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Informa Work Based Learning Forum

22nd – 23rd November 2011 | Vibe Savoy Melbourne

Interpreting practice

Merilyn Childs and Regine Wagner1

Honorary Doctorate awarded to retired High Court judge Michael Kirby

(UNSW 2008, Murdoch University 2009, Victoria University 2009)

Abstract

A number of speakers before us have defined practice, and talked about workbased learning

from a number of perspectives. Rather than duplicating this focus, we will instead share some

of our thinking about practice and workbased learning, drawing from our own practices.

During 1994-2007 we established four postgraduate degrees at the University of Western

Sydney, supported by a Recognition of Prior Learning entry process. These were the

Graduate Diploma of Educational Leadership, offered to students in Iraq and in Alice

Springs; the Graduate Diploma of Social Sciences (Community Services) offered in

partnership with the centre for Community Welfare Training and the Australian Children‟s

Welfare Agency, the Graduate Diploma of Social Sciences (Adult Education), offered

through open enrolment; and the Graduate Certificate of Social Sciences (Emergency

Services), developed in partnership with the NSW Fire Brigades as the promotional program

for Station Officers developing job readiness for the role as Inspector. The first two were

workbased degrees, the latter two were work-integrated degrees.

In addition, in 2002-3 we were funded by the NSW Office of the Director of Equal

Opportunity in Public Employment (ODEOPE) to develop a recognition process to enable

migrants attempting to enter employment in the public sector to articulate their prior

knowledge and experiences in the contexts of work and Higher Education learning. For these

various projects, work was defined as curriculum and was expansively understood as a

1 Affiliations: Associate Professor of Higher Education, Dr Merilyn Childs, Deputy Director of the Flexible

Learning Institute, Charles Sturt University mchilds@csu.edu.au and Associate Professor and Visiting Fellow, Dr

Regine Wagner, Flexible Learning Institute, Charles Sturt University rwagner@csu.edu.au

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metaphor for productive labour. For example, “work” encompassed relevant paid or unpaid

labour, and included individual as well as socially mediated evidence. Central to our response

to “work” was our commitment to interpreting practice. We began with a simple proposition

– life and work is more complex and potentially more thoughtful than a single undergraduate

or postgraduate semester long subject. Our task then was to establish strategies whereby that

complexity could be understood, expanded, theorised and evidenced. In this presentation we

outline our approach, and a number of the strategies we used to develop university degrees at

the nexus of work and learning.

In our presentation, we‟ll draw on some anecdotes from our practice, and some of these

you‟ll see throughout this paper.

Demystifying academic practice

We‟d like to give a brief indication about the meaning we give to words like “practice” and

“work” by saying that, by these words we are referring to “productive labour”; and by

“productive” we are meaning economically, socially, democratically productive labour. We

are influenced by the German concept of Sozialpaädagogik2; which means we think about

“practice” in relationship to “working on and in the social” (a social-societal orientation,

Pretoriaus 2008, p.5) and this includes working on and in the social in the context of paid

labour, voluntary labour, or socially productive activity. In particular it is concerned with the

inherent connectivity between learning, social actions and socially just futures. Humans are

not machines, and all human labour exists within, and shapes, multiple, complex and socially

connected worlds even when fire fighting!

So often within the academe in Australia, “practice” is portrayed as the (lesser?) labour done

by paid professionals and para-professionals, outside the academe.

Anecdote

A week ago I heard an academic refer to the work of paramedics as “doing what they are told

to do”. It‟s not the first time I‟ve heard this kind of claim, and some academics seem to

genuinely believe that work with the hands – operational work – can be done without the

mind. Clearly they have limited understanding about the complex nature of paramedic

practice, even when it involves novice paramedics. They simply see Standard Operating

2 In 2000, we wrote: “Although spoken of as educational innovation, WBL has a long history of experimentation and the

educational concepts and practices described as workplace learning and WBL have a rich epistemological tradition in debates about * the relationship between education and the economy * the relationship of theory and practice in education processes * the dualism of education and training and associated social and institutional divisions (Wagner and Childs, 2000, p.1).

