ABSTRACT
A central line of argument that emerges from several chapters in this volume is that learning should be understood as an interaction between personal and situational factors. The contribution by Stephen Billett (Chapter 2) makes it clear that learners can no longer be conceived of as passive individuals that learn by consuming and storing new concepts and skills. Instead, they need to be understood as active, agentic individuals that not only are shaped by the environment but also change the environment themselves as a result of individual agency, subjectivity, and intentionality. According to Chin and colleagues (Chapter 4), even novices take an active and pro-active role in the workplace, through a self-regulating process of submitting to the authority of experienced practitioners, mirroring the practitioner, and independently constructing patterns of actions and beliefs within the community. Fenwick (Chapter 3) also argues that individuals’ learning is entangled in systems of continuous activity and emerges from people’s relations and interactions with the social and material elements of particular contexts. In Bateson’s theory as described by Tosey, Langley, and Mathison (Chapter 5), learning is also approached as something both individual and social in nature. Bateson even argues that ‘mind’ is located in connections and
relations within systems, rather than in the brains of an individual. Berings, Van Veldhoven, and Poell (Chapter 6) conceptualize workplace learning as emerging from the interaction between psychological work conditions and intrinsic work motivation. They conclude that job demands and social support are not directly related to learning behaviour; rather, this relationship is mediated by the intrinsic work motivation of the learner.
