Codified knowledge and embodied learning: the problem of safety training

Abstract

The research that informs this article was focused around the relationship between how workers are trained to work safely and how workers learn to work safely in the workplace. The findings of empirical studies into learning and practising safety in aged care, fire fighting, building construction, and mining industries are summarized. A common feature emerging from these studies is the failure of safety training through codified knowledge practices such as those incorporated in competency-based training. In such training the embodied learning of workers in the social and physical environments of the workplace is ignored. Stories of this embodied and spatial learning will be analysed in order to draw some conclusions about the practical problem of facilitating learning to work safely. We explore how theoretical categories of the body and space, which have been largely ignored in workplace learning research, can contribute to our understandings of workplace learning more generally.

Acknowledgments

This paper was originally presented at the 4th International Conference of Researching Work and Learning, University of Technology, Sydney, December 2005.