Learning as becoming, in changing experiences of work throughout life.
Heather Hodkinson
Lifelong Learning Institute
University of Leeds
UK
Abstract
This paper looks at the nature and significance of learning at work over a long and varied career span, an area which has not been widely addressed in the workplace learning literature. It draws on an ongoing research project ’Learning Lives’ which takes a life history approach. Interview data collected covers amongst other things the varied work experiences that people have had across their lifespan. I’m focussing here on case study material, relating to one individual aged over 50 who has been through a series of jobs in his working career. In analysing complex work-related learning careers, the interrelationships between continuity and change are important, as are changing interests and dispositions across working lives. Within a workplace, it can sometimes be useful to consider the learning that occurs as legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger, 1991). This is less helpful in understanding successive changes throughout life, which subjects have experienced in a series of workplaces, where they have learned to fit in, to do the job, to become a part of the workplace and perhaps as a result to become somewhat different people. As Hodkinson and Bloomer made clear (2002), a ready formed person, with pre-existing dispositions, enters work, but is subject to influence. The French term “formation” as used by Dominice (2000) implies more than the English “training” and can encompass the idea of workers learning not only to belong but to become. I have previously discussed some of the problems of integrating a social and participatory view of workplace learning, with an individual perspective. The life history approach provides scope for advancing this thinking. Taking a longer view is valuable in understanding the individual dimensions of learning at work. Learning as becoming is one way of conceptualising this.
Introduction
In this paper what I want to do is to look at learning in the workplace not just as transition into a new job, not just as development for experienced workers, but at learning right across a career which might span several related or unrelated jobs and workplaces. This is made possible by a new research project which involves detailed qualitative longitudinal research over a 3 year period plus the collection of learning related life histories.
As a result of previous research, I have written with co-researchers about the importance of recognising learning as being much more complex than the filling of an isolated empty vessel/mind with skills and knowledge which Bereiter describes as the Folk Theory of Learning (2002). Learning as participation (Sfard, 1998) and other versions of situated cognition such as Lave and Wenger’s ideas on Communities of Practice (1991), proved to be useful tools when we looked at the learning of experienced schoolteachers. At the same time we found that it was important to include effects of and effects on individuals and their dispositions, in understanding how learning was working in such communities (Hodkinson et al, 2004). The current project puts the focus more strongly on the individual, but not the individual as a mind to be fed knowledge. Learning is seen as situated, relational and embodied. The context in which learning takes place affects that learning. The individuals involved affect the context, their histories are part of the context and their dispositions (built up through their history) influence what and how they learn. A person’s dispositions are formed throughout their earlier life and go on being formed in ongoing and new situations. Learning thus involves the whole person, not just their mind, and is affected both by the current situations and by previous experiences and dispositions. The project provides detailed information about individuals, their background and contexts, also about their dispositions and how all these things have changed over time. It provides information about people’s use of personal agency and about their essential and shifting identities as they have become, in various ways, part of different settings over their lives. This amount of background detail has rarely been available in studies of workplace and lifelong learning, although such emphasis is growing in the considerable work of the Roskilde school , (eg Weber, 2001), and the work of authors like Dominice, Antikainen (eg with others, 1996) and Alheit (eg 1995).
Dominice (2000 pp9-11) talks about identity resulting from learning experiences and asks, “to what extent these experiences are processes for becoming oneself – and how much the dynamics of learning belong to their own identity”. He also uses the French term formation to describe “the alliance of formal and experiential learning that gives shape to an adult life.” Phil Hodkinson has taken this idea further in recent conference papers (2005). For example he looked at the processes of transition for UK full time masters degree students as they move through various student identities, towards, in some cases, professional identities. He sees the learning involved in this as a process of formation and of becoming whatever is their next stage.
The focus of our current project on learning, identity, and agency through the lifecourse allows us to examine these processes of becoming for a good number of individuals, and I hope to illustrate this using one detailed case study. I hope to demonstrate the learning that goes on throughout life as someone moves from childhood through adulthood, via structural settings and critical events, moving through work and life events which are interrelated. Important questions are raised. In this process to what extent does learning affect agency and agency affect learning. How do learning and identity interrelate? To what extent do individuals learn to become someone different in changed circumstances?
