Formal Education and Training Provide only a Small Part of What is Learnt at Work - Term Paper Example

UNNING HEAD: WOҐKPLACE LEARNING Formal Education And Training Provide Only A Small Part Of What Is Learnt At Work [Name of the Writer] [Name of the Institution] Formal Education And Training Provide Only A Small Part Of What Is Learnt At Work Introduction To make some form of work-based learning available to all students, communities would need to generate a broad array of work-based placements. These placements would include unpaid internships and short-term paid internships in the summer as well as more intensive paid training experiences (e.g., 10 to 15 hours a week for at least one school year). In many communities, school-based enterprises and service learning opportunities would also be part of the mix. While the duration and scope of these experiences would vary, the emphasis would be the promotion of both confidence and specific competencies. Students would have the opportunity to work on progressively more complex tasks under the guidance of worksite mentors. Worksite learning would be closely tied to school-based learning and would be used to reinforce and put into context a student's academic experiences. Senior year projects --designed by students in collaboration with teachers and workplace staff, emphasizing the demonstration of academic and technical skills, and assessed systematically by a panel that might include employers, teachers, and fellow students -- could become the focal point for the integration of learning at school and at work. This is an argumentative paper which focus on “formal education and training provide only a small part of what is learnt at work”. The learning organisation discourse, with its attempts to systematize work-based knowledge, offers a perspective on the new vocationalism through the lenses of work places. This article is prompted by the convergence of discourses school-based and work-based that is engendered by the adaptation by workplaces of cognitive aspects of the normal grammar of schooling. This convergence of discourses is a genuine two-way street in that within education in recent times we have seen the strong influence of industry-originated ideas, such as quality standards and benchmarks, and students as customers. My focus here is on knowledge as something that both schools and workplaces claim to be central to their existence and my intention is to provide a critical survey of the literature that has shaped debate about this. In the process of examining the ramifications of this school/work convergence I raise concerns about the changing power dynamics in workplaces where knowledge workers reign supreme while their less fortunate compatriots must contend with a work life often made mindlessly routine by a pervasive technology. We have to be concerned about the ethical underpinnings of workplace knowledge as we decide upon the appropriateness of knowledge thus transacted for school purposes (here I am agreeing with Geoffrey Hinchliffe who points to the ethical dimension of work as the reason why ‘human flourishing’ has to feature as an aim of education for work—see Hinchliffe, 2004). My account proceeds under the following headings: (i) conceptions of workplace knowledge, (ii) tensions regarding knowledge at work, (iii) the nature of workplace learning, (iv) the intersection of school and work knowledge, (v) conclusion. Conceptions Of Workplace Knowledge Learning no longer precedes work but is interwoven with work on a lifelong basis. Workplaces are engines of learning as well as production, and more and more jobs require "multi skilling." Learning on the job is about crossing the boundaries between vocational training and working life (Huuhka & Saukkonen, 2007) An adult educational institute that is oriented to the daily practices of working life and the improvements needed therein can facilitate reaching an understanding that crossing the boundary between vocational training and working life is an opportunity for change and learning. Cooperation between educational institution and workplace ought to take place at the workplace or in associated networks. Crossing the boundaries that separate institutions, transitions, and the tools with which they are made to happen become important in the development of apprenticeship training (Huuhka & Saukkonen, 2007). When full competence is demonstrated primarily at work, learning on the job makes it possible to recognize, understand, and increase competencies (Gunnar, 2004). On-the-job learning is not only learning by doing but also analyzing theory and practice activities and sharing experience with others. Identifying the key tasks of a particular profession in a particular workplace allows workplace counselors and on-the-job learners to determine the goals and evaluation criteria of the on-the-job learning period. Moreover, clearly identifying the criteria makes the supervisor's or workplace counselor's job easier. Learning on the job must be considered a multiprofessional activity in which all parties benefit from each other (Gunnar et al., 2004). The on-the-job learning process can be viewed from the perspectives of students, workplace counselors, and organizations. Students adjust their learning-on-the-job goals, which are recorded in their personal study programs, to their other goals and evaluate their own learning and professional development. Students observe and discuss their own activities and emotions and those of others. They are also required to convert this into practical activity. Learning on the job is a learning process based on