Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Learning to Work
50 young short-term trainees in various Australian work settings.
Her study also provides a revealing insight into Australian employers and
workplaces, and how they can make traineeships valuable for employer,
colleague and trainee.
Reidy
Students’ experiences during work placements
SOCIAL STUDIES
Joanne M. Reidy
This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act
1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without
the prior written permission of the publishers.
Reidy, Joanne M.
Learning to work : students’ experiences during work
placements.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN 0 522 85237 8. (paperback)
ISBN 0 522 85238 6. (e-book)
1. Education, Cooperative - Australia. 2. Vocational
education - Australia. 3. School-to-work transition -
Australia. I. Title.
370.1130994
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Bibliography 185
Index 207
vi Learning to Work
Joanne M. Reidy
Melbourne, 2006
vii
The students
So, perhaps unexpectedly, this book does not introduce you to groups
of students called by intriguing names such as ‘The conformers’ or
‘The rebels’. Instead, the chapters are organised according to the
resources the students called up and fell back on in their hour of need
when they were tired and depressed or excited and challenged. In
fact, the sheer number of times that people told me that they had
accessed resources or social support was quite startling. Interestingly,
though, they did not talk much about electronic resources and so
Introduction
The placements
While different societies have always prepared people for adult roles,
including work, in a multiplicity of ways, contemporary societies use
a mixed formula of study away from the workplace and controlled
exposure to the workplace in which the newcomer’s role is often that
of a master’s apprentice. A mixed bag of study and practical, work-
based experience prepares people for a workplace that is constantly
referred to, described and discussed in lectures and tutorials whether
face-to-face or online. However, the workplaces spoken of with such
authority in such contexts never quite exist. Located in the textbooks,
in the lecturer’s anecdotes and in the stories of family members
swapped over dinner, these workplaces are always safe. They lack the
risk and the realities of the office, classroom or lab that kicks into life
at eight o’clock or a bit later every Monday morning.
Introduction
The interviews
In order to find out about people and their work-related placements,
I interviewed fifty people who had volunteered to talk to me about
this topic. They were not in their workplaces because they had part-
time jobs in these locations, but because their university courses con-
tained compulsory programs that were located in the workplace. For
many of the people I spoke to this was the first time they had had con-
tact with the real-world face of the professional occupation they
hoped to be involved in for a large part of their lives.
The people who so generously gave me these interviews were
aged between twenty and fifty years and came from many different
cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Almost half of the interviewees
were ‘international’ students, that is, students who had come to
Australia to undertake an accredited course at an Australian univer-
sity. One woman spoke Farsi as her first language and yet was a
Swedish national studying in Australia. Many of these students talked
about their families and their home communities as well as the
Australian workplaces and, predictably enough, more than one stu-
dent talked at length about the great differences between working at
home and the work environment he was experiencing in Australia.
Working lives
The book will interest people who spend their lives in education and
training, but it should also fascinate those who are fascinated by work,
workplaces and work colleagues, by talk at work, time spent at work
and changes in work practices—in other words, anything to do with
the world of work.
The writing of this book depended on the cooperation of many
people. People in workplaces both large and small were unexpectedly
co-operative and even though I had to observe the normal ethical
conventions of privacy and confidentiality, even the large companies
supplied me with a room for the interviews and gave me access to all
the graduates who were undertaking work there. I interviewed a great
range of students including would-be engineers, nurses, teachers,
and communication and information technology specialists. I also
Introduction
Resources in abundance
The students’ stories have been arranged according to the key
resources that they were given or that they were able to access during
their workplace experience.
The first group of interviews focuses on the resources that the
students were given in their workplaces. Many students made it clear
that their workplaces were extremely generous with their resources,
time and personnel. The second crucially important resource focused
on is the student’s immediate supervisor who again and again
emerged from the interviews as a highly significant person. The third
resource is that of the people outside the workplace—family, friends
and the friends of families who rallied around the students at this
taxing time to offer them extra support, encouragement, advice and
other more tangible resources.
Lacking resources
It will also become apparent that some students lacked resources
and that, as a consequence of this, their workplace experiences
were difficult, frustrating or boring. It is to be hoped that these
students had further opportunities to work and practise work in
other places as, at the time I interviewed them, they had had very
Introduction
Three questions
For many years, my brother worked for a large multinational com-
pany. He often cited a little mantra that people in his office used to
summarise the task of interviewing prospective employees. The ques-
tions always stuck in my mind even though he has probably long
forgotten them. The questions that seemed to drive any interview
were these: Can she do it? Will she do it? Will she fit in?