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Procedures, and imagine all paramedics do is follow orders. Or fire fighters just have to “put

the wet stuff on the red stuff”. It just isn‟t that simple.

We offer the word “lesser” because practice is often associated with “un” words like:

uncritical, un-theorised, and under-developed (un-thinking-ly meaning “with the hands”). The

work academics do is often associated with positive words such as: seminal, critical,

evidence-based, and peer-reviewed (done insightfully, guided by the mind). It is as if

academics are not in the labour force or even the same landscape as students; and “practice”

is the thing other people do. It is the activity undergraduates learn to do after a three year

degree, although even then it may be “uncritical” practice. In our experience, this assumed

superiority creates blindness within the university to understanding and working with

practice.

Anecdote:

I attended a Professor‟s Forum at which education for practice was being discussed. The

question of great interest was how the university might ensure that disciplinary rigour might

be applied to practice. I asked if the model they were discussing allowed them to understand

rigour from the perspective of practice. For example, how was “rigour” characterised within

the practice domain by those practicing within it? How did a particular domain of practice

foster criticality? How did it foster its evidence-base? How was new knowledge – for

example, as derived from university research – taken up and used within the practice-

domain? There was a long silence. The conversation returned to a discussion about

disciplinary knowledge.

In order to engage in meaningful ways with “practice”, we needed to see our own practice as

existing within the same rubrics, hierarchies and continuums as practice more generally. This

allowed us to understand that statements we made about practice were automatically

statements we were making about academic practice. If we asked students to interrogate and

expand their understanding of their practice; – then so too should we, in the academe.

The academic practices we worked to demystify (Wagner & Childs, 2000) included: the

relationship between work and learning; the subject; student contact hours with the subject;

critical thinking; assessment; and the role of the academic in a critically engaged learning

process. If we argued that reflective practice was important, then it had to be important as

applied to academic practice. If we argued that through their workbased projects, students

might mitigate or militate against structural disadvantage for their clients; then so too should

the academe in their practice. If we heard our colleagues say “we need to improve

professional practice in the xxx industry”; then we automatically took this to mean “and to do

this, we need to improve academic practice”.

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Students enrolled in the workbased degrees completed a workbased project that was either a

session long (Graduate Certificate) or yearlong (Graduate Diploma). As work was defined as

the curriculum, and a project was defined as the learning process, the project needed to be

highly relevant – and so too did the assessment practices. Learning evolved through three

thematic stages (as distinct from the completion of single, potentially unrelated subjects).

These stages were:

describing practice during which student articulated their professional “known”

through narrative and other forms

problematising practice during which students posed questions about their practice

through a variety of lenses, including appropriately chosen readings

re-shaping praxis during which students made recommendations and articulated

frameworks for future practice at the nexus of “the word” (critical thinking,

speculation, theory formation) and “the world” (practice domains)

In order for these stages to make sense in relationship to academic practice, we needed to

make a number of structural changes to our work, and this meant we had to understand our

own practice; see the systemic and pedagogical problems and learn more about how to solve

them; and re-shape our praxis.

Anecdote

When we designed the first postgraduate workbased program we were faced with some real

problems. We had a series of individual subjects which required at least two assessment items

per subject. There were four subjects in a session, and this meant eight separate assessment

tasks. Broken up in this way suited academic practice, but bore no relationship to the world

of work of community services professionals in Alice Springs – a world a great deal more

complex and dynamic than single subjects in a university degree; yet needing new ideas and

possibilities to solve real problems on the ground. We problematised our practice, integrated

the learning outcomes across all four subjects, and created a learning process and

assessment practices that allowed us to meet university workload, student load, and

assessment requirements; whilst similarly responding respectfully to the practices of students

who were adult workers in their own social contexts.

