Lifelong learning in the workplace? Challenges and issues

Abstract

There is much scepticism about the concept of lifelong learning within both the educational literature and the literature on work. Certainly, many work arrangements discourage learning, let alone lifelong learning. Nevertheless, there are also work situations in which significant learning occurs. However, even in instances where work arrangements are more favourable for learning, there does not seem to be wide recognition that this is the case. This paper suggests that this reflects the fact that learning is widely misunderstood. The common-sense view of learning as a product gives many types of learning a bad press, including learning at work and lifelong learning. However, when the process aspects of learning are given due attention, as in the emerging view of learning outlined in this paper, much learning, including informal workplace learning at its best, is accurately described as a form of lifelong learning.

Practicing physiotherapy in Danish private practice: an ethical perspective

“…This places the physiotherapists within a dilemma: do considerations for beneficence towards the patient or for oneself carry most weight? However, this discussion must be seen in the light of the ongoing trend of lifelong learning (Hager, 2004;Jørgensen, 2007;The European Commission, 2011), where education seems to be the answer to every question in modern society in general, and within the healthcare sector in particular; confer the pervasive concept called education of patients and relatives (Glasdam et al, 2010).…”

Toward Enriched Conceptions of Work Learning: Participation, Expansion, and Translation Among Individuals With/In Activity

“…A focus on the individual also disregards the role of sociocultural participation, the collective interplay of minds, bodies, tools and action in work learning. The acquisitive notion of knowledge has been refuted by critics given individuals' apparent inability to carry knowledge across space and time (Hager, 2004). Folk wisdom simply admits "use it or lose it": human experience suggests knowledge is embedded in everyday action, not in heads or even in bodies as dislocated skills.…”

“…That is, the progressive possibilities for both individual and social change remain vague unless these dynamics are more closely understood. For these reasons contemporary theories of learning in work tend to have shifted from individualism to social learning perspectives (Sawchuk, 2003), from acquisitional to practice-based conceptions (Hager, 2004), and from atomistic to comprehensive systemic analyses that also account for micro-interactions within activity (Engeström, 2001). In addition, power relations are increasingly analysed so that learning theories address politics of knowledge, production and social difference that shape everyday activity and the learning generated within it.…”

Making to measure? Reconsidering assessment in professional continuing education

“…Yet a general turn to practice-based perspectives of workplace learning discussed further on has generated wide acceptance that knowledge is embedded in everyday action, not in heads or even in bodies as dislocated skills. To view learning as limited to an individual consciousness 'acquiring' new knowledge and then 'carrying' it across time and space is to ignore growing evidence that knowledge is enacted and improvised within situational relations (Hager, 2004). Professionals collectively construct, modify, resist, and select different meanings of knowledge within the complex dilemmas of the everyday.…”

“…Recent scholarship in work learning tends to accept that the learning process is distributed -that is, it is simultaneously both individual and collective, and that it cannot be valued apart from the contexts with which it is mutually constitutive: everyday action, planning, conversation, projects, problem-solving, instruction, reading, and online activity (Hager, 2004;Bratton et al, 2003;Sawchuk, et al 2006). Amidst this scholarship increasing emphasis has been accorded to objects, to the material dimensions of learning and knowledge circulation, with the recognition that workplace practice represents a commingling of human and nonhuman entities that cannot be understood through analyses limited to social or constructivist perspectives of knowledge.…”