However, as soon as I began interviewing the students, I realised
that the question ‘Will she fit in?’ did not foreshadow the radical
uncertainty contained in the question, ‘Will I fit in?’ and had even
less to do with the anxious self-assessment that accompanied the
question regarding expertise, ‘Can I do it?’ I realised, of course, that
my brother’s colleagues were framing these questions from the
employer’s point of view, but I became more interested in the stories
of the employees, in this case, novice employees and their struggles
to attain an appropriate workplace ‘self’, a satisfactory level of com-
petence and even some idea of whether or not this would become for
them a significant and satisfying professional role.
Hence, the three questions seemed too light-hearted when com-
pared to the soul searching that accompanied an individual novice’s
decision to take another path after an unsatisfactory workplace expe-
rience. As a result of the interviews, the questions also seemed to
need re-ordering: for most of the students, the issue of ‘fitting in’ was
the primary one and the issue of expertise came a little bit later.
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
10 Introduction
Introduction 11
12 Introduction
Introduction 13
14 Introduction
Introduction 15
16 Introduction
In this way, the ‘stance’ of the interpreter was made explicit and
the ideas were given a ‘critical’ perspective that was congruent with
an interpretivist approach. At the same time, the analytical frame-
work used side-stepped the clusters of assumptions that have accrued
around such words as gender, class and race. This was in keeping
with Weedon’s (1999) insight to the effect that,
Introduction 17
18 Introduction
Before I began to write this book, I read the work of many interesting
writers who had investigated the topic of placements, practicums and
other kinds of work-related education, training and professional
learning. Although I had always thought of work placements as activ-
ities that belonged to the students that I had trained in university set-
tings during my own work life as a teacher educator, some of the most
interesting writers pushed the problem of work placements back on
to the workplaces asking very directly if the workplace could, in fact,
provide the students with the experiences and mentoring required.
Two Australian writers, Billett (1995) and Hughes (1998) tackled
this question head on. A short article written by Billet and entitled,
‘Workplace learning: its potential and limitations’ grasped the nettle
in the most appropriate fashion by directing our attention not simply
to the students on work placements, but also to the workplaces in
which the students in our universities are undertaking their training.
Similarly, the word ‘perils’ in Hughes’s short article, ‘Practicum
learning: perils of the authentic workplace’, seemed to warn students
and workplace personnel alike, reminding both groups that the real
workplace, as distinct from the one conjured up in textbooks and lec-
tures, had advantages as a place of learning, but it also presented its
own dangers and risks.
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22 Learning to Work
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Self-directed
Some two decades ago, Knowles (1981) stressed that teaching and
learning in higher education would have to be transformed in order
to prepare learners who would be able to assess their own learning
needs, articulate learning objectives, identify a range of ‘appropriate
learning resources’, decide on ways in which to use those resources,
28 Learning to Work
Independent
Boud (1981b) also refers to the significance of support. Writing briefly
about his own experiences as a learner, Boud states that several early
experiences of independent learning gave him a sense of ‘exhilara-
tion’ (p. 15), ‘buoyancy and freedom’ (p. 15). While this sounds ideal,
he also states that he was ‘forced by circumstances’ (p. 16) to become
an independent learner. However, Boud was not alone in his learning
situation, but was able to share ideas on a peer-like footing with other
senior people in the educational institution where he was employed.
Hence, the image of the somewhat solitary learner is softened by such
statements as ‘Autonomy cannot be pursued in a vacuum: it does not
necessitate isolation from the ideas and experience of others’ and,
‘Interdependence is therefore an essential component of autonomy
in action’ (p. 23).
The contributors to Boud’s (1981a) collection, in particular,
Ferrier, Marrin and Seidman (1981), Potts (1981), and Buzzell and
Roman (1981), are interested in developing learner independence,
autonomy or self-directedness in their classrooms and lectures.
However, when the complexities of such an approach have been
reviewed, it can be argued that the programs may be developing
attributes in the students that emphasise interdependence through
learning in small groups as much as independence.
In the study that had most relevance to my interviews because it
was directed at a professional preparation program, Ferrier, Marrin
and Seidman (1981) noted that the objectives of their medical pro-
gram in Canada stated that students in their progress towards inde-
pendent learning would also become skilled at ‘selecting appropriate
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32 Learning to Work
Problem solving
In the medical course reported on by Ferrier, Marrin and Seidman
(1981), incoming students were told that self-directed learning and
problem-solving abilities would be expected and developed during the
program of study. Building on a theoretical perspective developed by
Boud and Feletti (1997), Duch, Groh and Allen (2001) offer a compre-
hensive overview of problem-based learning, its various rationales and
some of the ways in which it has been implemented in higher educa-
tion. Cannon and Schell (2001) show that problem-based learning has
many positive aspects if considered as an approach to preparing pro-
fessionals such as nurses who will have to deal with situations that
occur routinely as well as making decisions and solving problems that
are related to the ‘safe, effective and efficient delivery of care’ (p. 165).