experience; this experience becomes knowledge and knowledge becomes practice. It can be described as a conflict between old and new procedures; learning is achieved through analyzing these conflicts. For workplace counselors, the important issues are improving one's own work and deciding what knowledge, attitudes, and procedures concerning work and duties should be transferred to the learner. For organizations, what is important is how learning on the job is related to the goals of the organization and what purpose such learning serves in the organization (Huuhka & Saukkonen, 2007). Beyond questions relating to the relative merits of theory and practice lie the question of forms of workplace knowledge and power. Knowledge work has a strong white-collar connotation, sometimes substantially at the expense of blue-collar work. Knowledge itself can be taken to be a cold, abstract matter that does not have the same emotional resonance as craft, with its existential connotations and its association with unions. There are issues of identity to be resolved here. For the craft worker, work and being are inextricably intertwined. Work is an expression of the inner. As transfers of skill are made from people to machines, the craft worker sees the source of his or her identity and power on the shop floor slip away. Work that was once complex is now rendered routine. Cook (1996) explains that in important ways, craft knowledge constitutes property to those who own it, and hence, in the face of the ascendancy of the knowledge-based workplace, resistance in defence of such property, whether expressed on non-expressed, should be expected. In the next section of the paper, tensions attending conceptions of work based knowledge are addressed. These tensions are often of a political nature. Tensions Regarding Knowledge At Work The schemata of knowledge work discussed above uncover political tensions that have epistemological correlates. What constitutes knowledge or what knowledge is of worth are questions that inevitably come to the surface (see Lewis, 1993). Barnett addresses issues of this kind. He points out that knowledge is a changeable concept, dependent on assumptions held by society at any given point in time. Thus, while in the previous one hundred years knowledge had come to be understood as the product of research, within recent times information systems have emerged as a new source of knowledge production. Thus, ‘For many fields of knowledge the use of the computer in some form has come to be taken as a likely, if not a necessary, condition of valid knowledge’ (Barnett, 2000, p. 15). He identifies what he takes to be points of tension regarding whether or not knowledge gains validity only when it is made public, to be captured in the form of propositions or theories that have their own tests of truth, or whether, following Michael Polanyi, knowledge can be tacit, derived in situ and yielded not through a mechanism of propositions or theory, but through ‘direct engagements with the world in particular settings as they arise, especially in the domain of work’ (Polanyi, 1966, p. 17). It should be noted that it is not clear that the position of Polanyi is opposed in the manner that Barnett suggests—that is, that the publicity of forms of knowledge denies the possibility of tacit knowledge. Barnett seems to be working with a different conception of what is meant by ‘public’. But it is the general line of Barnett’s argument that is of interest here. Barnett is supportive of claims to validity offered in support of knowledge at work but suggests that it should not suffice merely to argue that working knowledge is its own proof. He asks how we are to know that we are in the presence of knowledge when it is transacted through work. What are the tests of truth of this claimant to knowledge? Barnett points out that where propositional knowledge is made public, and subject to scrutiny, some forms of knowledge at work are deliberately kept secret by companies, their researchers being able to reveal only limited accounts of findings and ideas being patented to avoid replication, all in the interests of competitive edge. It could be argued that firms are not in the business of knowledge production for its own sake. They must yield to the brutal dictates of competition and must protect the sources of their success. Barnett’s cautions cannot be lightly dismissed, however, especially where the secrecy of firms about their data conflicts with public health and safety considerations. In the United States, the suppression by tobacco firms of findings about the addictive effects of nicotine hindered the attempts of public health officials to curb cigarette smoking among the public at large. Had such findings been subject to public scrutiny, the task of health officials would have been made decidedly easier. There is also the problem that, beyond secrecy, firms may manipulate the conditions under which their products must perform. For example, they can shape public taste through clever marketing. In these circumstances, it is reasonable to interrogate the epistemological merit of knowledge that is confined to the firm. Ethical issues are evident here. Anthony Carnevale, Leila Gainer and Ann Meltzer presented what in the United States has become a well-known schema of the skills employers want that is both prototypic for and congruent with new conceptions of the knowledge economy and of the learning organisation. Their reasoning is that in a learning organisation, where flexibility and quick-change are keys to competitiveness, workers must be intellectually nimble. Thus, they must