Guest editorial

Citation

Field, J. (2006), "Guest editorial", Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 18 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/jwl.2006.08618faa.001

Guest editorial

About the Guest Editor John Field is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Workplace Learning. He works as Professor of Lifelong Learning in the Institute of Education, University of Stirling; he also currently serves as the University's Deputy Principal for Research. He is also a Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College, University of London. Following a period in the engineering industry, he taught adults in South Yorkshire for a number of years before joining the University of Warwick in 1985. He has published widely in educational and social studies; his most recent book is Social Capital and Lifelong Learning (published in 2005).

A maturing field of enquiry

Workplace learning is rapidly maturing as a field of research, reflecting its increasingly central place in public debate over innovation and sustainability in the knowledge economy. A wide range of social science research methods has been adopted, often rather eclectically it should be said, and applied to the study of learning in different organisational contexts. The field has also developed theoretically as well as empirically. Concepts of workplace learning are increasingly informed by social theories of learning. Dominant among these is activity theory and the related notion of situated learning, often inspired by Vygotsky's broadly Marxist notions of learning from tensions and contradictions generated by wider social contexts, but mediated through the work of contemporary scholars such as Yrjö Engeström, David Livingstone, Jean Lave and Ettienne Wenger. A rather more philosophical bent is also visible in the field, for example, in the work of Stephen Billett. Nor has the field been exempted from critical and feminist approaches. As with many maturing fields of enquiry, workplace learning is a contested terrain.

In short, there appears to be an intellectual buzz around workplace learning, as well as considerable interest among policy makers and professionals. And the borders between scholarship and practice are often fluid and porous ones: scholar-practitioners form an important part of the research community; their concerns typically bring together theoretically informed analysis and the results of empirical investigation, often focused on an immediate aspect of their own practice. Given the number of workplace learning researchers who are employed in universities, it is not surprising that much of the published output concerns the relationship between higher education and workplace learning. While this focus may mean that other important aspects of workplace learning are relatively neglected, it also carries benefits, both in the development of an emerging body of knowledge about new and innovative aspects of higher education, and in the attempts to develop a research-based approach to pedagogic and curricular development.

This sense of excitement was highly visible at the third international conference of the Centre for Research in Lifelong Learning, from which this special issue is drawn. Held at the University of Stirling, Scotland, between 24 and 26 June 2005, the conference aimed to examine empirically, methodologically and theoretically contemporary research in teaching and learning in diverse contexts. Its eight themes represented a broad range of current interests in the broad field of lifelong learning. Two themes were particularly relevant to readers of the Journal of Workplace Learning: one focussing on professional learning and development, and a second specifically covering organisational and workplace learning. However, papers on workplace learning featured right across the conference. The fact that research into workplace learning was so well represented is in itself a signal of its growing status in the scholarly community, but it presented a considerable problem in selecting from the dozens of papers that were relevant to the journal and its concerns. Indeed, even after reviewing, we had more papers than could be fitted comfortably into one single volume.

Two of the papers emerge from critical and analytical reflections on occupational preparation in higher education. Learning and teaching are at the core of Cheri Logan's study of graphic design classrooms, which looks at the language that teachers and students use when they are talking about the different types of knowledge transactions that take place in educational and professional contexts. Logan's analysis of metaphor raises important questions about the role of language in constructing particular occupational identities, enabling students to think of themselves as graphic designers before undergoing the transition from an educational context to the vocational setting. She also reminds us that the transition process is not necessarily marked by clear, well-defined boundaries; nor is it necessarily a once-for all and unilinear process. She also enters a persuasive plea for the recognition of occupational knowledge of kinds that tends to be ill served by traditional academic criteria, and is not necessarily fully grasped in some of the new and emerging forms of academic assessment and evaluation.

Assessment regimes also feature as a troubling issue in the study of transitions into four professional areas by Cathrine Le Maistre, Spencer Boudreau and Anthony Paré. This paper examines the role of the supervisor appointed by the university to serve as a mentor to students engaged in periods of professional practice; as well as mentoring the students, though, the supervisor is also expected by the university and the professional to evaluate their students' performance. Le Maistre, Boudreau and Paré demonstrate that there is a powerful inbuilt tension between the demands of these twin roles, with consequences for the ways that newcomers were being integrated into the practices, values and cultures of the four caring professions.

Another theme that can be found in this collection is the role of new technologies in supporting work-based learners in higher education. Based on a semantic analysis of the content of messages among learners and tutors on an online work-based learning programme, Sara Bosley and David Young conclude that effective online exchanges largely mirror the features of effective face-to-face learning encounters. In particular, they show that affective communication appears to be important for participants in online learning communities.

Barbara Allan and Dina Lewis similarly base their paper on a study of online participation, this time in the context of health service workers training to provide support for online learning. Their findings confirm that online learning can have clear benefits in allowing new types of learner to follow structured programmes of learning, and in enabling adult learners to fit learning around the other demands of their lives. They also identify significant challenges arising from the experience; they note that online learning communities can take time to adjust to the realities of asynchronous discussion, and they also note the importance of the affective domain to the building of an effective learning community. They also join an increasing number of workplace learning researchers in pointing to the importance of involving line managers if learning is not to be left behind in the rush to complete the everyday tasks of the job.

Finally, workplace learning has also been an increasingly important focus for policy development. European Governments have been particularly concerned to encourage closer and more integrated approaches to learning in the workplace, not least because of the old continent's attempts to grapple with issues of sustainability and competitiveness in an increasingly unforgiving global market place. It is also widely suggested that globalising tendencies represent a significant threat to social cohesion, with the skill distribution of Europe's workforce coming to resemble an hourglass: growing numbers of highly qualified and rewarded knowledge workers at the top, growing numbers of unskilled and precarious workers (often young people or migrants) at the bottom, and an increasingly squeezed middle. Some European Governments have sought to find new ways of engaging unskilled and precarious workers in learning, with important new measures on both the supply and demand sides. Albert Renkema examines one such measure, the Individual Learning Accounts scheme developed by the government of The Netherlands with a view to stimulating demand for learning by workers with weak skills profiles and poorly rewarded skill sets. He concludes with important questions about the relationship between workers' learning culture and the perceived level of support that they expect to receive. Once more, then, the role of line manager seems central.

The Journal of Workplace Learning is pleased to be able to present a special issue based on papers first presented at the third CRLL conference. The breadth and quality of this selection indicates that workplace learning has ceased to be a neglected part of the wider lifelong learning terrain, and is now widely recognised as an important and exciting field of enquiry in its own right.

John FieldGuest Editor