Adult education in a workplace context: recognising production workers’ responses and partnership challenges

Abstract

This article is about a larger regional Swedish partnership programme that was established to develop site-based education for production workers. A partnership is seen as composed of different practice architectures. The actors involved represented larger transnational as well as smaller manufacturing companies, employers, the metal workers’ trade union, educational organizations, university researchers and public labour market authorities. Adult education teachers were engaged to act as leading action researchers on company-specific projects. The partnership programme is used here to illustrate the problem of supporting recognition under shifting partnership circumstances. The aim is to analyse enabling and constraining conditions affecting the teachers’ efforts as well as new possibilities that appeared as the partnership evolved over time. The article illustrates how the development of site-based education within a partnership framework means to develop a new practice that is very sensitive to local circumstances. It also shows how local meetings between people both enable and constrain, but also may open up a space for mutual recognition. A normative argument is that local spaces for mutual recognition need to be supported in a respectful way. Recognition of the particularities of each site is vital for this to happen.

Keywords:

• Adult education
• partnership
• site-based education
• practice architectures

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank members of the Pedagogy, Education and Praxis network and theme two: Partnership and Recognition. The author in particular notes the support from Ros Brennan Kemmis, Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga in the initial stage of the article.

Notes

1. LOM is a Swedish acronym for Leadership, Organisation and Participation.

2. From the 1930s onwards, and further developed in the 1950s by Gösta Rehn and Rudolf Meidner, two labour union economists.

3. The nine principles were: job security; a fair share of production earnings; co-determination in the company; a work organization for cooperation; vocational know-how in all work; education – a part of work; working hours based on social demands; equality at the workplace; and a working environment without risk from unhealthy conditions and accidents.