Hierarchies of knowledge and knowing

We made a claim at the beginning – that life and work is more complex and potentially more

thoughtful than a single undergraduate or postgraduate semester long subject. This doesn‟t

sound like a very big claim, but in our experience it turns out that it is. From inside a

discipline, even if words like “multi” and “cross” are added to it; the discipline seems very

complex. (Those involved in professional practice will have the same experience about their

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own practice-domain). So, we specialise; and as part of this specialisation, we create

individual subjects that bite off a small part of the complex disciplinary picture in order to

provide students with that one small coloured dot that we specialise in, that contributes to the

whole picture. These coloured dots make up subjects, typically about 24 in an undergraduate

degree over a 3 year full-time period. These subjects, through the student experience of them,

build disciplinary or professional capacity.

In the process of creating the “bits”, we rely on hierarchies. Some bits are seen as more

important than others, so we have first, second and third years. Some bits are more complex

than others, so we have 5,000 word essays rather than 2,000 word essays. We have theory,

and generally speaking this comes before and certainly above practice in our curriculum

hierarchy. In our experience at least – all of the bits, even the first year, first semester bits

taken by experience professionals who are experts in their own right – are seen as more

important and more complex than practice. We know this, because whilst some Australian

Universities may give credit for prior formal studies; credit for prior professional practice,

lifewide and informal lifelong learning remains in a poor state of development3.

Over the years we have participated in academic conversations based on a number of

underlying and historic assumptions about the theory/practice relationship, and these can be

summed up as:

Students need to learn theory before they can practice

Theory should be applied to practice

Theory is more rigorous than practice

Practice is un-theorised unless it has been interrogated through university studies

Theory is typically privileged, and celebrated, for example, through mandatory text books

that form the basis of a learning process; learning in many subjects remains structured in line

with the chapters of a textbook. Theory is seen as systematic, ordered, abstracted and tested;

universal therefore applicable to practice, and of its very nature critical. Practice on the other

hand is seen as un-systematic, not tested by peer review or experiment, context bound, and of

3 Although Pitman argued in 2010 that “29 out of 38 public universities in Australia accepted RPL for the purposes of

admission and/or credit”, he does not differentiate policy for RPL, and the actual practice of RPL, described by others as

inadequate and patchy (eg Fox, 2007).

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its very nature uncritical4. This latter assumption seems to be held without any understanding

of practice-rigour either through research or anecdote.

Anecdote:

When I was working as an educational innovator in a Mathematical faculty at a German

university, I asked the academics working in “Applied Mathematics” what type of work and

workplaces their students would go to. Not only did they not know, they did not see it as their

responsibility to prepare their students for work, they were „training‟ Mathematicians. In the

end, we did develop a course “Mathematics and the Environment”, aimed at taking a first

step into “applied” studies.

As academics working in workbased degrees, we were repeatedly confronted with the

obvious need to draw on multiple disciplines to develop, with students, an analysis of their

work problems and strategies to move forward. We experienced firsthand the limitations of

any one disciplinary approach. We realised how work as a generative theme created the focal

point for knowledge production, as it proceeded from a need to know and integrated various

approaches, concepts and frameworks to reflect complexity in situ. As much as un-theorised

practice is unable to respond to complex problems, un-practiced theory is bound by academic

traditions rather than by the search for complex understandings and therefore remains limited.

Both needed each other. We observed first hand student impulses to engage creatively and

thoughtfully through practice to understanding – we were merely part of this larger

professional and life journey.

The theory (critical)/practice (uncritical) dualism is unhelpful in a workbased learning

environment. To frame5 our academic education practice we developed four continua as

practice guiding principles for ourselves, and for students enrolled in workbased degrees:

1. process versus product orientation

2. investigation versus prescription

3. generative themes versus segmented knowledge

4. critical thinking versus mystification

These four continua go to the heart of workbased learning for all workers, including

academics.

4 There is no doubt that post-modernism has challenged notions of grand narratives but it has not been able to undo the

theory/practice divide in the academe. 5 If we inform our academic practice drawing on Vygotskii’s (1978) and Leont’ev’s (1982) thinking, there is no such thing

as pure mind or pure hand work. According to these influential thinkers, all activity is based in the material world and mediated through cognitive processes.

