Workplace Learning Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Workplace Learning - Essay Example The conscious development of the formal and informal learning fronts in work place sites has culminated from the management decisiveness on the aspects of competitiveness and as well product and market strategies. "The development has come from the frameworks within which decisions are taken regarding the factors of how work is organized within an organisational and also how people are managed." (Coombs, P.H. 1985) Various scholars as well as other researchers have concurred that the integration of various economic and commercial factors has had a significant bearing on the establishment of the broad parameters in which opportunities and obstacles to the effectual existence of work place learning obtain. Research outcomes have led to positions that expansive rather that restrictive environment are perceived to be pro-learning at work as well as the convergence of personal and organisational development. Researches into various workplace domain dynamics have culminated in the establishment of a theoretical framework that seeks to explain and contextualise the dynamics around which the manner in which new entrants into a career acquire knowledge and skills that empower them tackle the challenges posed by their career compositions. The dimension of workplace newcomers has been relished with valuable contributions from Lave and Wenger who developed the interlinked tenets of legitimate peripheral participation as well as communities of practice to explain how workplace newcomers (the valid peripheral partakers) develop to full participant status in a defined community of practice. Watkins, K. E. (2001) concur that the newcomers are perceived to embrace learning as a collective relational process which entails the cooperation of the novices with the more experienced personnel. "In our perspective , the acquisition of knowledge is not merely situated in practice like it were some independently definable prices that just occurred to be situated somewhere; the acquisition of knowledge in an integral part of generative social practice in the lived-in world". (Lave and Wenger 1991) Lave and Wenger view the situated learning theory as an essential thrust for those areas tied to social practice as well as that in has contributions to attempts at surmounting what has been called by theorists (Engerstrom 1991) as "The encapsulation of school of learning". Much interest that has been culminated from the forerunning frameworks and ideas on apprenticeship and education has been directed to the non-formal or structured environs. The interest has lead many scholars to invest into researches of workplace learning. Expansive Learning has is enunciated in Engestrom's model of expansive learning. The thrust of the theoretical framework is aimed at fostering significant changes at organisational levels of entities." the object of expansive learning is knowledge impartation process in which the learners are involved." According to the scholars, expansive learning activities generate culturally new trends of activity. Further, expansive learning at work particularly generates new forms of work activity" (Fuller and Unwin 2008, p 129) Basing on the frame work of the expansive learning