As policy makers increasingly focus on workplace learning as a way of improving organizational performance, the debate about the learning organization has grown. Counterbalancing the often over-optimistic assumptions made about the future of work and learning, this book argues that without a contextualized analysis of the field, our understanding of the learning environment is limited. It reconsiders the true role and nature of workplace learning in context.

Grounded in original research, the book features case studies which illuminate how the workplace environment can provide both barriers to and opportunities for learning. It explores learning in different organizational contexts and different countries, sectors, types of public and private sector organization, and by different occupational groups. This multi-disciplinary approach provides a coherent perspective of the institutional, organizational and pedagogical contexts of workplace learning, and as a result, policy-makers, trainers, trade unionists and educators alike will welcome this groundbreaking text, as it gives the intellectual tools required to understand how learning in the workplace can be improved.

This is the ninth volume in an enlightening series on clashing values in the worlds of business and education. Containing papers co-published with the Oxford Centre for the Study of Values in Education and Business, this volume traces the most recent changes in both areas of study. Through its focus on the latest advances in technology and their impact upon universities and the world market, this work provides insight into current dialogues on values between universities, businesses and technology.

This is the ninth volume in an enlightening series on clashing values in the worlds of business and education. Containing papers co-published with the Oxford Centre for the Study of Values in Education and Business, this volume traces the most recent changes in both areas of study. Through its focus on the latest advances in technology and their impact upon universities and the world market, this work provides insight into current dialogues on values between universities, businesses and technology.

Throughout the world, people understand the meaning of 'apprenticeship'. As a model of learning and skill formation, apprenticeship has adapted over the years to reflect changes in work, in technology, and in the types of knowledge that underpin occupational expertise. Apprenticeship serves the needs of government, as well as employers, individuals and society more generally. These needs have always co-existed in dynamic tension. This book explores the contemporary state of apprenticeship in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Ghana. The chapters present perspectives from leading researchers in the field, showing how apprenticeship is evolving and changing in every country (crossing boundaries of age, sector and levels of skill and knowledge) and examining the ability of apprenticeship to facilitate both vertical progression - particularly to higher education - and horizontal progression between jobs and sectors. As such, apprenticeship remains at the core of debates about vocational learning and the nature of expertise. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Vocational Education and Training.

Extending the chance for people from diverse backgrounds to participate in Higher Education (HE) is a priority in the UK and many countries internationally. Previous work on widening participation in HE however has focussed on why people choose to go to university but this vital new research has focussed on looking at why people choose not to go. Moreover, much of the extant literature concentrates on the participation decisions of teenagers and young adults whereas this book foregrounds adult decision-making across the life-course. The book is also distinctive because it focuses on interview data generated from across the membership of inter-generational networks rather than on individuals in isolation, in order to explore how decision-making about educational participation is a socially embedded, rather than an individualised, process. It draws on a recent UK-based empirical study to argue that this network approach to exploring educational decision making is very productive and helps create a comprehensive understanding of the historically dependent, personal and collective aspects of participation decisions.

This book examines, therefore, the ways in which (non-) decision-making about HE is embedded within a range of social networks consisting of family, partners and friends, and to what extent future participation in HE is conceived as within the bounds of possibility. It:

• provides a conceptual framework for understanding the value of network-based decision-making about participation in HE, in the light of the changing historical and policy contexts in which it is always located;
• highlights the importance of researching the socially embedded narratives of ordinary people in order to critique the deficit discourse which dominates debates about widening participation in HE;
• discusses the policy and practice implications of the network-based approach for widening participation and educational institutions.

Improving Learning by Widening Participation in Higher Education presents a strong and coherent rationale for improving learning for diverse students from a range of socio-economic, ethnic/racial and gender backgrounds within higher education, and for adults across the life course.

Edited by Miriam David, the Associate Director of the ESRC s highly successful Teaching and Learning Research Programme, with contributions from the seven projects on Widening Participation in Higher Education (viz Gill Crozier and Diane Reay; Chris Hockings; Alison Fuller and Sue Heath; Anna Vignoles; Geoff Hayward and Hubert Ertl; Julian Williams and Pauline Davis; Gareth Parry and Ann-Marie Bathmaker), this book provides clear and comprehensive research evidence on the policies, processes, pedagogies and practices of widening or increasing participation in higher education. This evidence is situated within the contexts of changing individual and institutional circumstances across the life course, and wider international transformations of higher education in relation to the global knowledge economy.

Improving Learning by Widening Participation in Higher Education also considers:

• the changing UK policy contexts of post-compulsory education;
• how socio-economically disadvantaged students raced and gendered fare through schools and into post-compulsory education;
• the kinds of academic and vocational courses, including Maths, undertaken;
• the changing forms of institutional and pedagogic practices within higher education;
• how adults view the role of higher education in their lives.

