Guided learning at work

Stephen Billett: Stephen Billett is a Senior Lecturer at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT: Research assistance was ably provided by Kerrie Scott and Andrew McCann from the Wodonga Institute of TAFE. Thanks to the enterprises and individuals in those enterprises who made this research project possible, to the National Research and Evaluation Committee of ANTA who funded this study; also, the comments of the two anonymous reviewers were helpful in refining this paper and posing questions that will guide further inquiry.

Introduction

There is growing interest in making workplaces effective learning environments. In turn, this interest demands a clearer understanding of the contributions of these environments and how learning within them might be best realised. This paper reports the findings of an investigation to determine whether guided workplace learning can assist the development of skills and knowledge required for workplace performance. Previous work proposes that participation in everyday work activities makes significant contributions to the development of individuals' vocational knowledge (Billett, 1993, 1994a, 1994b, 1996; Harris et al., 1996; Harris and Volet, 1997).

Engagement in authentic workplace activities, and the direct and indirect guidance available in everyday participation in the workplaces, were identified as the bases of these contributions. It was concluded from these studies that engagement in everyday activities in the workplace provides ongoing access to goal-directed activities and support that are instrumental in assisting individuals constructing or learning new work-related knowledge as well as the strengthening of that learning (Billett, 1999).

Also, the contributions of a workplace's physical environment provide important clues, cues and models that assist individuals' thinking and acting and hence their learning and understanding. Moreover, other workers are used as models for performance (albeit in different ways) and as source of how work tasks should proceed through observations and more direct interactions. Together, it seems, these contributions arising from participation in everyday work activities assist developing the knowledge required for work performance. Such conclusions are supported by recent theorising (e.g. Hutchins, 1993; Resnick et al., 1997) which suggests that knowing (the bases of our thinking, acting and learning) is distributed across social environments, such as workplaces. Therefore, learning is not only ongoing in our everyday thinking and acting, it is mediated by the circumstances in which individuals act.

However, the...