be equipped with basic skills of generic character, such as team-work, creative thinking and problem-solving (Carnevale, Gainer and Meltzer, 1988, p. 3). These so-called ‘basic skills’ are an admixture of cognitive competences as well as affective capabilities, informed by emerging, more expansive conceptions of intelligence such as can be seen in the formulation of Howard Gardner (1999). Excluded are practice-based skills. Included in the reckoning is not just what the worker can do, but whether he or she has the temperament to fit into the new socio-technical production regimes. While these skill clusters may appear, on the face of it, to be liberal, the purpose for which they are intended in the workplace is decidedly instrumental. The downgrading of the importance of practical skill has now penetrated German apprenticeship, long the global prototype of craft enactment (see the issues in Finegold and Wagner, 2002). Gary Herrigel and Charles Sabel (1999) speak of a crisis in craft production in Germany, owing to competitive pressures resulting from new learning organisation methodologies. They point out that German apprenticeship had gained competitive edge in Fordist times by reuniting the conception and execution of work in the person of the skilled craft worker. But the adaptation of new, lean production methods by competitors such as the United States and Japan, premised on flexibility and teamwork, had exposed rigidities in the German approach to skills production, a primary example of which was ‘the continued practical and cultural salience of skill distinctions within German workplaces’ (Herrigel and Sabel, 1999, p. 81). While tacit knowledge, a hallmark of craft, features in conceptions of workplace knowledge (for example, Barnett, 2000), its relative status as knowledge is an unsettled point in the discourse on the knowledge economy and learning organisations. Paul Hager (2003) offers an interesting account of how we should view it. His critique is on three counts: (a) that tacit knowledge is a poorly specified concept, (b) that it often seems to constitute merely the renaming of a problem, and (c) that the mere act of so renaming problems often serves to close off inquiry. Hager offers the development of practical judgment as a way to reason about the development of workplace expertise. He draws on research evidence to support the contention that knowledge that is made public or explicit is better understood and learned. Other things being equal that may well be so. But the essence of tacit knowing is its latency. Thus Hager seems to be taking issue not just with the imprecision with which tacit knowledge is characterised but with whether such knowledge exists at all. In my view the fact that tacit knowing defies operational definition does not disprove its existence. Here I am in sympathy with arguments offered by Stella Gonza´lez Arnal and Steve Burwood (2003) that resist current impulses towards knowledge transparency. There is indeed case evidence of knowledge-creating companies finding ways to get craft workers to make their tacit knowledge more public and susceptible to computerisation to the mutual benefit of both parties (see Nonaka, Umemoto and Sasaki, 1998; also Von Krogh, Ichijo and Nonaka, 2000). This, of course, is a real dilemma for craft workers who must understand, in the face of compelling evidence, the futility of their attempting to hold out against a relentless technological determinism. To make their peculiar knowing public is to risk having it appropriated. They thereby lose an important political bargaining chip on the shop floor and with that also their sense of agency. This is not a reactionary insight. There is evidence that professional worker, like craft workers must now contend with attempts to make public their tacit understandings. We may rightly call this an attempt to separate expertise from the experts. Morten Hansen, Nitin Nohria and Thomas Tierney (1999) describe efforts in the American health industry to capture the tacit knowledge of doctors for the creation of knowledge bases, so that less experienced health care workers can give advice that, arguably, is expert based. To the extent that inroads are made here, doctors will begin to lose their traditional control of their work circumstances. The claims to knowledge that are now made on behalf of workplace practices are claims that should not go unchallenged. Workplaces are political spaces; they are not, therefore, bastions of neutrality. Skill and knowledge in the workplace are objects of contestation. Thus, workers and employers may come to quite different assessments regarding the worth of knowledge created on the job. It may be in the interest of employers to understate or undervalue worker contributions. Jo¨rge Sandberg (2000) shows that when one looks at human competence at work through the lenses of interpretation, the picture that emerges is one that is qualitatively more interesting than that yielded by rationalistic means. He cautions against the ‘dualistic ontology’ that separates competence into worker and work. This is an insight we also see in Lum (2003). The lesson here is that knowledge that derives from work must be substantially mediated by those who perform the work. As an educator, I am much more drawn to schemata, such as that advanced by Joseph Raelin (1997), that look more closely at the worker through psychological lenses, allowing that tacit and explicit knowing are complementary dimensions of meaning-making in the workplace. I am also partial to accounts (for example, Lum, 2003) that do not objectify workers, but rather view