Losing Competence by Degrees: Visible and Invisible Aspects of Learning

Author(s):

Karen Jean Reinhard-Adler(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

20. Research in Innovative Intercultural Learning Environments

Format:

Paper

Session Information

20 SES 12, Competencies for Teaching and Learning in Research and Organizations - Exceeding These Processes in an Ethnographic Perspective

Paper/Poster Session

Time:

2016-08-26

09:00-10:30

Room:

NM-G103

Chair:

Christian Quvang

Contribution

Schooling steeps us in cultural notions of knowledge, learning, and competency - concepts bound tightly to formal education, testing, and degrees. Success (and failure) in school defines our personal notions of competency, and is the currency for promotion at work. In this paper I focus on how workers in an ethnographic study viewed their learning and how these notions related to how they learned. The data documents how workers' conceptions make learning they experience when working, unrecognizable to them as "learning:" though ubiquitous, workplace learning remains mostly "invisible." This paper focuses on this contradiction and probes the visible and invisible aspects of learning. I explore potential implications for the workplace and for higher education.

The study began with the question: How do people learn in the context of working in a dynamic, information-rich workplace? Do changes in the nature of work (from information technology and changing nature of competition (Zuboff, 1988) impact how people learn? Historically studies of workplace learning have focused on the products of learning (and reforming educational institutions accordingly) (Simon, et al.1991), not on the dynamic process by which those products emerge. Yet the changing terms of competition depend on learning that occurs within the immediate context of working (Author, 1994). What components and inter-connections create the experience of workplace learning? How does our influencing that structure foster -- or hinder -- the process?

The situated perspective (Lave and Wenger, 1991) contends that context affects how and what is learned. I use this framework to focus on the educational component of working: the experience of working produces people who know about working. I take a phenomenological perspective and tap the peculiars of the experience- the workers' felt-sense (Merleau-Ponty, 1963) of learning. The changes in workplaces driving the need for workplace learning -- changes in timing, technology, and the material and social working contexts -- are structural changes. I use a systems (Sterman, 1994) framework, which attends to the structure of any system of interrelationships that delimits its potential range of dynamic behavior. From this perspective, the critical question is: Does the nature of the structural changes in the workplace make any difference to the process of workplace learning? In our rush to implement technological changes in workplaces, are we unintentionally delimiting the very learning upon which the potential of the technology depends?

The findings on the workers’ engrained notions of knowledge, learning, and working suggest that education teaches us to value and see part of our competencies, while others, left unrecognized, become invisible to our eyes. The study raises the question: Does our definition of quality in education blind us to the breadth of human learning and competence? As we focus on testing, points, European-Union equivalencies, training-certificates and degrees, - the products of formal learning - are we overlooking dimensions of the learning process that are critical in a modern reality where rapid change and immersion in information has become the norm? Does our focus on degrees, on quality control hinder the actual process of learning? My findings suggest it does.

A model emerged that captured the process of learning as found empirically at that site. The model offers a shift in perspective by describing learning as the way individuals engage with the rich, emerging world around them to find distinctions, connections, and patterns. Through this lens, I probe the dilemmas of learning in a working community that values education, objective knowledge, quality control and competence.

Method

An in-depth qualitative ethnographic study at a multinational, multicultural factory in Ireland, I viewed everyday work as a learning experience. I researched workers’ perceptions and actions in the process of learning from information in the context of everyday work. The research provides one empirical case-study (Patton, 1990; Yin, 1994) limited to fourteen workers on one production line at one information-rich factory. The factory is pioneering the use of information technology to learn about work and to compete based on that knowledge. The way these workers' jobs changed typifies how technology can be used to invest work with information. Since the changes are recent, these workers were particularly reflective. Previously they obeyed repetitious instructions for manual radio assembly. With no training for their new job, they were expected to make sense of a wealth of information newly available to them for running the production line. These workers learned by working. I examined the relationships among workers' perceptions and behaviors, and immediate working environment. I used individual, semi-structured interviews to identify the workers' backgrounds, their concepts of learning in the workplace, and their sense of the symbolic information and of the opportunities and constraints involved in creating meaning from the technology while working. To capture aspects of the process about which workers might be unaware or that they might conceal, I used methods of participant observation to document workers' behavior on the job, and to query them about discrepancies between what they told me and what they actually did. Working aside these workers, I also gained limited first-hand experience of their jobs. Further, to understand the work context, I interviewed twelve key people in the factory with whom the workers interact, and supplemented these data with pertinent documents, work histories, product descriptions, etc., that described the workers and their work. Field data were collected intermittently during nine weeks over ten months. I either taped the data or created verbatim transcripts. I analyzed the transcribed field notes and interview transcripts inductively, using techniques to generate grounded theory (Geertz, 1973; Maxwell,1996; Schatzman an Strauss, 1973) that 1) documented salient aspects of the process by which these workers created meaning from information technology, 2) made sense of the aspects from the workers' perspectives, and 3) attended to how material, symbolic, social, dynamic and organizational aspects of the site influenced the learning process.

Expected Outcomes

Extrapolating from this practice of learning as found in a dynamic, technology-rich workplace, I draw parallels to the workplace of higher education. Our cultural concepts of learning and educational quality lead us to see and value part of how we actually learn, while invisible aspects remain discreet and underestimated. Based on the findings, I argue that the very culture that drives for tighter control over educational quality is in direct conflict with aspects of how individuals deal with diversity and how they choose to engage with their social environment while learning. Inherently personal, part of the process becomes either stifled, as students disengage, or discreet and surreptitious as aspects left unrecognized by the educational culture become invisible and divorced from our shared notions of competency. Using a conceptual lens I term Opportune Engagement, I touch upon how educators can redesign the context of higher education to support better the full range of human learning; a full discussion, however, is beyond the scope of this paper. The questions raised in this paper are important, because if we are not recognizing the full breadth of learning, the creative potential in individuals is lost to society. We value what we measure, and for purposes of intra-European and global transferability, we have gotten very good at evaluating and conferring degrees, certificates, points, etc. If the degrees we use as the currency of educational quality to be cashed in at the workplace reflect a fragment of people’s capabilities while other capabilities lay wasted or undeveloped for want of recognition, unused for lack acknowledgement, then society blocks its own access to valuable workforce resources available but invisible by degrees.

References

References Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning - Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maxwell, J.A. (1996)a. Qualitative Research Design: An interactive Approach. London: Sage Publications, Inc.. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1963). The Structure of Behavior. Boston: Beacon Press. Patton, M. (1990). Qualitative Evaluation and Research Methods. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.. Reinhard-Adler, K. (1994). Learning in Informated Workplaces. Qualifying Paper, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Schatzman, l. & Strauss, A. (1973). Field Research: Strategies for a Natural Simon, R., Dippo, D. & Schenke, A. (1991). Learning Work: A Critical Pedagogy of Work Education. New York: Bergin and Garvey. Sociology, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall. Sterman, J. (1994). Learning in and about Complex Systems. System Dynamics Review, 10 (2/3), Summer/Fall, 291-330. Yin, R.K. (1994). Case study Research: Design and Methods. (2nd edition) Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, Inc.. Zuboff, S. (1988). In the Age of the Smart Machine: the Future of Work and Power. New York: Basic Books.

Author Information

Karen Jean Reinhard-Adler (presenting / submitting)

Learning Centered Research & C., Ed.D Harvard University

Director

Unterlunkhofen

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