Varieties of Workplace Learning: A Symposium

By Bob Boughton, Anne Junor, Ian Hampson

Despite twenty years of "training reform" in Australia there are widespread concerns about a "skills crisis". To what extent is it a training crisis, and to what extent is it a crisis in the retention of skilled workers, exacerbated by the new relationships of the workplace?

This symposium adopts a very broad perspective of worker education. It includes voices that see skills training as but one aspect of workplace learning, the other being the acquisition of contextual knowledge, formal or tacit, about the employer-employee relationship. The first perspective is a critique of recent attempts to train managers in the efficient use of "relationship" skills (from Anne Rozario and Ian Hampson). From here a longer-term perspective demonstrates how the narrow skills approach can be traced to the diffusion of Taylorist based educational theory in formal and community based vocational education systems in NSW (Lucy Taksa). A new perspective is then introduced by a conversation among adult educators, who take the view that workplace learning inevitably involves learning about employer/employee relations (Bob Boughton). Contributions from Canada, South Africa and Australia (Peter Sawchuk, Linda Cooper and Tony Brown) consider the relationship between practical activity and ther gaining of two aspects of this awareness - union activism and class consciousness.

They explore approaches to union renewal and employee participation in shaping learning. Noting the decline of working class communities and of working class education movements, the symposium ends (Teri Merlyn) with a suggested explanation for the fluctuating class awareness of those whom the Australian labour movement is currently addressing as "working people."

(Economic and Labour Relations Review; vol. 17, no. 2, April 2007. pp99-231