The Learning Lives project
This is a 3+ year project funded by the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) of the British Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). It involves a collaboration between researchers at 4 Universities – Exeter, Leeds, Brighton and Stirling.The project aims to deepen understanding of the meaning and significance of learning in the lives of adults, and to identify ways in which their learning can be supported and enhanced. To do this we are examining a range of learning experiences – formal, informal, tacit, incidental - from the perspective of adult learners, set within the context of their unfolding lives. The qualitative data collection involves life history interviews and interviews about current learning over a 3 year period from 2004, with more than 100 adults over the age of 25. There is also a qualitative element involving analysis of data from the ongoing British Household Panel Survey, but that has only just started and is not used in this paper. The Leeds part of the qualitative work focuses mainly on adults aged over 50 who have had recent involvement with adult education or guidance. There are both men and women of varied ethnicity and social class, varied educational achievement and occupational status. They were interviewed first in a very open way about their life history. In succeeding interviews that information has been elaborated and refined and additional information sought in a slightly more structured way, building on the earlier interview(s). Once a reasonable picture of the life history has been built up, further interviews are at approximately 6 monthly intervals to follow an individual’s current life and learning. I gave more detail about the research method in the recent International Post-Compulsory Education and Training conference in Queensland.
For this paper I have chosen to use the detailed case study of one individual with a varied working history in order to look in depth at individual learning.
Case Study – the life history, work and learning of Joseph Pryce[1]
Although the main focus of the paper is on learning at and for work I am including much more than just work history in this example. Joe’s childhood and life outside work have evident bearing on the formation of his dispositions and thus on his working life and learning, on his use of personal agency and on his developing identity. I intend to tell his story fully before showing how his learning can be seen as becoming.
Joe Pryce is a 56 year old man of Caribbean origin. He was recruited to the research through his participation in a part-time foundation degree at an English university. His life today has three main foci: his church and its community, his work a teacher in a further education college and his family – that is particularly his wife and one daughter still at home, who share in his church activities.
His early life was spent in the West Indies where he was brought up by his Grandmother who, he says, was strict but fair. He had a strongly Christian upbringing which he saw as giving him good values, and did well at school. He came to realise that his Grandmother could not read or write but was nevertheless a highly knowledgeable person. His father was a skilled carpenter with a successful business but the family – father, mother and younger siblings moved to England leaving 6 year old Joe with Grandma. His parents gradually paid for other members of the family to join them and brought Joe over when he was about 13. His Grandmother chose to stay behind.
In England the family had a good sized house with a big vegetable garden in a city in the south with few other black immigrants. Joe’s father worked in a foundry (ruining his hands) as there was no carpentry work available – this made no sense to Joe. It was all a big culture shock, especially the schooling. He was initially treated as if he had had no education and placed in a bottom stream where the children spent more time on errands than academic work. He is scathing about the level of education in his new school compared to the level he had reached in the West Indies. He is also critical of his parents for not intervening, but accepting that the teachers knew best. However he learned the system, worked his way up into the top streams of the school, participated in music and cricket and made good friends. He took some low level external exams, and based on good maths, and careers advice, thought about working in a bank.
At this point the family uprooted again. He doesn’t know why and is again somewhat resentful as he underwent a second period of culture shock. They moved to a northern industrial town to a house with no garden in an area with a significant black immigrant population. He found it initially difficult to fit in with the attitudes and behaviour of the West Indians in the area which he found very different to those of his friends and neighbours in the south. He became aware of racial prejudice. He did not consider going back to school but was not allowed to take up a job in a bank. His father insisted he should have a skilled trade, working with his hands. Respecting parents wishes was important and although it was not what he wanted, he took some tests and was accepted for an electrical apprenticeship with a large company.
