Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Workplace Learning 545
both declarative and practical knowledge of every worker, shouldn’t schools be affording every
student opportunities for both school-based and workplace-based learning, regardless of the
student’s goals for life after school? Second, if recent research on workplace learning rests on
notions of situated learning in which the context is part of what is learned, how can we ensure
that learning in one workplace is generalizable to other contexts? In other words, how can we be
confident about what learning might be transferable and what is clearly not transferable, so high
school students can be optimally prepared to learn from workplace settings?
Before we rush to place every high school student in a workplace, in response to the first question,
we require an answer to the second question. In a recent paper, the Co-operative Education
and Workplace Learning (CEWL) group at Queen’s University in Canada showed that recent
research in metacognition can inform instructional theories that may be helpful. When students
are taught about commonalities among workplaces’ demands for practical knowledge, while
developing knowledge in action in a specific workplace, the students can then use that practical
understanding of knowledge in action. With it, they can monitor and regulate (metacognition) their
own performance in the current workplace, and analyze the demands of other workplaces. Routines
illustrate this well. Most work consists of common demands or routines (and subroutines).
For example, our observations of workplaces revealed “opening routines” such as the routine
followed by a gardening center employee when he arrived for work at the beginning of the day:
putting up “Open” signs, setting out lawn equipment, removing plastic from shrubs and plants,
watering, etc. We noted “opening routines” at other workplaces, but they differed according to
the workplace. Although individual routines are different, all routines have common features:
something initiates them, they run until a defined end point is reached, they can get off-track,
and they can be improved. These general features could be taught so that novice learners in the
workplace monitor their own learning about the work they perform. As Billett argued, recognizing
the routine reinforces the familiar, encourages increased understanding, and frees the worker to
anticipate the nonroutine. Pushing work-based learning to encompass an understanding of the
shape and characteristics of knowing in action within contexts, while acquiring knowing in action
in one context, may surmount the challenges posed by the threat of context-bound learning.
In a recent case study, CEWL demonstrated the applicability of David Hung’s (1999) notion
of epistemological appropriation for understanding how work-based learning might be made
effective for high school students. A high school senior, in a co-op education placement, was
observed regularly over a six-week period during which she moved from an awkward novice
who nearly fainted while watching a procedure to a competent dental assistant. By the end of
the observation period, Denise, the high school senior, had appropriated the social aspects of the
role, joining the community of practice by modeling her uniform and language on those of the
preventative dental assistant (PDA) who mentored her. She had also engaged in cognitive appropriation
and was able to aid the dentist unprompted, anticipating his need for tools and materials
just as the PDA did. Extensive observational data that showed the PDA’s regulatory behaviors
of scaffolding, modeling, and coaching and the novice’s corresponding regulatory behaviors of
submitting, mirroring, and constructing contributed to Denise’s learning in action. Unlike the
sequential progression suggested by Hung’s theory, the supervisor’s and novice’s regulatory behaviors
continued for the duration of the term. Even during one day, there would be examples
of all regulatory behaviors. This finding suggests that sequential progression occurs for each
instance of significant new learning, and that new learning is constantly being introduced. Hung’s
regulatory behaviors focus attention on how supervisors can improve opportunities for novices’
learning, and on how novices can become more engaged in both social and epistemological
appropriation in work-based learning.
The second challenge to schools runs deeper. If high school seniors like Denise can appropriate
knowledge in action and join complex communities of practice within one school term, can schools
ignore the possibility that their emphasis on declarative, decontextualized knowledge in the