding (Lum); and emergence (Beckett).

Learning, in the view of these authors, is tied to ontological processes, or non-empirical concepts, that provide a broader horizon for propositional learning. The epistemological assumptions of propositional learning (as contained in the academic paradigm) reveal a paradigm that is focused on the individual's access to knowledge, the form that knowledge can take in the “proposition” or statement of fact that is most clearly articulated when written in examination. Finally, there is a broader notion, that this form of knowledge benefits the individual in terms of understanding the world and, benefits, in turn, the organisation they are part of. Not only culture but the effectiveness of the economy and firm improves by way of this paradigm.

What the collection overturns (and the authors I have named specifically here), in different ways, are these assumptions. What is proposed by this emerging “new paradigm” is that the context of work-based learning is a collective one; it is bound to a particular social context, so the premise that learning is solely concerned with the individual's relation to knowledge is undermined. As is the idea that knowledge is propositional in form; work-based learning has an intimate relation to embodied knowledge (Brinkmann and Tanggaard) and tacit skills, which are not so easily articulated (Lewis). Finally, that the apex of learning in the academic paradigm is given as theoretical understanding is here also questioned by the view that in work-based learning the focus can be on collective endeavour, even cultural endeavour (Hinchliffe relates identity to social processes; Zembylas, Metz, and Akdere and Salem, all suggest a much broader telos to work-based learning than the individual's self development or “Bildung”).

On this point, I think that Beckett's notion of ontological emergence, is genuinely original and novel when placed in an educational setting. Notions of emergence are familiar enough in the philosophy of mind debates around supervenience, moreover occur in complexity theory, as well as critical realism (briefly discussed in Hager's contribution), but what Becket does is show the emergence of properties that, on reflection, cannot be reducible to individual or inter-subjective agency.

Beckett's example is elaborated from Dewey and shows that the properties of learning, as a social phenomena between teacher and student, in project work, or, one might add, in any collaborative working, reveals outcomes that are not reducible to the parts. What Beckett proposes is that such outcomes have an independent existence from those parts, hence, emerge. The example, taken from Raelin, is the notion of a career advantage given by a particular co-operative way of working. The outcome for the individual members was produced, emerged, from a collective way of working that could not have been planned or predicted. Beckett's own example attempts to show that the process of learning itself is embedded with a notion of emergence, with identifiable elements of novelty, creativity, and normativity. In a social setting such a notion of emergence may well help to explain the danger that individuals or institutions see in collaboration. It is a genuinely unpredictable process as is any project that involves “holistic” characteristics. The irony is, of course, that for Beckett, such characteristics are already embedded in how we go about the world of work and our learning generally. By shirking such risks we may be fooling ourselves, we may be attempting to control what is actually fundamental to the human experience of working, learning, and developing.

It must be mentioned here that there is another strand to the philosophical debates within the text and that is the more pragmatic deliberations of Gibbs, Brinkmann, and Tanggaard, and one could include Papastephanou here who clarifies the Aristotelian mode of knowledge (Gnoseology) in order to reintroduce a more precise understanding of “theory” and “practice”, a key theme in the collection.

In conclusion, what this set of readings of work-based learning and practice reveal is new ways of conceiving work, learning, and practice. How much they set out a new emerging paradigm is for others to test (perhaps, even, exemplified in Flint's chapter), but I hope to have shown that this is a remarkable and thought provoking set of essays that will become a standard reference work for students new to the area and for future debates.