Professional learning and knowledge ‘transfer’ in practice: Immigrant engineers reticulating the epistemic culture of the profession.

AbstractIt is known that skilled immigrants learn to integrate professionally. This paper complexifies this image. By following the experiences of ‘successful’ immigrants working in the engineering profession in Canada, it argues that immigrants engage in not only learning but also knowledge ‘transfer’. Their learning at work often starts as legitimate peripheral participation, and evolves through expansive participation in work activities. Meanwhile, they also ‘transfer’ knowledge and practices, a role that could be amplified given their transnational experiences. Immigrants’ learning and knowledge practices can also be understood as a sociomaterial process of translation, through which they knot together people and objects, while negotating power, position, and positionality at the same time. Through continuous learning and knowledge practices, the paper further highlights that immigrant engineers necessarily articulate themselves into, and to some extent, reticulate the epistemic ‘machineries’ or ‘culture’ of the profession, which is constituted through a nexus of professional associations, societies, institutions, and practice communities that are bounded by professional domains and interests, and lifeworld exigencies. Conceptually, this paper draws on practice-based theories and views continuous learning and knowing as an effect of the sociocultural and sociomaterial organization of professional practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]