The last fifteen years have seen much conceptual and methodological innovation in research on education and learning across the lifecourse, bringing both fresh insights and new dilemmas. This innovation was initially fuelled by the growing influence of conceptual framings often named as either post-structural or postmodern. The works of Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard have variously found their way into the canons of educational research, and in more recent years, the influence of the work of Deleuze and Guattari has also grown. This work has proved controversial both in the challenges it has raised for the purposes and practices of education and training but also over the assumptions underpinning such work.

As part of and also in response to the influence of post-structuralism and postmodernism in the social sciences, there have emerged and developed a further range of conceptual and methodological framings which are more relational, system and practice-focussed. Several of these framings work with a non-linear understanding of causality and embrace unpredictability in the world and undecidability in our understanding of it. They also challenge any notion of a strong boundary between the social and natural sciences.

This book explores the most significant four of these framings, how they are being taken up in research in education and learning across the lifecourse, as well as their possibilities and limitations:

• complexity science
• cultural historical activity theory (CHAT)
• actor-network theory (ANT)
• spatiality theories.

Illustrated throughout with examples drawn from educational contexts across the life courses, including schooling, post-compulsory education and training, educational policy, workplace and community-based education in North America, the UK, and Australia this vital guide to understanding fresh ways of conducting and understanding educational research will prove essential reading for everyone undertaking educational research in the modern world.

Published Under the Garamond Imprint

This innovative book is concerned with the power relations, complexities, and contradictions in the paid workplace. Workplace learning is not value-free or politically neutral, and cannot be studied independently of the political economy of work.

Workplace Learning is part of a growing body of work that offers an alternative to mainstream approaches to workplace learning, recognizing that power relations, politics and conflicts of interest all shape learning. The authors emphasize the lived experiences of working people, avoiding prescriptive accounts and uncritical Human Resource Development views.

Comments:

"Here is a map through contested and largely uncharted terrain..." - from the foreword by D'Arcy Martin

The last fifteen years have seen much conceptual and methodological innovation in research on education and learning across the lifecourse, bringing both fresh insights and new dilemmas. This innovation was initially fuelled by the growing influence of conceptual framings often named as either post-structural or postmodern. The works of Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard have variously found their way into the canons of educational research, and in more recent years, the influence of the work of Deleuze and Guattari has also grown. This work has proved controversial both in the challenges it has raised for the purposes and practices of education and training but also over the assumptions underpinning such work. As part of and also in response to the influence of post-structuralism and postmodernism in the social sciences, there have emerged and developed a further range of conceptual and methodological framings which are more relational, system and practice-focussed. Several of these framings work with a non-linear understanding of causality and embrace unpredictability in the world and undecidability in our understanding of it. They also challenge any notion of a strong boundary between the social and natural sciences. This book explores the most significant four of these framings, how they are being taken up in research in education and learning across the lifecourse, as well as their possibilities and limitations: complexity science cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) actor-network theory (ANT) spatiality theories. Illustrated throughout with examples drawn from educational contexts across the life courses, including schooling, post-compulsory education and training, educational policy, workplace and community-based education in North America, the UK, and Australia this vital guide to understanding fresh ways of conducting and understanding educational research will prove essential reading for everyone undertaking educational research in the modern world.

The last two decades have seen an international explosion of interest in theories of mind, culture, and activity. This unique collection is the first to explicitly reach back to the tradition's original critical impulse within which the writings of Karl Marx played such a central role. Each author pushes this impulse further to address leading contemporary questions. It includes a diverse array of international scholars working from the fields of education, psychology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, communications, industrial relations, and business studies. Broken into three main sections - education, work, and everyday life - each chapter builds from an analysis of practice and learning as social cultural participation and historical change in relation to the concept of activity, contradiction, and struggle. This book offers insight into an important complex of overlapping practices and institutions to shed light on broader debates over such matters as the 'knowledge economy' and 'lifelong learning'.

This book explores the hidden world of everyday learning in the lives of manufacturing workers from a social perspective. It challenges the myth that everyday learning, despite its apparent openness and freedom, can be understood as class-neutral. Based on life-history interviews, selected ethnographic observations in homes and factories, and large-scale survey materials as well as the microanalysis of human-computer interaction, the analysis follows learning across the spheres of "working-class life" and draws on the author's personal experiences as a factory worker and academic.

Finding My Place: One Man's Journey from Cleveland to Boston and Beyond is a humorous, poignant, and eclectic trip from 1960's Cleveland to the gay mecca of Provincetown, Massachusetts--with stops in Jacksonville, Florida, and Washington, DC during President Obama's first inauguration. But Judah's Leblang's journey is an internal one, touching on universal themes: unrequited love, the search for one's place and identity, and wrestling with Father Time. This new edition includes numerous pieces broadcast on NPR stations around the United States, and published in newspapers and magazines in Boston and Cleveland and the text of Leblang's one man show about aging gracefully: "My Life in the Middle Ages."

Published Under the Garamond Imprint

Available in the US through Rowman & Littlefield.