New Network - Organizational Education

Thursday, 4 September, 15:30 - 17:00 (Part 1) and 17:15 - 18:45 (Part 2)

Chair: Dr Michael Göhlich, FAU University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
Discussant: Dr Bente Elkjaer, Aarhus University, Denmark

Location: B338 Sala de Aulas

EERA recently accepted the opening of a new EERA network on Organizational Education. It starts at ECER 2014 with an Inaugural Symposium in Sessions 10 and 11.

Organizations are an important factor of social life in modern societies. Through organizations, demands on human acting are made, and organizations can be formed with the proviso of human criteria. In the complex processes of modern societies, organizations are often granted the status of actors. Therewith organizations become addressees of reforms and actors of development and of learning processes.

Globalization, virtualization and demographic change bring plenty of changes the society of the 21st century has to adapt itself to. This also is true for its organizations, be it schools, kindergarten, youth institutions, hospitals or industrial enterprises. Today organizations (as individuals) have to orient themselves internationally and multiculturally. They have to learn to act as part of a mediatized world. They have to open new possibilities for the interplay of generations and ways of life. Additionally, the acceleration of innovations is significant. Especially in the field of vocational competences, the half-life of knowledge has rapidly decreased at the same time the demands for the flexibility of the employees and for their willingness to learn has grown enormously.

All these trends require not only individual lifelong learning but also supraindividual, collective, organizational learning processes. They require that the organizations enhance themselves. These enhancements not only technologically answer the mentioned societal trends but always imply an ethical decision. The support of such development and learning processes is an educational task.

While the educationalist knowledge about organizational learning, about its barriers and its support, is growing, it urgently needs more structured exchange on an international level. This is the aim of the new EERA-network “Organizational Education”. The network focusses organizations of all kinds from an educational perspective and thereby gives the international educationalist debate back a field which long time was lost to psychology, sociology and economics.

The inaugural symposium of the network focusses selected questions of organizational education. Some of the presenters concentrate on results on the object-level, others primarily argue methodologically. But all are interested in the relations between individual, collective and organizational learning. Valerie Drew (Stirling, UK) asks for visualizing complexity regarding the process of enacting a policy desire for professional learning. Nicolas Engel (Erlangen, Germany) discusses educational ethnography in and of organizations and escpecially cross-border organizational learning as a translational process. Didem Sözen Sahiner (Istanbul, Turkey) asks for the effect of occupational values on organizational learning in industrial and academic settings in Turkey and Germany. Lee Yu Lee and Yi Byung Jun (Pusan, Korea) discuss the development of Korean HRD towards cultures, arts, and humanities. Mi Hui Ryu and Yi Byung Jun (Pusan, Korea) report the influence of a community-of-practice towards education for sustainable development in school.

Contributors:

• Dr. Valerie Drew,  University of Stirling, UK: “Visualising complexity: Surfacing uncertainties and tensions in enacting a policy desire for professional learning”
• Dr. Nicolas Engel, FAU University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany: “Translating Organizational Learning: Educational Ethnography in and of Organizations”
• Dr. Didem Sözen Sahiner, Aydin University Istanbul, Turkey: “Occupational values and organizational learning culture: Considerations for a comparative research project in Germany and Turkey”
• Lee Yu Lee and Prof. Dr. Byung Jun Yi, Pusan National University, Korea: “HRD of Humanites - as a viewpoint of Korean discourse"
•  Mi Hui Ryu, Lee Yu Lee and Prof. Dr. Byung Jun Yi, Pusan National University, Korea: " Education for Sustainable Development, Community of Practice and Innovation in School Organization”