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The demographic shift to an ageing population in contemporary Western society offers a new cultural frontier, with rapidly shifting contours that demand creative and critical examination. Rather th...

This chapter offers an auto-ethnographic account of my experiences of working as a critical social work educator and trade unionist in contemporary academia. In doing so it provides insight into the increasingly neoliberalised higher education sector, and some of the challenges this context can pose for academics who adopt a critical stance and conceptualise education as having the potential to contribute to a more socially just, equitable and democratic society. The chapter reflects on a managerial system that is wholly implicated in supporting and normalising bullying. The paper seeks to contribute to critical scholarship on higher education by theorising a considered, ethical response to neoliberal managerialism within universities. Critical pedagogy, collective action and collegial solidarity are suggested as practices of agency and resistance.

Continuing to learn is universally accepted and expected by professionals and other stakeholders in professional practice. However, despite changes in undergraduate professional education in response to research findings, most continuing professional development (CPD) practices focus on delivery of content rather than on learning. Professional development still largely consists of brief, didactic episodes, often separated from practice or ongoing support. In exploring reasons for the lack of significant change in support for continuing learning, scant research was found about how professionals experience learning through their working lives. This study explores how allied health professionals learn in the current changing work context. The aim of the study is to enhance understanding about continuing learning so that support for professionals can improve. The findings have implications for learning in health and other professions. Using a phenomenological framework, continuing professional learning (CPL) is conceptualised in this study as part of the professionals’ lived experience of everyday practice. This conceptualisation challenges the problematic way in which much previous research views professional knowledge as a commodity that can be transferred and accumulated, separate from the professionals’ working context. Rich and diverse descriptions of learning were gained from interviews with sixteen therapists, contextualised through worksite visits, network meetings and relevant policy documents. These data were analysed using Giorgi’s empirical phenomenological methodology. A key finding of this study is the identification of significant dissonance between the reality of the professionals’ experiences of learning and the rhetoric of stakeholders’ expectations about professional development. The main focus of previous research, on the implementation and outcomes of CPD activities, fails to acknowledge the complex, diverse, multifaceted and idiosyncratic nature of professional learning experiences. Professional responsibilities with respect to CPD are linked to supervision of standards, monitoring of accountability and promotion of evidencebased practice. As this study clearly reveals, the participants are enthusiastic learners who take these professional responsibilities seriously, but consider that their continuing learning is richer than this narrow CPD interpretation. The findings are reported in two phases. The first describes commonalities across diverse experiences of CPL, in terms of four inter-related constituents: understanding, engagement, interconnection and openness. Within the complexity of descriptions of CPL, tensions are revealed, particularly between the openness and uncertainty of learning, and the constraints and regulation of context. How tensions are resolved depends on each person’s way of being a professional, so that each professional’s learning has a unique quality permeating what is essentially a shared experience. The second phase of the findings draws on phenomenological philosophy to interpret the shared experience of CPL. The key argument of this phase is that the dissonance between rhetoric and reality in CPL is largely hidden from public discourse, being mainly voiced between professionals in supportive environments. It is argued that the hidden nature of this dissonance is one reason for the lack of significant change in CPD practices, in that few professionals publicly question CPD practices or the current context for learning. Within the usual CPD discourse, learning is viewed in epistemological terms as change in professional practice knowledge, with the professional viewed as deficient and in need of developing. In this study, the ontological dimension of CPL is highlighted, in that who the professional is shapes and directs what and how the professional learns. The ontological dimension of learning and the impact of context on learning are overlooked in most CPD practices. It is important that learning providers are cognisant of the complex, diverse nature of CPL so that innovative ways of supporting professionals to learn can be encouraged. Although CPL can’t be controlled, it can be supported, so that professionals can continue to learn in their own authentic way, whilst taking into account the expectations of their working contexts. In seeking a balance between responsibility and agency in CPL, a framework of “Authentic Professional Learning” is proposed as congruent with, and supportive of, professionals’ experiences of learning, yet cognisant of the realities of the workplace with respect to accountability. Constructive strategies are developed from this framework to enable change from the current practice of CPD to that of authenticity in CPL. This study integrates, empirically confirms and extends research in higher education, workplace learning and adult education. The contribution made to understanding and supporting CPL is both theoretical and practical. Furthermore, demonstration of the value of a phenomenological framework as an alternative approach to researching continuing learning makes a methodological contribution to research in this area.