them in humanistic terms, understanding that work for them is much more than an act of profit making. The Intersection Of School And Work Knowledge So far the focus here has been upon knowledge as it is conceived in the context of work and organisations. The epistemological ground traversed in the process can be seen to intersect substantially with terrain one would cover were the backdrop of the discourse the world of schooling rather than the world of work. The grammar supporting arguments relating to what constitutes knowledge whether tacit knowledge is knowledge, the relative merits of abstract over grounded knowledge, or the role of sense perception in cognition ordinarily derive from educational philosophy and practice. But it seems clear that modes of thinking that derive from education and schooling transfer well when employed in the world of work. Interestingly, the appropriation of intellectual tools from education by the world of work has helped educators to understand better the complex nature of the processes of learning and the conditions that facilitate it. For example, group processes from industry have now become features of educational practice, learning being increasingly seen as having important social aspects. Further, that learning is enhanced when situated in practical or real-world contexts now figures prominently in conceptions of learning, as seen, for example, in the discourse of constructivism. One view that has underpinned school/work border crossings discourse is that school knowledge tends to differ in character from work-based knowledge, and hence there is need for reconciliation in the curriculum. This way of thinking has informed American school-to-work policy, and it can be seen especially in the SCANS report on what schools must do to ready school leavers for the workplace (Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, 1991). The report identified five competencies needed by high performing organisations that must now inform the school curriculum, namely: (a) management of resources of time, money, people, material; (b) interpersonal competence for working with others; (c) information acquisition and use; (d) understanding complex systems; (e) work with various technologies. These competencies were to be supported by a three-part foundation of (a) basic skills (writing, reading, oral language, arithmetic), (b) thinking skills (decision-making, problem solving, visualising, reasoning), and (c) personal skills (honesty, self-esteem, responsibility, sociability, selfmanagement). The extent of the congruence can be seen when the SCANS schema is compared with that set forth (above) by Carnevale, Gainer and Meltzer (1988). ‘Work-based learning’ was an explicit feature of the American Schoolto- Work Opportunities Act of 1994. Generally, the legislation (now abandoned) intended work-based learning to mean structured instruction that used workplaces as the site for student learning. Secondary and postsecondary institutions receiving funding under the legislation were required to include work-based learning opportunities in their curricula. W. Norton Grubb and Norena Badway provide a case account of a work based learning programme at a community college. The curriculum included a mandatory period of internship in industry. The work experiences of students varied across firms but in general responded to a common set of goals (Grubb and Badway, 1998). Researching work-based learning practice in American two-year postsecondary institutions, Debra Frankel, Russell Hamm and Kay Trinkle (1995) identified five models, namely clinical experience, cooperative education, school-based enterprise, traditional formal apprenticeship and youth apprenticeship. Whatever the model, the intent was to provide students with authentic or vicarious work-based learning experiences, to supplement conventional classroom learning. In this vein a clarion call within the American educational research community for bridging the school and work knowledge divide has come from Lauren Resnick (1987), in an address that called on schools to pay more attention to practical, everyday learning. She contends that school learning differs from learning out of school in ways that include (a) the individual nature of cognition in school versus its shared quality outside, (b) the pure approaches to thought in school versus the applied approaches outside of school, (c) the abstraction of school knowledge versus the contextualisation outside and (d) generalised learning in school versus situation-specific learning outside. Resnick is concerned not just about the disconnection between school and work cognition, but about the possibility, as she perceives it, that workplace education programmeshave too slavishly adopted the practices and assumptions of schooling. The corollary of this observation is that schools must adjust their learning agenda to become more in line with the world beyond. Resnick’s critique of conventional approaches to school knowledge and learning is on one level useful, where it calls for schools to make learning more meaningful for children by relating the curriculum to practical contexts and through social learning. But it is flawed to the extent that it fails to recognise the power of principles or theory, and the prospect of knowledge transfer, where it suggests that schools ought to abandon systematic approaches to teaching for more particular ones. It also was blind to critiques of workplace literacy approaches that narrowly circumscribed the curriculum to content related to the work at hand (especially Gowen, 1992). In the case reported by Gowen, workers expressed a preference for more ennobling literature. Where they emphasise the virtues of contextual learning, the stances taken by Resnick find support in theory and research, notably research based on notions of situated cognition (Brown, Collins and Duguid, 1989; Lave and Wenger, 1991), and on cognitive apprenticeships in communities of practice (for example, Scribner, 1984). Situated cognition theory turns on the view that learning is affected better in practical everyday contexts. For example, words are more efficiently learned in everyday contexts of verbal communication. Mathematics is made more reachable for a wider pool of children when it is introduced in the context of everyday problems and when learning is active. Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) show how commonplace learning differs from school learning, pointing to the importance of the heuristic in everyday activity. Brown, Collins and Duguid speak of learning as a process of enculturation. Learning is authentic when it is purposeful. These authors contend that many aspects of school learning are inauthentic and ‘would not make sense or be endorsed by the cultures to which they are attributed’ (Brown, Collins and Duguid, 1989, p. 34). Students misconceive what practitioners actually do. Sylvia Scribner (1984) attempts to reveal a practice basis of cognition, drawing from observations of workers on the job where the heuristics employed to solve problems (such as counting) were effective but unlike formal school methods. We may quibble over the imperfections of schemata set forth as representative of work-based knowledge. But in general what they say is that knowledge does not have to be isolated from its use. There are implications here not just for vocational education but for liberal education as well. Methods traditionally associated with vocational learning, such as authentic practical experiences drawn from work, can be adopted by the liberal curriculum as pedagogy aimed at improving the learning of academic subjects. This is not a case against abstraction in the curriculum; it is rather a challenge to an untenable stance in schools where the practical and the theoretical are held to be enemies. The convergence we see here, between school and work discourses, issues from an ironic paradox—school knowledge seeking the authenticity conferred by practical context, and workplace learning seeking the high ground of abstraction that has been a mark of school learning, but from which schools are now being diverted. Resnick warns schools that their modes of knowing do not represent everyday reality, in workplaces or elsewhere in life. The push and pull we see here are conditioned by historical epistemological tensions over what knowledge is of worth. We can better digest these tensions by next revisiting briefly some received ideas regarding the nature of knowledge, including questions regarding practice as a basis of knowing. Conclusion The modern learning organisation with its focus on knowledge has provided a forum for a renewed focus on what knowledge is of worth. While, on the one hand, we see in the discourse conceptions that seem to take a traditional line, favouring theory over practice, we also see a new willingness to value practice-based knowledge or knowledge derived from particular contexts. Questions are also reopened pertaining to claims of tacit knowing. Is such knowledge of value, though not verifiable? Amid the tensions and contestations, we see that workplace-based learning has in fact been striving towards eclecticism in its relation to knowledge. Though the ultimate test of knowledge in the learning organisation tends to be use, we see along with this pragmatic orientation a clear valuing of liberally textured knowledge. The knowledge focus of organisations is inspiring school-based ferment in terms of what is learned and how. It is the convergence of these courses on knowledge of the school and the workplace that has been the central thesis here. One benefit of this convergence is that it helps us see more clearly the arguments of those who have been calling for a bridging of the liberal/vocational divide. In the practical context of the workplace we see that liberal learning is valued for traditional reasons, such as the flexibility it affords those in whom it resides, but also for its instrumental possibilities. This easy crossing of knowledge borders made possible by practical contexts surely must be instructive for how schools view the curriculum and how children are taught. In his Aims of Education, Alfred North Whitehead (1929) offers the insight that there is no liberal education that is not vocational, and no vocational education that does not have a liberal bearing. This is what we are coming around to, this epistemological fluidity, as scholars continue to explore the common ground shared by school-based and workplace-based discourses, and as they help us to understand better how the knowledge yielded within these contexts connects. References Argyris, C. (1994) On Organizational Learning (Cambridge, MA, Blackwell Publishers Ltd). Arnal, S. G. and Burwood, S. (2003) Tacit Knowledge and Public Accounts, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 37.3, pp. 377–391. Barnett, R. (2000) Working Knowledge, in: J. Garrick and C. Rhodes (eds) Research and Knowledge at Work (London, Routledge), pp. 15–31. Brown, J. S. Collins, A. and Duguid, P. (1989) Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning, Educational Researcher, 18.1, pp. 32–42. Carnevale, A. 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