INSTITUCIONAL (SEVRI) D-3-2005-CO-DFOE

Discussed in the previous section are the factors that promote either expansive or restrictive learning. Developing on from these themes are studies that argue individual agency and the learner’s current dispositions to learning can influence engagement and facilitate or restrict learning. Billett (2002:29), as Vygotsky argues, “guidance by others, situations and artefacts are central to learning in the workplace

because the knowledge to be learned is historically, culturally, and situationally constituted”. Opportunities afforded to individuals to participate and learn through

work are shaped by workplace norms and practices that are ultimately designed to sustain the work practice. They are also distributed in ways that reflect political and power relationships (Bierema, 2001). This presents one side of the reciprocal process of participation and learning. Billett (2002) argues that individual agency also mediates engagement with activities and what is learned through participation.

Individuals may elect to engage fully in some components of vocational activities, whilst participating less willingly in others. How they engage in and learn from work activities is determined by what they are being afforded as meeting their needs. Of significance is the interaction between individual’s agencies and the affordances of the social practice that are reciprocal and negotiated, yet will undergo constant transformation. Studies have found individuals to be most interested when engaging with workplace learning that supports their continuity (e.g. sustained employment, promotion, transfer and personal goals) (Billett, 2004: 235). Tensions arise when the kinds of participation individual’s desire are not afforded by the workplace. A worker’s pursuit of promotion and learning of the skills required for promotion might be inhibited by workplace practices (pp 238). Engagement in social practice can also

79 be influenced by the individual’s values, beliefs and sociocultural background (Mak et al, 1998). The term Billett uses to illustrate how the workplace affords participation and how individuals elect to participate in that social practice is ‘coparticipation’. He also found that what is learnt in the workplace is not necessarily easily transferable to other contexts and proposed that initiatives be designed to encourage this to happen (see 2002 and 2004 articles).

Other writers argue that a learner’s current dispositions to learning (or work) can be better understood through their past lives, including their position in relation to various fields that they occupied, together with their experiences and interactions with others, in the past and the present (Hodkinson and Hodkinson, 2003). They suggest that much workplace learning literature drawn predominantly from the participatory perspective focuses primarily on the workplace itself. For example in Engstrom’s (2001) writings, the ‘subject’ is seen as part of the activity system to which he/she/they belong, but the nature of these subjects as people, with biographies and identities developed partly outside those systems is largely absent. Billett (2001) has also been criticised for focusing on those factors within the workplace that either facilitate or constrain individuals’ participation in work and consequently their learning. They state that his work does not explore in detail the ways in which already developed and developing worker biographies contribute to their affordances and interdependencies.

Hodkinson and Hodkinson (2003:5) contend that individuals are separate from their places of work, as well as being integrated into it: ‘They can and do step outside the

workplace, but cannot step outside the social structures that are a part of their habitus and identity. They are thus part of and separate from the workplace

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community’. In an ESRC funded research project titled ‘Improving incentives for learning in the workplace’, Hodkinson and Hodkinson (2003) focus on secondary

school teachers’ learning and the factors that influence it. Their research illustrates that evolving habitus influences individual current dispositions towards learning. They were interested in how individual teachers learn and primarily focused on the subject department within the school in which the teacher was employed and the place of both within the broader UK policy related to teacher learning. They found it impossible to separate the learning careers of individual workers or the communities of practice they inhabit from the wider contextual issues. These broader contexts provide both tensions and opportunities for communities and their individual members (Hodkinson and Hodkinson, 2003:17). Broader contextual influences as well as the relationships within the community contribute to the composition of community practices and to individual dispositions, therefore have a significant bearing on workplace learning (pp19). Hodkinson and Hodkinson contend there is a need to develop participatory perspectives on learning to accommodate this crucial conjunction.

Some writers however are wary of excessive individualism or voluntarism, they are concerned that an overemphasis on the individual can divert attention from the influence of the organisational and wider institutional context in which work occurs. Fuller and Unwin (2004:133) use the metaphor ‘learning territory’ to infer that every individual has, and has had access to a (unique) range of learning opportunities, whether it be in the region of education, home or workplace. They argue that the character and scope of the individual’s learning territory (as well as how they respond to it) influences how he or she perceives or engages with opportunities and barriers to learning at work. Evans et al (2006) similarly believe that it is necessary to take a

81 more holistic and integrated approach to understand and improve workplace learning. This involves viewing workplace learning as taking place at three overlapping scales of activity. The first two concern the context of learning and the third the way in which individual workers interact with the opportunities afforded them. According to some theorists, experience and reflection are fundamental elements of the learning process (Hager,2004; Dewey, 1916, Kolb, 1984). As discussed previously, education can help provide expansive learning opportunities for managers, especially when experience and reflection are designed into the programme of study.