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Abstracts
Volume 35, Number 1, Spring 2003
[ Mary Jane Curry ] [ Margaret Somerville and Lena Abrahamsson ] [ Valerie-Lee Chapman ] [ Richard Edwards ] [Arthur Gould ]
Skills, Access and ‘Basic Writing’: a community college case study
from the United States
As policymakers in many parts of the world, including the United
Kingdom, push for widening participation in higher education, the preparation of
diverse students for the communicative demands of the academy becomes
increasingly salient. As greater numbers of ‘non-traditional’ students, who may
be unfamiliar with the conventions of academic communication, enter higher
education, discussions about explicitly teaching academic literacy have
increased. A ‘skills’ conception of learning concurrently dominates governmental
and policy discourses. In response, this article argues against the use of the
skills model in teaching academic writing by drawing on a case study of a
‘basic’ (pre-university level) writing course for English language learners (ELLs)
at a US community college. In particular, it examines the use of a version of
the ‘skills model’ to teach writing to ‘non-traditional’ students. It concludes
that in the context of this case study, in which students had varied backgrounds
and educational goals, the skills model was insufficient for teaching writing
and helping students gain access to the discourses of tertiary education.
Trainers and Learners Constructing a Community Of Practice: masculine
work cultures and learning safety in the mining industry
This article begins with the practical problem of the failure of
training in safe work practices to result in changes to the rate of accident and
injury in mining workplaces. A review of the literature in workplace training
and workplace learning suggests that there has been little investigation of the
relationship between how trainers train, and what learners learn in the
workplace. Interviews and participant observation were carried out with 20 mine
workers in a coal-mining organisation and seven trainers in a Mines Rescue
Service about masculine work cultures and teaching and learning safety in the
mining industry. In this article we analyse the cultures of mine work in which
trainers and mine workers operate and specifically, their responses about their
teaching and learning practices. Analysis suggests that even though trainers and
workers do not work in the same organisation or geographical location, they
co-participate in the ongoing construction of a community of practice that
reinforces strong implicit masculine storylines. Mine workers were found to
learn safety through the experience of doing their work, while trainers report
safety training using simulated environments and codified practice.
Understanding how mine workers learn safety in the workplace, within a community
of practice, is critical to attempts to improve safety training and safety
records.
On ‘Knowing One’s Self’ selfwriting, power and ethical practice:
reflections from an adult educator
Adult educators are increasingly concerned with issues of power and
identity. Drawing on my research text, The Body’s Tale, and Foucault’s writings,
I explore how pastoral power effects construct subjectivities in learners. Using
three genealogical narratives from my text – eating, elimination and ‘swarming’
– I show how we can interrupt our own self-regulation; I suggest we can surface
our exercise of power in our daily work, and through self-writing, or askesis,
the discipline and care of the self, develop an embodied ethical practice
Ordering Subjects: actor-networks and intellectual technologies
in lifelong learning
This article explores the relationship between changes in governing
and the significance of lifelong learning for this. Drawing on Foucault’s
notions of governmentality and technologies of the self, and concepts derived
from actor-network theory, I argue that discourses of lifelong learning act as
intellectual technologies through which there is the attempt to fashion certain
networks and order socialities. In the process of representing and mobilising
lifelong learning new orderings for the conduct of conduct are produced, which
provide possibilities for subjectivity in alignment with a moral economy of
enterprise, in which the self becomes something to work on. I also point to the
fragility of such actor-networks as the processes of representation become
more diffuse and subject to (dis)orders. Theoretically, the paper is attempting
to work beyond the binaries of subject-object, nature-society, structure-agency.
Its concern is with the socio-rhetorical work in the intellectual technologies
with which we engage in and around lifelong learning and the exercises of power
at a distance that are involved in the discursive work of the notion of lifelong
learning itself.
Study leave In Sweden
This article investigates how well the Swedish law on Educational
Leave, passed in 1974, functions. A 1994 Commission Report into different forms
of employee entitlement to leave – including Study Leave – is outlined, as well
as responses to its recommendations. An examination of two sources of
statistical information shows that about one per cent of the work force is on
study leave at any one time. Women are shown to benefit from study leave more
than men and manual workers more than salaried ones. A literature review,
together with the results of interviews carried out with a range of policy
actors, suggests that Swedish employees experience few problems with their
employers in applying for leave but that issues of student finance have not been
fully dealt with. While study leave in Sweden has not met its original grand
aims, it functions well as a complement to other lifelong learning measures.