Time for reflective thought is constricted in busy academic lives, with available thinking time focused on urgent, analytical inquiry. Paradoxically, time spent in contemplative mindfulness, stepping back from insistent probing into a still, calm space, may allow increased clarity and focus on problems worthy of inquiry, once re-engaged. This paper highlights the dual dimension of reflection captured in the concept of ‘mindful inquiry’ as a dialectic interchange between active critical inquiry and receptive open mindfulness. In the focus on robust critique in contemporary higher education, the value of contemplation is lost. Insights from Western and Eastern philosophy, as well as evidence from empirical research, suggest an integrated approach may allow alternative, creative and intuitive ways of approaching problems to supplement rational, problem solving strategies. The practice of ‘mindful inquiry’ also offers a practical tool, to enhance academic wellbeing as well as help prepare students for partici...

While the focus of practice-based education (PBE) is on students becoming practising professionals, we contend that professionals inevitably and desirably bring their life experience to their practice, and so PBE curricula should also encompass learning for life. We want professionals to engage with the people and communities they work alongside, to be productive global citizens and to be enriched as people from their work as professionals.

The way that a professional continues to learn is an expression of her way of being a professional, in dynamic interplay with her particular professional context. Conversely, learning shapes that way of being and, therefore, way of dealing with the context. Learning as a professional has an important ontological dimension: what and how a professional learns vary with who she is as a professional.

As this book is based on research into real-life experiences, it opens with the voices of professionals describing situations where they have learnt. The first description was given by a young therapist, Nerida who works full time at a residential setting for adults with intellectual disability. Nerida commented that she often learns as a professional in seemingly incidental situations, with such incidents building upon each other. From the “gum” incident, she described not only learning more about her client but also learning more about communicating with adults with intellectual disability.

“Authentic Professional Learning” is the term I have used to represent the lived experience of continuing to learn as a professional. This term distinguishes the realities of the experience of PL from the rhetoric about PD expectations, whilst raising the notion of authenticity with respect to dealing with dissonance between the two. This chapter outlines a framework based on this notion of APL, proposing constructive possibilities for supporting professionals as they learn in the current context.

From the holistic perspective taken in this research, the descriptions of APL throughout this chapter are imbued with nuances of the professional life-world, but because the focus is on the experience of learning, some life-world details are lightly sketched. To contextualise the phenomenological structure of APL, this chapter begins with a description of the professional life-world drawn from the complete data corpus, with respect to three aspects of the professional context: professional affiliations, employer organisations and local workplaces.

This chapter on methodology begins by reviewing the increasing dissent amongst social researchers about close adherence to research method. I then outline my own position on method in this research, drawing on Mats Alvesson’s argument about the need for “reflexive interpretation” in most empirical research (Alvesson & Skoldberg, 2000; Alvesson, 2002). Following this theoretical and reflexive positioning, issues of quality that influenced the research design and choice of methods are described. The design involves an adapted and extended version of Amedeo Giorgi’s methodology, with some influence from Max van Manen.

A wide diversity of literature exists that is relevant to examining PD and understanding PL, making such investigation an interdisciplinary area of inquiry. This inquiry is located at the intersection of a number of areas of research and of policy. Research into the continuing learning of professionals can be informed by the literature from higher education and continuing professional education, workplace and informal learning, adult and community education and organisational learning and human resource management. Until recently, research from these areas was rarely integrated, let alone focused towards the particular concerns of the continuing learning of working professionals.

Besides enhancing understanding about the experience of APL, this research reveals concerns about the current focus of PD. As described in Section III, APL is shaped through continuing interplay between who the professional is and the opportunities for and constraints on learning within her professional context. To support learning, opportunities need to be enhanced and problematic issues addressed. This chapter questions the current professional context for learning, whilst being cognizant that the impact of context on learning varies with each professional.

In choosing and using a research perspective, conceptual congruence and clarity are vital. Thus the research purpose should be congruent with the research approach and methods chosen; the assumptions underpinning the research approach should be clear and consistent in their use throughout the research. This chapter highlights conceptual underpinnings in outlining the phenomenological perspective taken in this book. For readers unfamiliar with phenomenology, an overview of key concepts is presented; for others cognizant of the complexity of phenomenology, the philosophical assumptions of the particular approach I have used are clarified.