Understanding Learning at Work

Citation

Mumford, A. (2001), "Understanding Learning at Work", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 33 No. 7, pp. 270-273. https://doi.org/10.1108/ict.2001.33.7.270.3

David Boud has made many contributions to the theories of, concepts about and practices involved in work‐based learning. This book provides another significant contribution. With his co‐editor he has collected a number of authors primarily from their own country, Australia, with single contributions from the UK, New Zealand and the USA. While the authors are predominantly Australian, this rarely leads to explicit cultural problems. This is partly because the authors are widely read outside their own country. It is perhaps more concretely affected by the fact that they are mainly dealing with ideas, concepts and theories rather than specific work practices.

One other fact about the authors, however, may be seen as a limiting though not necessarily totally disabling factor. They are all academics. Moreover they write about the issues primarily in terms of concepts or theories, with occasional excursions into specific practical illustrations. In a book of this kind I have no problem with all the contributors being academics; a contribution from any intellectual consultant or training manager would have been welcome but is not a prerequisite. The book, however, would have been helped if there had been, in at least some of the chapters, a more direct association between the theories and issues being discussed and issues about the design of effective programmes of learning at work. While the editors quite reasonably say that they are not offering prescriptions, there is a paradox involved in the absence of the application of the theories. Since many of the issues and theories of workplace learning they describe emphasise the issues of learning at work being centred on and derived from practical experiences, it would have been an even better book if it had carried out this aspect of learning theory.

I do not intend this last comment to put off readers of this journal from accessing the book. They may not want to read all of it, but for thoughtful trainers, educators and developers there is material here that would well justify not just the purchase price but the time involved in reading some or all of it. My continuing experience is that in our field too few people really understand why they use the processes they do to facilitate the learning of others. In the field of formal education, for example, in a piece of research I conducted with Professor John Burgoyne on the use of the case study, it was clear that most of the people we interviewed had no theoretical understanding of or justification for the method they were employing. What they had mostly was a simple‐minded view that case studies were popular and worked – and there had been little occasion for anyone to ask them for stronger evidence about how and why the case method works. Given as various authors in this book say the increase popularity of consciously planned and operated learning at work, it is important that practitioners understand better the reasons why “it” may work. At least as important, they need to understand different varieties of “it”.

There are a number of issues arising from the various chapters which should concern any thoughtful practitioner in this field. They include, for example, discussion of whether workplace learning either generally or in a specific application is primarily concerned with improving performance for the benefit of an organisation, or more for improving learning for the benefit of the learner, or improving learning as a general proposition as a “social good”. The discussion of these purposes in the first chapter by Boud and Garrick is not only a good starting point, but in many ways might be of most practical benefit to readers of this journal. Matthews and Candy, in their chapter on the dynamics of learning and knowledge, similarly provide a very useful checklist on different aspects of the workplace as a site for learning. This would provide an admirable guide enabling thoughtful trainers to be clearer about what they are trying to achieve when they attempt to encourage learning at work. Beckett unfortunately does not sustain the stimulating promise of the title of his chapter “Past the Guru and up the Garden Path”. In fact he refers approvingly to the only three gurus he mentions, Mintzberg, Argyris and Aristotle. However, he provides a quite useful guide on how work‐based learning needs to be supported.

In my view, two of the main unstudied areas in learning are those related to gender and to culture, so I looked forward with interest to chapters dealing with these subjects. The chapter on gender by Probert makes some very powerful points about restrictions on the roles carried out by women at work, but does not deal at all with the issue of whether women learn differently at work. Similarly, the culture chapter by Solomon, while providing useful comments about culture at work, and ethnic dimensions of culture, again does not refer to consequences in learning terms. A chapter by Billett referred to approvingly by several other authors gave me the most difficulty in terms of agreeing with a number of the points he makes. He grandly dismisses the view that many activities in the workplace can be considered to be incidental, ad hoc or informal. His dismissal of this view, which is certainly one I hold, would have greater weight if he provided any reasons for his conclusion. He asserts also that learning through problem solving is a recently identified process. This is a quite unhistorical view – think of Kolb, Knowles – and even Dewey.