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Anecdote

When I was a student myself, I had to sign up to a „theory/practice seminar‟ for two years,

which involved team based practice as educators in professional development programs for

child care and youth workers. Our practice led us to choose discipline based offers at our

Uni, across a broad social science spectrum, ranging from educational to sociological to

psychological courses. We explored research methodologies, philosophical and ethical

issues, political and economic aspects, communication and design. The point was, those

course were organised around our field of practice, to respond to our need to understand and

develop strategies for our next encounter with our „clientele‟ and as such were utterly

relevant. At the same time, as student/practitioners we were able to ask pertinent questions of

academics, who were also practitioners engaging in the same fields. …. And we had to

produce a minor thesis to be able to graduate form an undergraduate degree.

Practice, including WBL, as a site of interpretation

In order to talk about practice, we needed to introduce the idea that hierarchies of knowledge

based on a (critical) theory/practice/ (uncritical) dualism existed as an invisible curriculum,

and we had to develop strategies that turned the dualism into continua. Work-integrated

learning, field placements, “authentic learning” and personal learning environments are all

really useful approaches to improving the student experience. However, they are typically

used to enliven a theory-lead curriculum; or to tentatively allow students to engage in practice

in a controlled and limited way.

Anecdote:

I recall when one of the large Sydney universities announced they were going to introduce a

mandated subject for all undergraduate students who would be required to do volunteer work

as a subject in their degree. No mention was made of valuing the voluntary labour many

students may have already undertaken on their own cognisance, or of a mechanism that might

allow any student to register the learning outcomes that the university aspired to achieve

through their voluntary labour. All that counted was voluntary labour manufactured within

the codification offered (and advertised) by the university.

We began this presentation by making reference to three honorary doctorates awarded to

Justice Michael Kirby, a worthy recipient, in 2008 and 2009. We did this to point out in the

simplest way possible that Australian universities do value practice achieved through

recognition. Justice Kirby‟s workbased learning over many years was judged by three

universities to be equivalent to (more likely exceeding) a doctorate. The statement produced

by the University of Melbourne supported the awarding of the doctorate by interpreting

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Justice Kirby‟s practice by making reference to his career highlights, his increasingly

prestigious appointments, awards, and service. At the upper end of the hierarchy of

knowledge, we know how to interpret practice – Justice Kirby is tertiary qualified, and his

contribution to the law and society has been exemplary. That is why it is equated to a

doctorate.

The underlying principle remains useful – universities are able to value and interpret practice

for the purposes of a qualification. Whether acknowledged or not, students more generally

are adults for whom formal university studies take place within diverse and complex lives –

of course not to the extent of Justice Kirby‟s and the awarding of a doctorate, but

nevertheless developing practice through work and life. Let‟s look at some statistics. In 2009,

the Australian Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEET)

released the enrolment statistics of all students by age group and broad level of course. One

million adults aspired to enrol in an Australian University in 2009. According to DEET‟s

figures, the total number of students enrolled in all Undergraduate (UG) courses in public

universities in Australia in 2009 (excluding enabling and non-award courses) was 790,810

(DEET, 2009). Of this total, 13% were aged over 30 years old (100,633); 9.5% were aged 25-

29 (75,032); 45% were aged 20-25 (358,398). A total of 67.5% of all UG students enrolled in

Australian Universities were aged over 20 years old and were legally “adults”, and of these

22.5% were aged over 25 years. Only 140,466 or 18% were under 18 years old. University

students are not all seventeen or eighteen year olds straight from school, but adults who will

have aspirations, life experiences, learning journeys and spaces, outside the institution.