After an extensive, if succinct, review of the literature on
problem-based learning (PBL), Cannon and Schell (2001) offer a
detailed example from one section of the nursing program at the
University of Delaware (see p. 170). The strategies centre around the
case study of a patient. Having been prepared beforehand to empha-
sise specific details related to haemorrhages (for example), the case
study is analysed in small groups of two to five students. Then the
same case is reintroduced in another course, this time the focus being
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36 Learning to Work
The practitioner, when faced with ‘an element of surprise’ can ignore
the problem, or ‘respond to it by reflection ... in one of two ways’, the
two ways being ‘reflect[ion]-in-action’ and reflection ‘on action’
(Schön, 1987, p. 26).
In Schön’s (1987) writing, the two kinds of reflection are concep-
tualised and differentiated with great clarity. Reflection-in-action, a
‘kind of experimenting’ (p. 66), happens when the practitioner
‘reflects in the midst of action without interrupting it’ and involves
on-the-spot decisions made to ‘reshape’ (p. 26) or fine-tune existing
knowledge in order to meet the particular demands of unfamiliar sit-
uations ‘where the problem is not initially clear and there is no
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a social role will involve one or more parts ... each of these
different parts may be presented by the performer on a
series of occasions to the same kinds of audience or to an
audience of the same persons. (p. 27)
The concept of role has been criticised for its rather rigid view of
social life and institutions. However, Goffman’s (1959) emphasis on
the many parts that can contribute to a role allows the concept to
attain some complexity. Although Goffman does not elaborate on this
point in great detail, it seems clear that if many roles contain several
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46 Learning to Work
Another difficulty lies in the fact that the performance, the man-
agement of the overall impression, has to be sustained over a period
of time. Hence, possessing certain characteristics associated with the
role is not adequate. The performer has to accomplish the social role.
Goffman (1959) states that the social position must be ‘realized’
because it is not something that can be owned but is a ‘pattern of
appropriate conduct’ (p. 81) that must be performed.
A third difficulty faced by performers is that they must often
depend on the other people in ‘the team’ in order to sustain their per-
formance and the desired definition of the situation at hand. If the
performance is sustained in front of another audience, the ‘team’ of
performers will be ‘in the know’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 88) about the
exact nature of the performance. Hence, loyalty to one’s team and
one’s team mates will become very important so that even if one team
member should make a ‘mistake’ (p. 94) in front of others, this will
not be referred to until the audience has disappeared. Goffman adds
to his observations about ‘teams’ by showing that certain team mem-
bers can endanger the ability of any performer to achieve an effective
performance or ‘front’ before others: ‘It is apparent that if performers
are concerned with maintaining a line they will select as team-mates
those who can be trusted to perform properly’ (p. 95).
Hence, if the students are seen in Goffman’s (1959) ‘dramatur-
gical’ terms as performers, the students will have to learn to:
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The stories from the ‘very beginning’ have been arranged in two
main groups. The first group is composed of the stories the students
told about their initial encounters. These stories have been organised
according to the themes of greetings, gatherings and gifts. All relate
to the larger issue of belonging. The second group of stories is cen-
tred on the tasks that the students carried out during the first part of
their placement. The accounts reveal that the students were given
many different types of tasks and that these tasks fulfilled a variety of
functions. The stories in this section of the chapter both illustrate and
define the ways in which the students were able to manage the first
stage in their development as participants in a specific workplace
community. Hence, while each story contributes to a further under-
standing of the process of belonging, it does so by focusing on the
ways in which the students learn to become competent.
Greetings
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70 Learning to Work
Mark had had his own schooling in a very free atmosphere: ‘we
didn’t even have a uniform’. Unaccustomed to wearing a tie, he dis-
covered that he had just two ties in his wardrobe, but decided that
the second one, a comic tie, was unsuitable for his teaching round in
an expensive, private school. As Mark remarked, ‘I wanted to make a
good impression, so I wore the proper silver one every day, which no
one seemed to notice—no one made any comment’.
