Search Results for
"learning"

As more teachers move into new areas such as enterprise-based workplace education, concerns have been expressed regarding the deprofessionalisation of their work. This article explores an approach to workplace education, within a manufacturing environment, which not only re-defines the work of teachers In ways which utilise, enhance and extend their skills, but also values the role of professional educators in advising industry personnel on matters relating to learning and assisting in the development of learning frameworks. It is argued that when competence is contextualised and viewed holistically, and the subsequent training program is based on the complex reality of the particular workplace, all the professional skills of teachers are required to design effective learning strategies. If the resultant educational program is also to be responsive to the needs of the learners and sufficiently flexible to encompass changes in the workplace as they occur, its development and implementation will pose a unique challenge to teachers.

In the last decade in Australia there has been a significant emphasis placed on vocational education and training. More recently within this context there has been renewed interest in apprenticeship training which has both formal learning (in a technical and further education college), and informal learning (in the workplace) components. This article, which draws on the perspectives of both apprentices and their workplace trainers from six industrial sites, is focused on the extent to which apprentices and their workplace trainers perceived the workplace to be a learning context. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analysed. The findings of the study indicated that, in a context where production is valued over learning, a number of effective learning processes are underdeveloped and undervalued. © 1997 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

States that health systems globally are in transition, for which also a correspondingly reformed education is required, involving new - and renewed - basic sciences, principles, skills and methods. To that end, demonstrates how problem-based learning in general practice is almost ideal, although still sparsely implemented, and has much in common with health care quality assurance. Contends that primary care in many ways comprises the most important platform and vehicle of modern health services and their interaction with the population. Uses the example of the Faculty of Health Sciences in Linköping, where all curricula are integrated, community-oriented, problem-based and have a focus on primary care and general practice. Represents a useful and hitherto insufficiently recognized widening of the overall field of health care quality assurance, and summarizes some of the experiences therein. Also provides a brief overview of the literature. © 1996, MCB UP Limited

[No abstract available]

1996 marks the 10th anniversary of the National Council for Vocational Qualifications, the body responsible for a national framework of competency-based education and training in the United Kingdom. Concurrently, the qualifications are being highlighted as they are developed at professional levels 4 and 5.The anniversary was preceded by a plethora of reports. Beaumont flagged up issues of validity, reliability and quality control in relation to the organisational structure of the framework. The Institute of Employment Studies noted that there had only been a marginal increase in the number of employers implementing the qualifications and the Higher Education Quality Council began the process of persuading the higher education sector by noting the positive contributions that competency-based assessment processes could make. However, there remain very real issues to debate. Whether knowledge and understanding can be ‘inferred’ from performance. Whether the qualifications are suitable for the complexities of professional performance. Above all, whether policy-making over the last decade has been thinking along the right lines. This paper explores those issues. © 1996 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

The authors school-to-career approach that inseparable from a strategy for high school reform. They feel that this proposal, which is based on their research and experience assisting schools, can accomodate the rising ambitions of adolescents and can also carry the reform banner of contextual experiential learning further into the schools.

A Staff Development Forum for the post-16 sector has recently been established. It will examine the need for a more coherent approach to staff training and professional development, including the introduction of ‘national standards’ in the form of National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs). This paper argues that there is, indeed, an urgent need to consider the case for some form of consensus about what constitutes best practice in teaching. But a proper consideration must begin from a conceptualisation of teaching as professional practice. Three typical characteristics of professional practice are examined for their relevance to teaching: ethical values, autonomous pragmatism and the pursuit of expertise, together with the question of whether current NVQs can provide an account of these characteristics. The conclusion drawn is that methodological inadequacies of a conceptual, psychological and epistemological nature prevent them from doing so, and that these inadequacies derive from the role of competence-based qualifications in New Right social and educational policy. The potential effect of devising qualifications using the current competence-based approach is a reconceptualisation of teaching and learning as technical procedures, and of teachers as technicians. Unless resisted, this will achieve the ideological intention of subordinating the practice of teachers to direct political and managerial control, thus rendering teachers and learners less independent and autonomous, more impotent. © 1996 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

A theory of competitive advantage requires a theory of the development and utilization of productive resources. The empirical foundations for such a theory are the comparative experiences of the most successful economies. This paper presents comparative and historical evidence on the development experiences of the USA, Germany, and Japan that demonstrates that the social organization of enterprises, regions, and nations is integral to successful economic development and sustained competitive advantage. Fundamental conditions that characterize this social organization are 'organizational integration', which provides people with the abilities and incentives to develop and utilize productive resources, and 'financial commitment', which provides ongoing control over the money required to develop and utilize productive resources. Using this framework, the paper shows how the economies of the USA, Germany, and Japan outcompeted the British economy early in this century, and why more recently Japan has been outcompeting the USA and Germany. Besides providing foundations for a theory of economic development in which innovation and organizational learning play central roles, this paper suggests that what neoclassical economists call imperfections in financial, labor, and product markets may not be imperfections in economic activity but improvements in social organization that foster, technological innovation and economic development. Policy debates over employment and governance systems that can best promote economic development and sustained competitive advantage should focus on building appropriate social organizations rather than on ridding the economy of imperfect markets.

To understand the nature of learning in workplaces and how this learning might be improved, it is useful to view the activities that learners engage in as key units of curriculum. These learning experiences, which workers engage in as part of everyday work practice, should be conceptualised as goal-directed activity shaped by the context and requirement of the particular community of practice in which those activities occur. This paper draws upon current theorising and empirical work in order to provide an initial model of a workplace learning curriculum. The model suggests that learning rather than teaching should be at the core of concepts of curriculum. Commencing with a review of goals for vocational expertise, learning through goal-directed activity and a synthesis of some recent research into learning in workplaces a tentative model of workplace learning is advanced. Features of this model include guided participation in the everyday activities of the workplace with explicit interventions aimed at providing access to forms of knowledge which remain opaque and also the development of procedures. The overall structure of the learning arrangements is referred to as the learning curriculum with activities being advanced as key components of the curriculum model. Although founded within workplace communities of practice, this model may well have wider applications. © 1996, Taylor and Francis Inc. All rights reserved.

It is the thesis of this paper that the time has come for business schools to rethink the purpose of their establishment. They need to reflect upon the professional foundations of management education through rethinking a new philosophy of knowledge which is suitable for professional education and through reviving it at a higher status than vocational training. The future of management education, we believe, depends upon a rethinking of the theory of knowledge that guides the increasing interests in managerial learning and training.