ABSTRACT
Traditional learning seeks to provide learners with generic knowledge and skills but then leaves the challenge of transferring that learning from the education or training context into the workplace to the learner themselves. Learners therefore regularly experience difficulties in applying such learning to their local work situations where there may be few rewards for trying out something new or different. Learners can either adopt a surface or a deep approach to learning. Much traditional learning is concerned solely with Replicative and Applicative usage, but action learning potentially covers the entire range, with as much attention devoted to Interpretive and Associative learning as to the other modes. Replicative and Applicative learning thus tend to focus on what has been termed explicit knowledge. Interpretative and Associative learning, by contrast, are concerned with tacit knowledge, which is both personal and context-specific. Action learning accepts the co-existence of both explicit and tacit knowledge.
