Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemLearning organisations and their educational impact in a corporate environment( 1995)This thesis is a study of learning organisations and their educational impact in a corporate environment. It provides an overview of the theory of organisational learning, and of learning organisations and describes several models of learning organisations. The important principles of holism and explicitness are established. Examples of learning organisation practices in overseas enterprises are compared with two case studies of Australian organisations which are aspiring learning organisations. These practices are then critically reviewed leading to the development of a new model for learning organisations, based upon 'empowered leadership', which explains holism and explicitness in detail. It concludes by addressing the issue of what learning organisations provide educationally, using the emerging prominence of 'life-long learning' as a focus.
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ItemA Review of the changes necessary to ensure the successful implementation and maintenance of a competency based training and assessment program into the Australian Customs Service( 1995)This review examines the changes necessary to to ensure the successful implementation of competency based training and assessment into the Australian Customs Service as recommended by the "Review of the Australian Customs Service and Australian Customs Service - Report of the Consultancy for a Human Resource Development Plan" completed in November 1993.
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ItemOut of the frying pan : to what extent does Certificate III in hospitality (Commercial Cookery) prepare students for further education?( 2009)Further education, a subset of lifelong learning occurring post-compulsory schooling, is an educational and economic requirement to re-skill the workforce for current rapid technological changes requiring broadly-focused skills sets. Further education for cooks generally occurs at an Institute of Technological and Further Education (TAFE). The marketing of most TAFEs state they offer improved vocational and further educational pathways. A cook's career is often characterised by a lack of planning, transience, impulsiveness and chance. Professional cooks focus on attaining a set of culinary craft-specific skills which have limited applicability to other careers, whilst often missing opportunities to learn skills of a broader focus. Many cooks have poor experiences of formal education, both in compulsory schooling and at TAFE. Most cooks tend to career change with less than ten years experience of professional kitchens. Changing career increasingly requires pre-training from a formal education provider, however previous poor experiences of formal education inhibits this re-engagement for many cooks. The research explored the perceptions of twenty-four Commercial Cookery students (fifteen male and nine female) and their four (three male and one female) chef-trainers from a metropolitan TAFE (seventeen respondents) and a rural TAFE (eleven respondents) about the extent to which Certificate III in Hospitality (Commercial Cookery) is preparation for further education. The research explored how experiences Of TAFE and professional kitchens impacted on later re-engagement with further education. To achieve this, the research sought the opinions of apprentices through focus groups and chef-trainers through semi-structured interviews. The findings of this study indicate a need to review, anticipate, promote and prepare for the nexus between professional cooking and career change. Further, this study highlights the dominance of the paper-based assessment paradigm, and finds that this is a major obstacle to accessing much further education for kinaesthetic learners. This study should assist curriculum development through recommending scaffolding for later re-engagement with further education within Commercial Cookery study with a view to giving students a better chance to take control of their long-term future.
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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.