| Path: Home > Book Shop > Journals > Studies in the education of adults > Back Issues > Abstracts Vol36#1 |
Abstracts
Volume 36, Number 1, Spring 2004
 | The significance of individual biography in workplace learning |
| ‘Good luck and you’ll be welcome back’: Manual workers and study leave in Sweden |
| A capital project? ‘The New Deal for Musicians’ in Scotland |
| Recognition of prior vocational learning in Sweden |
| Visual imagery, lifecourse structure and lifelong learning |
| Telling stories of research |
| Teachers of adult education in British universities 1948-1998 |
The significance of individual biography in workplace learning
Phil Hodkinson, Heather Hodkinson, Karen Evans, Natasha Kersh, Alison Fuller,
Lorna Unwin And Peter Senker
In this paper we address a perceived gap in the workplace learning literature, for there is very little writing which successfully integrates the issues of individual learners into predominantly social theories of learning. The paper draws upon data from four linked research projects to address this problem. Following an analysis of the theoretical problems and a possible solution, the paper identifies and discussed four overlapping individual dimensions to workplace learning. They are: workers bring prior knowledge, understanding and skills which contribute to their learning; the habitus of workers influences the ways they co-construct and take advantage of opportunities for learning at work; the dispositions of individual workers contribute to the co-production and reproduction of the workplace culture; and belonging to a workplace community contributes to the developing identity of the workers themselves.
‘Good luck and you’ll be welcome back’: Manual workers and study leave in
Sweden
Arthur Gould
Sweden’s law giving all employees the right to study leave was introduced in 1974. This article is a report of qualitative interviews carried out with 19 manual workers from five trade unions in an industrial town. Respondents had attended a wide range of academic, vocational and trade union courses in recent years. Few had experienced any problems obtaining leave from their employers. Courses lasted from three days to three years. Student finance was a problem for many of those taking academic courses but some of the interviewees obtained grants or earning-related benefits from the state or compensation for loss of income from their employers or their unions. Most of the women had attended academic courses to enhance their careers, most of the men had attended union courses which did not. In reporting their own experiences and those of others, the overwhelming view to emerge from the respondents was that the right to study leave was positive, essential and significant.
A capital project? ‘The New Deal for Musicians’ in Scotland
Martin Cloonan
This article is based on empirical research conducted in Scotland between 2000 and 2002 into the New Deal for Musicians (NDfM) - a UK government training scheme for unemployed musicians which forms part of the ‘Welfare to Work’ initiative. It argues that while the NDfM forms part of a wider lifelong agenda within current adult education policy based on developing human capital, the scheme is successful only when it manages to move beyond that narrow base to embrace social and (sub)cultural capital. As such, the programme lays down fundamental challenges to current UK lifelong learning policy and thus has important implications for adult educators.
Recognition of prior vocational learning in Sweden
Per Andersson, Andreas Fejes And Song-Ee Ahn
Initiatives in the recognition of prior learning (RPL) have been taken in Sweden in recent years, mainly focusing on prior vocational learning among immigrants. The government started different projects to find methods for recognising a person’s prior learning in the field of vocational competence. This article presents a study of how these projects were organised and their starting points. Differences are identified concerning whether they were integrated with, or parallel to, the school system, and whether the starting point was a few vocations or a number of different vocations (depending on the background of the participants). The article then looks at some problems that arise when trying to recognise prior learning. We find that knowledge of the Swedish language is essential in this process, but that the demands are flexible and the criteria informal. The article also discusses the relationship between RPL and the educational system, where most of the projects had problems in not being too influenced by the school tradition where the main documentation of competence is grades. Finally, the article discusses conditions for the development of trust in RPL.
Visual imagery, lifecourse structure and lifelong learning
Tom Schuller
Imagery could add an extra dimension to analyses of lifelong learning, which need to draw on diverse sources and techniques. This article has two principal components. First I suggest that the use of images might be divided into three categories: as illustration; as evidence; and as heuristic. I go on to explore the latter two categories, first by discussing Philippe Aries’ use of pictorial evidence to explore how children were not differentiated from adult life and learning in mediaeval times, and second by presenting five images which in my view open up fresh lines of thinking about adult learning. These include historical images of the lifecourse as a whole, and contemporary pictures such as those by Norman Rockwell and Frida Kahlo, which can enhance our analyses of age and period effects.
Telling stories of research
Debra Evelyn
Experimental narrative forms of writing research can offer empowering representations for adult education and feminist researchers. This article presents a selection of academic storytelling in the form of scanned transcript poems or ‘Learning stories’, produced through interviews with women who participated in a special access program in rural New South Wales, Australia. I suggest that such forms can allow the ‘voices’ of those researched to express both individual and collective experience in concise and unique ways, cutting across arbitrary divisions between public and private, objective and subjective. The form not only offers wider audiences for academic writing about the education of adults, but is also potentially liberating for those within the academic context who wish to read and produce research in different but representative ways. Finally I discuss some of the controversial questions raised by poetic narratives as academic writing, proposing that their production is a form of analysis, which does not overwhelm the data with the researcher’s narrative, and that they are indeed a legitimate form of research that generates knowledge. I propose that the potential applications for such research writing methods are still emerging in adult education and beyond.
Teachers of adult education in British universities 1948-1998
Sarah Speight
The role and position of liberal non- or semi-vocational adult education (LAE) within English university provision is endlessly debated, centred upon policy and funding issues in Higher Education (HE). This debate seldom descends to delivery level to relate strategy to the experiences of a largely part-time, casually employed tutor body. This is despite the historic reliance of LAE upon part-timers and ‘enlightened amateurs’. Examination of the tutor body reveals groups with distinct motivations, aims and objectives, diversity that is both a strength and a weakness. The ability to innovate and to respond rapidly to social change is balanced against potential alienation from mainstream university practice and quality procedures. Policy may be formulated at national and institutional level but its success is hugely dependent upon the goodwill of these diverse practitioners.
