Promoting Resilience with new Learning Cultures. Perception, Negotiation, Normalisation, and Enactment of Change in Workplace Learning

ABSTRACT

Technological, social, and economic changes challenge workers’ resilience at many levels. Innovative learning cultures have the potential to accommodate industry’s skills expectations with workers need for new forms of workplace learning. This study explores the role of learning cultures as (1) moderators between stability and change, (2) indicators for promoting resilience in VET, and (3) generators for new ideas and innovative approaches in VET. In probing how 26 actors involved in workplace learning negotiate new expectations and changes at their workplace, we arrive at a process model of resilience in workplace training that describes several steps of a perpetual process: Individuals need to perceive a change or new situation as such and then classify it as a form of disturbance. This is followed by a process of negotiation in w hich certain aspects of the change are tested and adopted. This can lead to rejection and exit or to a phase of normalisation where interpretations, adaptations, and internalisations take place. Finally, we argue that the role of new learning cultures is to ensure that new ideas and training concepts are eventually enacted constructively and beneficially by all actors involved in workplace training.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• learning culture
• workplace learning
• negotiation processes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The new learning concept is defined and explained in internal documents. To respect anonymity and discretion, we are not able to provide any references.

Additional information

Funding

The project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and follows the code of conduct for scientific integrity defined by the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences (see https://api.swiss-academies.ch/site/assets/files/25607/kodex_layout_en_web-1.pdf); Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF [192396].

Notes on contributors

Patric Raemy

Patric Raemy is a senior researcher and lecturer at the Department of Communication and Media Research of the University of Fribourg. He is interested in how institutional actors (such as actors involved in VET) perceiving, negotiating, interpreting, and enacting changes, new expectations and professional roles. His major research fields are journalism studies, media pedagogy, and how journalism and education react to digitalisation.

Antje Barabasch

Antje Barabasch is head of the research axe ‘Teaching and Learning within the VPET system’ and the research field ‘Learning cultures and didactics’. Her research is concerned with innovative approaches to apprenticeship training, creativity development and creative approaches to VET education, policy transfer in VET, migration, and arts-based instruction.