Work and Learning: An Introduction (2013) by Bruce Spencer & Jennifer Kelly
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bruce Spencer and Jennifer Kelly intend their primer on work and learning to be a crossdisciplinary and critically orientated introductory text on adult workplace learning in liberal welfare states, a field that the authors acknowledge as lacking in common consensus concerning the limits and boundaries of study.Rather than introducing workplace learning as part of other fields of study, such as the sociology of work or critical political economy, this book represents the more recent scholarly work of several prominent researchers and theorists within education subdisciplines that have carved out an increasingly distinct genre.Educational scholarship within the field of work and learning often comes from a reactionary perspective, critically attuned to how education has been co-opted under a capitalist mode of relations.As Spencer and Kelly highlight throughout the book, the repercussions of capitalism are particular within the current era of neoliberalism, a subject which cannot be ignored within work and learning.Social and economic influence under neoliberalism is argued to reframe education as ongoing self-investment incumbent upon a worker for success within a knowledge economy.Spencer and Kelly's "critical vocationalism" (p.88) attends to this so-called post-industrial framework to address inequalities inherent within this understanding of learning for work.Their book, while just over 100 pages long, covers significant ground within its eight chapters, examining the multifaceted forms of tension between critical and normative perspectives through topics such as managerialism, employer-and employee-initiated learning, prior learning assessment, and democratic forms of work and learning.Grounding their analysis of these aspects of work and learning is a critical orientation with respect to exactly who benefits when learning dovetails with the "desire to extract more from each employee" (p.52).While focus is placed primarily on adult learning from the 1990s onward, a vast exploration of the history of education in Canada is given in the middle of the book, moving from voluntary and informal education of the 1850s to the Canadian Indian Residential School system, progressivism, and neo-conservatism reform that primarily supported vocationally-relevant curriculum in the 1990s.This vocationalism of education is situated within the current era of neo-conservatism, of which the authors provide an overview of the pervasive ideologies that shape educational reform.These dominant understandings often propagate the necessity of vocationally relevant education above all other intents and interests.As the rest of the book examines, this shift deeply affects how occupational learning is situated and the social relations that emerges from it.Vocationalism is shown to take place at multiple levels of education, bringing relevance to readers who may come from other educational sectors or have modest interest in workplace learning.Organizational spaces come to influence one another, as
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.010 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".