This book, based upon both qualitative studies and quantitative datasets, offers a rare insight into the overall implications for current and future policy and will provide a springboard for further research and debate. It will appeal both to policy-makers and practitioners, as well as students within higher education.

In today s modern climate, education and learning take place in multiple and diverse spaces. Increasingly, these spaces are both physical and virtual in nature. Access to and use of information and communication technologies, and the emergence of knowledge-based economies necessitate an understanding of the plurality of spaces (such as homes, workplaces, international space and cyberspace) in which learning can take place. The spaces of policy making with respect to education are also being transformed, away from traditional centres of policy formation towards the incorporation of a wider range of actors and sites. These changes coincide with a more general interest in space and spatial theory across the social sciences, where notions of simultaneity and diversity replace more modernist conceptions of linear progress and development through time.

This volume proffers a unique perspective on the transformation of education in the 21st century, by bringing together leading researchers in education, sociology and geography to address directly questions of space in relation to education and learning. This collection of essays:

• examines the changing and diverse spaces and concepts of education (occurring simultaneously at different scales and in different parts of the world)
• explores where education and learning take place
• discusses how spaces of education vary at different stages (compulsory schooling, tertiary and higher education, adult education and workplace learning)
• inspects the ways in which the meanings attached to education and learning change in different national and regional contexts.

Changing Spaces of Education is an important and timely contribution to a growing area of concern within the social sciences and amongst practitioners and policy-makers, reflecting an urgent need to understand the ways in which both education and learning are being reconfigured, not just nationally, but also internationally and transnationally. It is essential reading for final-year undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in geography, sociology, education and policy studies, with an aim, too, of informing policy and practice in this area.

Interest in learning at work has captured the attention of many people around the world, often taking centre stage in policy debates about improving economic performance, prosperity and well-being. This book is about the learning that goes on in workplaces ? ranging from offices, factories and shops to gyms, health centres and universities ? and how it can be improved. Such learning includes everyday work activity, on-the-job instruction and off-the-job training events.

Improving Working as Learning is the first book to analyze systematically learning at work in different settings by developing and applying a new analytical framework. The Working as Learning Framework connects the particularities of work tasks with the way jobs are organized and the wider pressures and constraints organizations face for survival, growth and development. The authors convincingly demonstrate that the framework offers a sophisticated understanding of how improving the work environment ? both within the workplace and beyond ? can enhance and sustain improvements in learning at work.

Each chapter presents evidence ? taken from both private and public sectors ? to illustrate how the Working as Learning Framework provides a means by which employers, researchers and policy-makers can

• Improve the conditions for nurturing and sustaining learning at work
• Build appropriate workforce development plans within given constraints
• Recognize that the creation and use of knowledge is widely distributed
• Mobilize existing workplace resources to support learning
• Enhance and extend our understanding of how workplace learning is shaped by relationships at, and beyond, the workplace

This topical book will appeal to an international readership of undergraduate and postgraduate students, vocational teachers and trainers, human resource professionals, policy-makers, and researchers.

As policy makers increasingly focus on workplace learning as a way of improving organizational performance, the debate about the learning organization has grown. Counterbalancing the often over-optimistic assumptions made about the future of work and learning, this book argues that without a contextualized analysis of the field, our understanding of the learning environment is limited. It reconsiders the true role and nature of workplace learning in context.

Grounded in original research, the book features case studies which illuminate how the workplace environment can provide both barriers to and opportunities for learning. It explores learning in different organizational contexts and different countries, sectors, types of public and private sector organization, and by different occupational groups. This multi-disciplinary approach provides a coherent perspective of the institutional, organizational and pedagogical contexts of workplace learning, and as a result, policy-makers, trainers, trade unionists and educators alike will welcome this groundbreaking text, as it gives the intellectual tools required to understand how learning in the workplace can be improved.

Throughout the world, people understand the meaning of 'apprenticeship'. As a model of learning and skill formation, apprenticeship has adapted over the years to reflect changes in work, in technology, and in the types of knowledge that underpin occupational expertise. Apprenticeship serves the needs of government, as well as employers, individuals and society more generally. These needs have always co-existed in dynamic tension. This book explores the contemporary state of apprenticeship in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Ghana. The chapters present perspectives from leading researchers in the field, showing how apprenticeship is evolving and changing in every country (crossing boundaries of age, sector and levels of skill and knowledge) and examining the ability of apprenticeship to facilitate both vertical progression - particularly to higher education - and horizontal progression between jobs and sectors. As such, apprenticeship remains at the core of debates about vocational learning and the nature of expertise. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Vocational Education and Training.