His early life had been, unsurprisingly, dominated by direction from his family, but within that setting and sometimes in spite of it, he was able to work his way to successes, getting to the top at his school, fitting in with the white population of the southern city. Then he learned to be part of the new culture of the West Indian population in the North, and he rapidly learned to be a good electrician. Application, hard work and a determination not to be put down were significant parts of his character alongside a mixture of respect for and resentment of his parents.
To become a qualified electrician he had to do 5 years working alongside experienced practitioners and pass college exams, studying one day a week during term time. He described becoming an electrician in some detail. Most important was working alongside practical electricians. To start with he learned to do things exactly as he was told or shown, assuming it was the only way. With experience (his own grasp of the work, plus working with different people, plus additional information from college) he found there were alternative, sometimes better ways to do things. He believes the college course complemented the workplace learning. He is sure that there are some things he would never have learned on-site, as electricity can involve quite a lot of theory and calculations and planning which his mentors either didn’t know or didn’t pass on. He passed all his college courses without difficulty. His first workplace did not suit him too well. He quickly developed an aptitude for the electrical work but found it difficult to adapt his committed and hard working attitude to the more relaxed “tea break” culture of his fellow workers. His supervisor advised him that he might make more progress elsewhere, so he took a test for another firm and moved on. The first company had mainly been involved with repair work, the second one did installations, which he found more interesting. Given his college learning and a rapidly developing “eye” for what was needed in an installation job he started to train as an estimator – to plan installations. He had some talent in this direction but his father stepped in at this point partly because Joe had again moved away from working with his hands and partly because Joe was not earning enough to pay for the suit he now needed for work! He reverted to being a site electrician but had already learned enough that when a few years later he started running his own electrical installation company he did not have problems with that side of the work.
I think his own words demonstrate how he had “become” an electrician.
There is numerous ways of wiring a house, yeh, and you might as an apprentice be taught certain specific ways or you might be taking on ways in which a particular individual might see things, but as you progress you have developed your own way of actually going about doing the same job completely different, because I think the way you actually function and see things is completely different. Although you were given a starting point of how things are done and actually took things as ‘gospel’, when you start actually looking into the requirements, the statutory regulations etc you can actually visualise and see things differently. You get a different concept and see things how things can be done differently.
At the same time as learning to be an electrician he was also learning to be a musician. He had always been very keen. At his English school he hadn’t had the opportunity to formally learn an instrument but had been an enthusiastic support worker with the school band. In each of his first two jobs a colleague had helped him to learn the basics of guitar playing, during lunch times and after work. He went on to buy books on the subject and enrolled for an evening class. That was disappointing at the time, as it started from the beginning so the progress was too slow for him (and several other students) and he didn’t enrol for a second year. With hindsight he wishes he had been “humbler”, and that he had learned to read music and practice scales from the beginning, as he still can’t sight read.
I mean I wish I’d started like that. Someone showed me a few chords and I was able to strum the guitar and actually sing along with those few chords that they showed me and then started writing a few things with these basically three chords which might move, progress to a few more chords and that was it basically, and so I really believe I wasn’t taught the correct way.
He began to practice with groups/bands in the local area, and they built up regular weekend bookings, using an agent and supplementing their earnings. Then one of the bands was recruited as a backing group for a nationally rated singer. They dropped everything, and set off for London to become professional musicians. Being in a band at the heart of youth culture, admired by one’s contemporaries, had great appeal in the ‘70s and has done ever since. His band’s music was good enough, but the glamour either wasn’t there or turned out to be not what he wanted. One significant thing he learned was that it was hard work in difficult conditions. They were neither well paid nor well treated, frequently sleeping rough “on the road”. The singer, with a good agent may have fared better – Joe doesn’t know. After less than a year he returned home (now firmly in the northern city) to regular electrical work and to settle down with his northern girlfriend. He continued playing semi-professionally for a few years in the local music scene where he had learned the parameters and was comfortable. He later went on to help aspiring young people in the community, passing on his musical (and related electrical) expertise where it was wanted. He moved out of his parents home at the age of 21 with nothing and moved into a rented room. He met his wife soon after though they didn’t get married until several years after they’d had their first child. She at one time sang with the band.