Understanding transitions in professional practice and learning: Towards new questions for research

The purpose of this article is to critically examine, within the context of professional practice and learning, diverse theoretical approaches that are currently prominent in researching transitions and to propose future directions for research. Much research to date on professional transitions has focused on predicting them and then preparing individual practitioners to navigate transitions as sites of struggle. The article begins by describing work contexts integral with professional transitions: regulation, governance and accountability; new work structures; and knowledge development. The discussion then examines transitions research in developmental psychology, lifecourse sociology, and career studies. These perspectives are compared critically in terms of questions and approaches, contributions to understanding professional transitions, and limitations. The implications for educators are a series of critical questions about research and education directed to support transitions in professional learning and work. Future directions and questions for research in professional transitions are suggested in the final section, along with implications for supporting professional learning in these transitions. The article is not intended to be comprehensive, but to identify issues for the reader’s consideration in thinking about various forms of transition being experienced by professions and professionals. The discussion theory-based, exploratory, and indicative rather than definitive

Performative ontologies. Sociomaterial approaches to researching adult education and lifelong learning

Sociomaterial approaches to researching education, such as those generated by actornetwork theory and complexity theory, have been growing in significance in recent years, both theoretically and methodologically. Such approaches are based upon a performative ontology rather than the more characteristic representational epistemology that informs much research. In this article, we outline certain aspects of sociomaterial sensibilities in researching education, and some of the uptakes on issues related to the education of adults. We further suggest some possibilities emerging for adult education and lifelong learning researchers from taking up such theories and methodologies. (DIPF/Orig.

Normalising standards in educational complexity: A network analysis

The proliferation of transnational workplace sites has strengthened the demands for consistent standards of practice and operation. These are increasingly applied and regulated internationally through technologies such as ISO 9000. Workplace learning programs have been designed to reduce variation in skills and procedures at the local level, and to increase individuals’ compliance with regulatory manuals, audit forms, error reports etc. Yet at the same time, a key emphasis for organizations attempting to survive amidst global competition is to increase innovation across different units and different operation levels. This push for innovation has been coupled with ideals of a learning organization wherein all employees are supposed to learn continuously, e.g. to increase variation. This paper explores the organizational tension between centrally imposed demands for both standardized practice and innovative challenges to existing standards that often produces complete separation of design and execution functions, sometimes into sites located in different countries. It shows how in practice, workers continue to experiment and learn in ways that deliberately subvert reductionist standards measures, or that produce local innovations that are unrecognized by these measures

Women learning in garment work: Solidarity and sociality

Abstract: This article explores processes and possibilities for critical learning in the workplace, with a focus on workers labouring in what are often exploitive and dehumanizing conditions. The argument is based on a study of work-life learning of women, mostly new immigrants, employed long-term at an Alberta garment manufacturing plant. It is argued that their negotiations of work conditions are nested in various areas of learning associated with everyday practices, small communities, labour organizing processes, and English learning classes. These areas are argued to have generated forms of solidarity emerging through learning about sociality, resistance, and personal worth. These solidarities appear to be configured by energies of both transformation and reproduction that are threaded together and generated simultaneously as women learned to survive within the system while supporting one another in a vital interdependent social network. The discussion explores how these dynamics unfolded, and their effects on how different women positioned themselves and their knowledge

Understanding relations of individual-collective learning in work: A review of research

Abstract: A review was conducted of literature addressing learning in work, focusing on relations between individual and collective learning published in nine journals during the period 1999-2004. The journals represent three distinct fields of management/organization studies, adult education, and human resource development: all publish material about workplace learning regularly. A total of 209 articles were selected for content analysis, containing a range of material including reports of empirical research to theoretical discussion. Eight themes of individual-collective learning were identified through inductive content analysis of this literature: individual knowledge acquisition, sensemaking/reflective dialogue, levels of learning, network utility, individual human development, individuals in community, communities of practice, and a co-participation or co-emergence theme. The discussion notes apparent lack of dialogue across the fields despite similar concepts, the ontological and ideological differences among the themes of learning currently in circulation, and the low frequency of analysis of power relations in the articles reviewed

Co-production in professional practice: a sociomaterial analysis

Co-production, typically defined as services and products that are planned and delivered in full conjunction with clients, has become a popular policy discourse and prescription for professional practice across a wide range of public services. Literature tends to herald the democratic and even transformative potential of co-production, yet there is yet little empirical evidence of its processes and negotiations at the ‘chalkface’ of everyday practice. This article adopts a sociomaterial theoretical frame of professional knowing-in-practice to analyse these negotiations, drawing from a case study of community policing. The argument is situated in terms of implications of these co-production practices for professional learning

Responsibility matters: putting illness back into the picture

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore specific instances of junior doctors’ responsibility. Learning is often understood to be a prerequisite for managing responsibility and risk but this paper aims to argue that this is insufficient because learning is integral to the management of responsibility and risk. Design/methodology/approach – This is a “collective” case study of doctors designed to focus on the interrelationships between individual professionals and complex work settings. The authors focussed on two key points of transition: the transition to beginning clinical practice which is the move from medical student to foundation training (F1) and the transition from generalist to specialist clinical practice. Findings – Responsibility in clinical settings is immediate, concrete, demands response and (in) action has an effect. Responsibility is learnt and is not always apparent; it shifts depending on time of day/night and who else is present. Responsibility does not necessarily increase incrementally and can decrease; it can be perceived differently by different actors. Responsibility is experienced as personal although it is distributed. Originality/value – This detailed examination of practice has enabled the authors to foreground the particularities, urgency and fluidity of everyday clinical practice. It recasts their understandings of responsibility – and managing risk – as involving learning in practice. This is a critical insight because it suggests that the theoretical basis for the current approach to managing risk and responsibility is insufficient. This has significant implications for policy, employment, education and practice of new doctors and for the management of responsibility and risk

Complexity science and professional learning for collaboration: a critical reconsideration of possibilities and limitations

Professionals increasingly must collaborate very closely, such as through inter-professional work arrangements. This involves learning both in and for collaboration. Some educational researchers have turned to complexity science to better understand these learning dynamics. This discussion asks, How useful is complexity science for examining professional learning in collaboration? After introducing complexity principles that appear in accounts of professional practice and education, selected studies are presented that draw from complexity science to examine professional collaboration in fields of management, social and health care, and education. A critical discussion of these studies points out oversights and limitations. Complexity theory is concluded to offer useful insights for two areas: (1) articulating complexities of professional practice and knowledge; and (2) providing educational support for professional knowing-in-undecidability. However, it is also argued that complexity analyses of professional collaboration could do much more to exploit the explanatory power of complexity concepts, by returning to rich dynamics of strong emergence in a sociomaterialist analysis, and by avoiding metaphorical uses of complexity. Used rigorously rather than romantically, complexity concepts may prove more useful not only in analysing political dynamics of collaborative professional practice, but also in opening new questions and approaches for future research in professional learning