It is significant that the exchange between Mark and his super-
visor concerned a tie. A tie is a highly visible part of the school culture
and can be read with great ease by all those within the culture and by
those at similar schools throughout Australia. The tie sets its wearers
apart from students of other schools who may wear similar suits,
shirts or shoes and also differentiates groups of students within the
school. (At a school similar to the one Mark was in, students who
have achieved excellence in sporting or scholastic endeavours can
purchase a second, more elaborate school tie, which gives testimony
to their scholarly or sporting prowess.)
The wearing of the tie also denotes compliance with school
rules and at least outward conformity to the school’s culture. Not
surprisingly, ‘the lads’ in Willis’s famous (1977) study, ‘rarely’ wore a
tie (p. 17), while in Measor’s (1984) study, a student removed his tie in
order to show his disdain for Music, the lesson he was about to attend.
In schools with strict uniform policies, the teachers’ ties serve the
same potent symbolic functions. Ties also allow members of staff to
mingle on a more or less equal basis with the highly paid members of
the professions who, as parents of the students they teach, are
simultaneously the teachers’ clients and their employers. Finally, the
presence of a tie allows the students to join the junior ranks of the
professions of their fathers, mimicking their dress by donning suits
and ties at an early age.
By wearing a tie as directed, Mark showed that he was willing, at
least for a time, to take up a place in the school community. However,
by wearing the same tie all week, he also showed (although he did not
seem fully aware of this in the interview), that he had not wholly
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76 Learning to Work
Gifts
Most workplaces prompted the students to change some aspects of
their life-style or aspirations. Some felt that their new workplace was
their whole life, but others found the unfamiliar expectations rather
oppressive. Some workplaces gave the students resources including
money and equipment so that they would find the demands made
easier to bear. Some of these resources were related to the students’
appearance. James was given a full set of clothes for his triathlon, while
Ravi and Ken were given state-of-the-art computers. One student, Emily,
described her new name tag as if she had been given a very special gift.
The language Emily used to describe the idea of the name tag at
first seemed overly emotive: she used ‘love’, ‘fantastic’ and ‘really good’
to describe a practice, that of wearing a name tag, that is quite common
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Martin: But the first week, the most enjoyable thing was
that they got me to do a project that involved
walking around the site and making sure certain
things were in their places. At first I thought,
‘Why am I doing this? —this is a pretty silly
project—I’m supposed to be an engineer, not
some guy that just walks round ... but I
absolutely loved doing it! Because I got to see
everything on site—all the cool machines and
stuff like that. And especially because I’m doing
Robotics—the machines here are just awesome!
The arms going up and down and ‘round and
dropping stuff! I enjoyed it thoroughly! Got an
idea of everything on site. So now when people
say, Go to Building C105, I can say, Oh yeah—
that’s over there. Before that it was, like, What? ...
I had no idea.
In a very direct way, the company that Martin was placed with
provided him with a very empowering introduction to his work. Not
only did he see the scope of the company’s production, but he was
also able to find his way around a large and sprawling work site where
much of the raw material was piled and stacked in large yards. As a
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Challenging interactions
The students interviewed about the initial period of their work place-
ment reported having various intense feelings when faced with their
new environment including anxiety, excitement and a heightened
sense that they could, in this new environment, ‘prove’ themselves. In
the first phase of the placement, students responded positively when
it was made apparent by various people and activities that their
uncertainty could be seen as part of the experience of being a new-
comer and would therefore be responded to with a range of wel-
coming, integrating strategies. That this was very important was made
clear when some students depicted their initial feelings of uncertainty
as short-lived, while others felt partly or significantly estranged from
the people around them or the activities they were engaged in up
until the time they departed the workplace.
Interpretations of the interview transcripts revealed that while
the exact nature of the welcoming strategies varied according to the
specific workplace involved, by accepting and participating in par-
ticular gatherings and tasks, the students were able to learn about
aspects of the workplace including the self that they were required
to perform on their way to ‘being an ordinary person’ (Sacks, 1992b,
p. 415) in that workplace.
Further difficulties
Keiko experienced various forms of student disruption during her
classes. She stated that some children joked, made fun of her, did not
work well, were ‘out of control’, and failed to take the lesson seriously.
Mai also stressed that she had been treated with indifference by
her supervisor. Like Keiko, Mai felt that her limitations as a teacher
were not dealt with subtly by the supervising teacher but were made
to seem more obvious in her classroom. Wilma’s narratives also high-
lighted her difficulties.
