Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemNew cars, new work, new learning: productive workplace learning at a lean manufacturing site( 2007)This study investigates the construction of knowledge through action, teamwork and problem-solving. Within the context of a competitive global industry, the vehicle manufacturing industry, production workers and font-line supervisors from a component manufacturing company, Toyota-Boshoku, were interviewed about their work. Workers in a production environment are active and participative and the fieldwork indicates that they learn most effectively from the practical performance of tasks. Clearly, the embodied actions of workers are epistemologically significant because it is the doing of the task that their learning, knowledge and understanding are expressed. Therefore, learning practices that emerge from the performative nature of the work are most likely to present workers with opportunities to display their skills, knowledge and understanding. The whole person is involved in such learning - the cognitive, social, psychomotor and affective domains - and helps to shape knowledge for workers as expressive bodies. Knowledge is constructed in the social and atmosphere of the workplace as workers learn from one another in their everyday work practices. The thesis concludes that there is significant epistemological value in the embodied actions of the workers and in this respect the thinking and the doing are intertwined and interdependent, rather than separate entities.