Students come to their University studies from somewhere, going somewhere. Jackson (2010)

argued that a university can change its “conception of curriculum” (p.496), and discusses

how this has unfolded at Surrey University (UK) through the development of a “life-wide

learning award” that values workplace learning curriculum, new learning through part-time

work and volunteering, and experiential learning gained through “life wide enterprise” gained

outside the academic curriculum. The award recognizes the learning spaces in which students

engage in learning, and the “building blocks of an epistemology of practice (Raeline 2007,

cited in Jackson, p.495) achieved in those spaces. This approach to curriculum reform is

qualitatively different to reforms that attempt to “improve the student experience” without

changing the university‟s conceptions of curriculum.

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Whether we design a work-integrated, workbased or a recognition curriculum, we ask

students to interpret their practice – for example, as a narrative of understanding, through the

lens of theory, through a rubric, as assessments. This approach to learning changes what is

required of us, as academics, in relationship to a student‟s practice and their productive

labour more generally. We can no longer privilege a textbook chapter or a pet theory derived

from a favoured discipline in order to work with students to translate their practice into a

genre that can then be used for assessment.

Anecdote:

In 2005 I did some part-time teaching for a large city university. The subject I was teaching

was “Program Development” in a Bachelor of Adult and Vocational Education. The policy of

the course, and one of the theoretical stances of the subject, was that program development

should be responsive to a student‟s prior learning. As mature aged students with substantial

post-compulsory program development experience, at least a third of the class could have

taught the subject just as well as I could. When I referred these students to the Course

Coordinator with a request for Recognition of Prior Learning to exempt them from the

subject, their requests were denied. They were told they had not studied the textbook assigned

to the subject, and could not therefore show they knew the theory of program development.

The rationale was that they knew the practice, but we (the university) knew the theory, and

the theory could only be found in this single textbook.

Justice Kirby did not have to articulate his life‟s work in relationship to a discipline or set of

disciplines. He did not have to refer to seminal works nor compartmentalise his lifewide and

lifelong learning into assessments that responded to textbooks that had been privileged. The

University of Melbourne interpreted his achievements through a portfolio of evidence against

a policy framework related to excellence as a quality.

The act of translation does not lie in the hands of students alone. As we pointed out through

our example of Justice Kirby, the act of translation lies also in the hands of the academe. In

the case of our workbased degrees, we had to translate what we were doing in relationship to

policy, and to our peers, and to try to find models within the university that could create

precedence for our innovations. Academics working with students in the context of practice

must engage in acts of interpretation in ways that are totally different to teaching content,

then marking an essay. They need to be able to

value practice as holding the potential for praxis

recognise theorised practice, and value theory formation

recognise rigour in the practice-domain

recognise “graduateness” and graduate attributes in the practice-domain

recognise equivalence

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recognise criticality through its many iterations as action and activism

foster learning in the context of practice-domains, including academic practice-domains

Conclusion

In this presentation we have outlined aspects of our approach and some of our experience

with workbased learning in higher education, told from within the small window of

opportunity that presented itself in the tumultuous years of accelerated change and continuous

restructuring of universities in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty first century. We

briefly outlined what we mean when we talk about “practice” and outlined the problems

posed by the (critical) theory/ (uncritical) practice dualism that characterises a great deal of

academic talk about practice.

Valuing and interpreting practice, including work as a practice-domain, lies at the heart of

workbased learning. Our approach to integrating and interpreting practice/praxis benefitted

traditional and “non-traditional” students (now often referred to as lower SES students),

academics and industry partners we worked with at the time. These achievements were

possible because of the way we perceived, valued, recognised and problematised practice,

including our own. Work as learning creates a deeply authentic and connected curriculum not

only to Higher Education, but also to productive labour more generally. It demands a

different way of thinking about practice from the point of view of the academic, and the

academe.

Since our work in workbased learning, the sector has moved on and is experimenting with

different work related models, often at the individual subject level. As far as we know,

workbased learning – that is, learning where work is the curriculum – is yet to be accepted

beyond a few local examples by the Australian HE sector. Perhaps the widely adopted “work

integrated learning” model made popular during the Australian Learning and Teaching

Council era is one small step towards a more radical understanding of what it means to

theorise practice and to practice theory to achieve praxis? Our story about Justice Kirby

provided proof of the sector‟s capacity to value practice in its complexity and rigour, in his

case, through recognition. It seems possible that those designing “authentic learning

environments” and “learning spaces” might add to their tool box the capacity to value,

translate and problematise existing authentic learning environments and spaces, designed

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through and in the life world (Childs and Wagner 2011) and populated by adults, who one

day may be students?