‘Strategic silence’
The transcripts showed then, that the anxiety the students felt about
their situations prevented them from bringing their isolation, ongoing
dissatisfaction and restricted opportunities to make progress to the
attention of anyone in the workplace. Keiko and Mai retreated because
they were anxious about their perceived competence, while Wilma
understood too well the many stressful demands her supervisor faced
while the student nurses were present in the hospital. Perhaps
because she liked the supervisor and because she had worked in
hospital-like settings previously, she sympathised readily with her
supervisor’s predicaments and then held back from making her
worries about her overly restricted access to opportunities in the
workplace known to staff.
Mike, in contrast to Keiko, Mai and Wilma, had no reason to
complain about the time that was accorded him or his opportunities
to progress. However, he knew that the issue about which he had
disagreed with the supervisor was a potentially very confronting one.
‘Committed presence’
In many ways, the relationship between Suresh and his supervisor
was an ideal one. Throughout the interview, Suresh could be heard
describing the supervisor’s ‘committed presence’. Of course, that
phrase was never used in the interview but only emerged when the
students’ transcripts had been examined. Furthermore, the strategic
silence that characterised the relationships between some student-
teachers or nurses and their supervisors was not present in the rela-
tionship between Suresh and his supervisor, possibly because the
polymer project’s outcomes were judged by the delivery of certain
findings to an external client, but also due, perhaps, to the interde-
pendent, task-related co-operation that had made Suresh able to ask
if the machines could be kept running so that he did not have to clean
them as often.
‘Trusting dialogue’
From Arthur’s point of view, such was the trust that had been engen-
dered between Arthur’s supervising nurse and himself that she was
able to support his account of the disagreement and accept his deci-
sion without anger, resentment or loss of ‘face’ for either person.
Hence, in some of the richest student–supervisor relationships, cer-
tain students were able to participate in a ‘trusting dialogue’.
Emily:
I had a situation, it was just a couple of weeks
ago, where one of the engineers that I was
working on a piece of literature for was quite
rude to me, just the way he dealt with me. He
was very, very demanding, and I’ve got lots of
work from different people, but he’s expecting
his work to always be the priority. He was
basically stressing out, I suppose, like his office,
like his workstation is downstairs so he was
calling me up: How are you going with it, are you
nearly finished, are you nearly finished it? Just his
manner was very rude and I didn’t—I mean it
wasn’t—just very bad people skills, really, and I
had to leave early one afternoon because I had
an appointment and I handed it over to Terence
who is the other student and Terence had even
more problems.
... the impression that we got, like, that both
Terence and I got from him that was first of all
you know, ‘I’m an engineer, I’m so much more
important than you, like I can treat you like this,
and furthermore you are a student, so I can treat
you how I want’, and [Marie] actually contacted
him, and said, ‘Oh, well, maybe we should have a
meeting with him and go over like’—just a non-
confrontational meeting with him ... so when
Marie went and contacted him he was quite rude
to her as well ... so she took it to [Anne] who is
our manager and Marie had to—it turned into—
it just escalated really, like Anne had to contact
At the end of her narrative, Emily said that her supervising staff
member had seen the incident from the students’ point of view and
had expected an apology from the engineer who had demanded the
sheet about the latest product he wanted to discuss with overseas
clients.
Even though Emily seemed upset about the incident two weeks
later when the interview was being conducted, her supervisor’s trust
and her endorsement of the students’ position obviously meant a great
deal to Emily. Although she might not have been able to articulate it at
the time, it was obvious that the way in which the company’s personnel
had handled the incident had given Emily many opportunities for
learning. Firstly, the students were treated with courtesy, sympathy
and respect. Secondly, their worries had been taken to a suitable forum
for further discussion. Finally, their account of events had been
accepted. Emily’s future career was going to be set up somewhere
within the field of marketing. By having become involved in this
dispute and its resolution, she had been given the opportunity to learn
not only about the importance of courtesy and respect for colleagues,
but also on a much more practical level, how to negotiate a dispute
with a colleague in an appropriately professional way.
Emily’s supervisor’s trust had opened up trusting spaces and
trusting dialogues followed on from this. In this way, both Emily and
Gary’s supervisor told him that he, too, had to manage various
professional problems, but he demonstrated that there were ways in
which to cope with such situations. By having allowed his professional
mask to drop before the class, the supervisor enabled Gary to see that
good teachers know how to energise both themselves and the children
even when they feel under some pressure for reasons of their own. By
‘Trusting revelations’
The supervisor not only trusted Gary enough to tell him that he was
tired, but showed him the difference between his tired state and his
classroom persona without feeling any anxiety that Gary would think
that he was insincere. The supervisor knew that Gary was skilled
enough to understand the situation deeply. The trust felt by the super-
visor benefited Gary greatly as he was given an all-important insight—
a ‘trusting revelation’—about the nature of teaching in a very
economical manner.
