Contemporary accounts of learning emphasise the importance of immediate social partners such as teachers and co-workers. Yet, much of our learning for work occurs without such experts. This paper provides an understanding of how and why new home care workers use scaffolding to learn and enact safe manual handling techniques in their workplaces,…

Health care organizations are facing rapid changes, frequently involving modification of existing procedures. The case study reported here examined change processes and learning in a health care organization. The organizational change in question occurred in the emergency clinic of a Finnish central hospital where a new action model for…

In this paper, we explore the relationship between differing conceptualisations of competence, and the implications of these differences for the enacted workplace curriculum and its pedagogical epistemologies. We argue that when competence is understood as a set of stand-alone attributes that reside within an individual, it limits and over…

This paper discusses how discursive power and creativity are found to be inter-related in a context not traditionally associated with creative work; the operating theatre of a hospital. Here, it is proposed that creativity relies on socio-cultural factors emphasizing the practical nature of creativity, and highlighting the fact that a large part…

In vocational education, there is an ongoing discussion about problems occurring in school-work transitions and in relating school and work-based learning processes. Apprenticeships have been identified as valuable learning and working trajectories for making successful transitions and relations between school and work. However, they have been…

The research discussed in this article focuses on workplace learning in industrial manufacturing work. Everyday work episodes contributing to workplace learning are investigated in four companies operating in the Finnish and Swedish package-supplier sectors. The research adopts a qualitative, interpretive approach. Interviews with employees and…

The aim of the paper is to advance understanding of in-service learning and skills sector trainee teachers' learning and propose ways of improving their learning. A conceptual framework is developed by extending Billett's ("International Journal of Educational Research" 47:232-240, 2008) conceptualisation of workplace learning, as a…