ABSTRACT

Lifelong Learning is essential to all individuals and in recent years has become a guiding principle for policy initiatives, ranging from national economic competition to issues of social cohesion and personal fulfilment. However, despite the importance of lifelong learning there is a critical absence of direct, international evidence on its extent, content and outcomes.

Lifelong Learning in Paid and Unpaid Work provides a new paradigm for understanding work and learning, documenting the active contribution of workers to their development and their adaptation to paid and unpaid work. Empirical evidence drawn from national surveys in Canada and eight related case studies is used to explore the current learning activities of those in paid employment, housework and volunteer work, addressing all forms of learning including: formal schooling, further education courses, informal training and self-directed learning, particularly in the context of organisational and technological change.

Proposing an expanded conceptual framework for investigating the relationships between learning and work, the contributors offer new insights into the ways in which adult learning adapts to and helps reshape the wide contemporary world of work throughout the life course.

chapter Chapter 1|12 pages

Introduction

A framework for exploring relations between lifelong learning and work in the computer era

part I|43 pages

Surveys

chapter Chapter 2|41 pages

Work and learning in the computer era

Basic survey findings

part II|42 pages

Case studies of unpaid work and learning

chapter Chapter 3|20 pages

Odd project out

Studying lifelong learning through unpaid household work

part III|74 pages

Lifelong Learning in Paid and Unpaid Work

chapter Chapter 5|18 pages

Revisiting Taylorism

Conceptual implications for studies of lifelong learning, technology and work in the public sector

chapter Chapter 8|18 pages

Teachers' learning and work relations

(Shifting) engagements and challenges

part IV|41 pages

Case studies of transitions between education and work

part V|26 pages

Concluding reflections

chapter Chapter 12|12 pages

‘Not just another survey’

Reflections on researchers' working and learning through investigating work and lifelong learning