The story of the lolly box is one of the least dramatic of all the
stories related by the students. This single small drama, recounted as
the opening story of the study’s fourth interview, allowed the listener
to understand more fully the challenges faced by some students
during their placements. In this story, Sobash was the one who
watched and listened. Although the company employees gathered to
discuss the missing coins, Sobash did not say that he had joined in
their conversation. He waited to see what would happen. He also
reflected on Andy’s actions.
The part of the story that was most surprising was the section in
which Sobash listed his potential responses to a similar situation as
those of embarrassment, insecurity and even fear. He imagined his
colleagues comparing his work to that of others and accusing him of
cheating. Later, he commented that, in his own country, Sri Lanka, it
would be thought unusual ‘to keep a lolly box at work’. Throughout
his narrative, Sobash depicted himself as the outsider, contrasting his
observations with his colleagues’ talking, his sense of strangeness
and insecurity with Andy’s relaxed reassurance that he could be
trusted and had simply forgotten to return with the coins after taking
a bag of sweets.
Sobash’s reactions to the incident of the lolly box can be linked
to the many difficulties he had faced during the first months of his
work placement. Sobash said that he had made many ‘mistakes’ at
the beginning. He had to get used not only to the gap between pre-
paring for work at university and ‘the real kind of thing’ in a specific
workplace, but also to the constant checking of his work by the
employer, and to the unfamiliar accounting software used by the
company. He had also discovered that he was expected to have a
more detailed knowledge of the Australian taxation system than he
Friends were also willing to carry out various tasks during the
students’ placements. This meant that the students did not have to
leave work early or at an inconvenient time. Agnes opened up her
interview by telling a story about a friend. She focused on the way in
which the friend had gone into the university and re-enrolled Agnes
in her Business studies program for the coming year.
Gary: ‘I’ll ring people and go, How did you go today?’
Gary had easy access to a professionally like-minded family. The
interactions Gary described during his interview seemed warm and
pleasurable, providing encouragement and ongoing reassurance.
What is especially noticeable about Gary’s networks of support is the
way in which familial relationships, professional concerns and leisure
times were mixed together and could be accessed simultaneously.
The conversation at Gary’s dinner table concerned teaching and the
friend whose house he was looking after had a wall of teaching refer-
ences for him to borrow.
Gary’s own very proactive role in accessing the support provided
by his friends is demonstrated in the following extracts in which he
described his telephone calls after work and the house that he was
looking after for a friend. The way in which Gary represented his
many telephone calls may offer some insight into his ability to sur-
round himself with sustaining friendships. In his depiction of the
telephone calls, Gary showed that he had taken the initiative by
ringing up one of his friends. However, far from dominating the inter-
actions, he asked the individuals he rang to give an account of their
own teaching day first, initiating a mutual exchange of the day’s
stories about teaching. Hence, the support was reciprocal.
Like Gary, Suresh, Agnes and many other students, Ophelia also
relied on the friends she had made at university.
Mark: ‘We can be just sitting and we can go: How did that go?’
Mark made demands on his closest relationship for support. Although
Mark’s wife, a nurse, was not in exactly the same professional area,
Mark made a strong connection between the professions of teaching,
nursing and two other welfare-oriented professional roles that he had
played. Like Didi and David, Mark had already had access to ongoing
support that continued during the teaching practicum and would
continue on beyond it. All three men seemed to be aware of the con-
tribution that their very supportive female partners made to their
professional lives. Mark described the times when he and his wife sat
down to talk in some detail. There was great warmth in his voice as he
spoke about these sustaining interactions. As he spoke, he seemed to
realise the crucial nature of the interactions about which he was
talking. He linked the kind of mutually supportive conversation that
he had with his wife with his ability to leave problems behind and
move forwards in an optimistic way in institutional settings.
Gary: ‘My Mum’s been great ... Try this—this works, that works’
Gary, a student who was training to be a primary teacher, had a
mother and a brother who were both actively involved in his chosen
profession. In the interview, he introduced comments about his
mother’s teaching style by saying, ‘My mother’s been teaching for
thirty-four years’. Although he had worked in other fields, Gary stated
that his mother had always seen him as a potentially gifted primary
teacher: ‘Do primary teaching, do primary teaching, because you’re
good with kids’. The interview made it obvious that Gary enjoyed var-
ious levels of family support. On a general level, his choice of profes-
sion was validated by the lived commitment of family members to
that profession. On a more specific, practicum-oriented level, he was
able to obtain ‘some fantastic lesson plans’ and advice on the difficult
topic of classroom management from his mother. His brother had
offered ‘a wealth of knowledge’ as well.
Ophelia: ‘She would say, Yep, you’re on the right track, but …’
The significance of family expertise was so great that Ophelia accessed
the advice, good will and assistance provided by her sister even
• What do the narratives reveal about the ways in which both the
local and the international students come to understand, learn,
account for, take action and manage their day-to-day situation
during the workplace components of their programs?
• In what ways did the students define, perceive, access and make
use of different types of ‘resources’ and ‘support’ during their
placements?
The data has shown that Bourdieu’s (1990) emphasis on the ‘reg-
ulated improvisations’ (p. 57) of the social world seems to depict with
accuracy the situation of the students as they both try to control, and
yet are constituted by, the new places they are learning within. In
such situations, the image of the independent learner seems inade-
quate. Firstly, as Leach (2001) has pointed out, learners are often
directed to be independent when they might wish to participate in
richer interactions and have access to more adequate resourcing.
Secondly, learners cannot be seen as ahistorical individuals. Rather,
the historicity, the ‘this-ness’ of any situation, is not simply the detail,
but rather the essence. A learner without a ‘generalized social con-
text’ (Halliday, 1979, p. 122) and a ‘learning context’ (Candy, 1991, p.
412) is an image without social meaning. Thirdly, the people who
appear to have most independence, autonomy or agency are those
who are the ‘bearers of capitals’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992b, p.
108). As the different kinds of capital are not always easy to perceive,
the bearers are often seen to have won the position in the field they
have entered when they have the position they occupy ‘by virtue of
their endowment ... in capital’ (p. 108). These students have the prac-
tices, the language, even the bodily dispositions that make ‘their tra-
jectory’ (p. 108) in a certain field seem their right.
Hence, approaches to adult learning that have at their heart
images of individuated, active selves need to replace such images
with other, more social, or socially situated, images of identity and
learning. These have to offer a detailed account of the complex ways
in which resources of all kinds (including that most complex of
resources, language) do not simply ‘influence’ the learner’s ability to
achieve certain goals, but actually work to constitute his or her rela-
tionship with the game and its stakes, to forge the identity of the
learner within a field. The theories that seem most adequate to this
task are those that emphasise the interpreted nature of all experience
(Ricoeur, 1991a, 1991b), the discursive positioning of subjectivities
Recommendations
This book has presented the placement experience from the point of
view of the student. Hence, the recommendations that have been
offered are intended to open up further ‘spaces’ for students during
their work placements. However, because only fifty students were
interviewed before this book was written and because the implemen-
tation of recommendations always involves many different stake-
holders, the following recommendations are offered tentatively in
spite of their rather direct style. It should be noted that none of the
recommendations requires large-scale funding or drastic changes to
existing programs, rather a change of focus, of purpose, a change in
the fundamental framing of the task at hand—that of preparing
people to make the most of their short-term experiences in profes-
sional workplaces.
The following recommendations complement those offered by
Martin (1997), but have been written with the students and their
workplace supervisors, mentors and managers as the main focus,
whereas Martin’s recommendations had university staff as the pri-
mary audience. Some recommendations pose dilemmas that need
further investigation. The work of Bourdieu encourages us to recog-
nise that seemingly independent social actors are never completely
free to pursue their own goals. Certain opportunities must lie in wait
for the learner so that positive ‘positions’ exist prior to the learner’s
arrival in the workplace.
The recommendations have also been designed to complement
the insights presented in a study by Dagher, D’Netto and Sohal (1998)
regarding the extent to which the Australian manufacturing industry
has recognised the need for, and implemented, ‘diversity practices’
(p. 177) in workplaces. In their report, the writers commented that,
‘The literature considers workforce diversity as an enormous chal-
lenge that requires cross-cultural understanding in a constructive
and creative manner, through establishing a cooperative, harmo-
nious, and productive working environment’ (p. 189). This is a huge
Recommendation 1
The students require welcoming, integrating greetings and gather-
ings. The welcoming strategies set up for each new group of students
should be planned ahead, so that workplace personnel can commit
appropriate time to them. Any planned activities also need to involve
various levels of formality. Certain welcoming tasks can involve the
students themselves. Any activities that take place before the place-
ment should be seen as part of the welcoming phase and should also
be well planned. These activities are important because they famil-
iarise the student with the workplace as well as offering the students
opportunities to meet the salient accessible competent peers that can
contribute so much to the students’ workplace learning. Friendly
greetings, friendliness and the ‘friendly manner’ that George referred
to were mentioned positively with great frequency by the students
interviewed. Friendliness can both welcome and empower.
Recommendation 2
The students need to be given a variety of opportunities to speak and
to be heard. However, for those in the workplaces concerned, such
interactions involve entering dialogues with students who will not
always speak with either the ease or the authority of insiders or
experts. If the students can be given opportunities to speak in many
different ways and in many different contexts, they will be more able
to identify and acquire the resources support they require or would
like to have. The students’ requirements in terms of resources and
levels of support will vary. Some flexibility should characterise the
placement arrangements if possible and students should have oppor-
tunities to make their needs known. A student who, like Wilma, has
heavy responsibilities outside the workplace may need to negotiate a
shorter working week and a slightly longer placement. A student, like
Sobash, who needs support in order to discuss aspects of the place-
ment with the employer-supervisor, may request further visits from a
university-based visitor.
Recommendation 4
Students need to be given opportunities to explore both the limita-
tions and the great richness of workplace learning in their university
classes. It is obvious that the placement experience has many chal-
lenging aspects. Such a perception supports those of Martin (1997). In
her investigation of the effectiveness of work-based university educa-
tion, Martin made the highly significant point that the learning to be
achieved during placements had to be seen as ‘problematic’ (p. 77) by
academic staff. At first, this insight was not seen to be especially
significant. However, given the students’ accounts of their experi-
ences, it is now seen that if not only the academic staff, but also the
students concerned, see the placements from this perspective, the
students may be better prepared for the surprises and limitations of
workplace learning, and paradoxically, better equipped to participate
in its richness. Students also need to know about learners as sojourners
and novices so that they can become active networkers as quickly as
possible.
Recommendation 6
Students will need to be given opportunities to define existing and
potential resources more broadly than may have been the case in the
past. What is most interesting is that experiences that were perceived
as unimportant beforehand will become more important in the new
situation. In his interview, Martin who in the previous Christmas hol-
idays had accompanied his brother on a door-to-door job selling
household security systems, narrated an account of such a transfor-
mation. Martin could not have predicted at the time that he would
later see this experience as a vitally important one because the com-
munication skills he had learned during the summer ‘really helped’
during his work placement with Company B.
Recommendation 7
Students need to be given opportunities to develop a greater aware-
ness of the resource networks within which they are located. The stu-
dent needs to explore and reflect on the placement in a way that takes
up the social situation as much as it does the experience of the indi-
vidual learner. In this context, an article by Morrison (1996) suggests
Recommendation 8
Students, university staff and workplace personnel need to build up a
variety of strategies to ensure that students have access to salient
competent peers. It is clear that peers are a key resource. As peers are
often competent rather than expert, their help can be understood
more easily and asked for more often by the students during their
placements. All institutions should be concerned with building up the
students’ professional networks and should see this as part of their
role. The building of peer-based networks is especially important for
students who are not as resource-rich as others.
Recommendation 9
Appropriate, situation-specific networking strategies need to be iden-
tified, encouraged and reflected upon. The interviews suggest that
some of the most confident students had access to many different
kinds of networks—ones based on information technology and
extended family relationships, as well as peers. Hence, another impor-
tant role that can be played by the universities who oversee the pro-
fessional education and training lies in their ability to build strong
networks of students before they enter the workplace. These networks
need to be based on both information technology and human
resources. Human networks cannot be fostered artificially, but have
to grow out of the activities that students undertake in seminars and
beyond. This seems to be one of the many strengths of problem-based
learning. As the learning is group-based, students are offered the
opportunity to participate in co-operative activities and can therefore
build networks before they enter unfamiliar workplaces. It may also
be possible to place students who have fewer resources in workplaces
with peers that they already know.
Final reflections
Hess (2001) has pointed out that researchers who have a perspective
influenced by feminism or cultural studies often separate the effort to
understand the informants’ perspectives from a second research
phase in which those perspectives are re-interpreted using ‘social sci-
entific analysis’ (p. 237). Such a method was adopted in relation to the
interviews conducted so that the concepts that emerged from the
transcripts were scrutinised using key ideas formulated by Bourdieu
and other writers. Throughout the discussion, it has been argued that
Bourdieu’s rich and diverse thought can be used to illuminate the
situation of students during the workplace components of their uni-
versity programs. This strategy also made it possible to situate the
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206 Bibliography
208 Index
Index 209
210 Index
Index 211
212 Index
Index 213