Finally we return to a claim we made at the beginning, and expand it a little – life and work is

more complex and potentially more thoughtful than a single undergraduate or postgraduate

semester long subject – and perhaps even an entire undergraduate or postgraduate degree.

Some final questions: What do you think about our proposition? Have you thought about

rigour from the point of view of practice? What might it mean in the context of the practice-

domains with which you work? What are its characteristics, and how might it sit comfortably

along a continuum with academic rigour? Do you value practice? If you do; how? Does the

value you place on practice benefit the student/novices and student/experts with whom you

work? How do you interpret practice within the rubrics available to you? Do you think, by

and large, practice is uncritical and needs theory to make it critical? What blindness does this

create for you, as you work with students and design learning environments?

Anecdote – what else is possible?

In 2000 and 2001, we facilitated a workbased graduate diploma in education change

management with staff of the Ministry of Education who became interested in the concept‟s

applicability to schools. In a lecture, I used the „Tvind‟ example. Tvind, an experimental High

school in Denmark did not teach classroom based curricula but used all activities required to

keep a residential school running as learning sites. Students were engaged in grounds,

vehicle and building maintenance (curriculum areas: biology, technology, design, physics,

mathematics, mechanics); financial management (curriculum areas: budgeting, accounting,

statistics), catering (curriculum areas: health, nutrition, communication, planning,

measuring, stock maintenance), organisational management and development (curriculum

areas; social studies, conflict resolution, internal and external partnership management,

marketing), entertainment (curriculum areas: performing arts, sports, travel and tourism).

Over several years, the majority of students passed the national matriculation exam with

flying colours and then went on a twelve months bus trip around Europe, as part of the

school‟s curriculum, to experience cultural diversity and assist in community projects.

Interestingly enough, the Iranian Ministry of Education was interested in the concept; alas we

were interrupted by 9/11.

References

Childs, M. (ed.) (1997) A slight breathing space. A guide to working with micro and small to medium

business enterprises for adult educators and the VET sector. University of Western Sydney Nepean.

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Childs, M and Wagner, R. (2011). „Beyond The Look – Viral Learning Spaces as Contemporary

Learning Environments‟. In Mike Keppell, Kay Souter, Matthew Riddle [Eds], Physical and

Virtual Learning Spaces in Higher Education: Concepts for the Modern Learning Environment,

Information Science Publishing, Hershey, pp.33-50.

Childs, M. and Wagner, R. (2010) Rethinking margin and centre in student equity in higher

education: The sound of viral learning spaces: voices from praxis2nd

Annual Student Equity in

Higher Education national Conference, Melbourne October 2010.

Constable,J., Wagner,R., Childs,M. Natoli, A. (2004) Doctors become Taxi Drivers. Recognising

Skills – not as easy as it sounds.

http://www.dpc.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/25577/Recognising_Skills_-

_not_as_easy_as_it_sounds.pdf

DEEWR (2009). Students: Selected Higher Education Statistics, Accessed February 22nd

2011,

http://www.deewr.gov.au/HigherEducation/Publications/HEStatistics/Publications/Pages/2009FullYe

ar.aspx

Fox, Tricia A. (2005) Adult learning and recognition of prior learning: The 'white elephant' in

Australian universities. Australian Journal of Adult Learning, 54(3), pp. 352-370.

Jackson, N. (2010) From a curriculum that integrates work to a curriculum that integrates life:

changing a university's conceptions of curriculum. Higher Education Research &

Development; Oct2010, Vol. 29 Issue 5, pp491-505

Leont‟ev, A.N. (1982) Action, cognition and personality, Weinheim, Beltz. (in German) Pitman, T. (2010). The use of recognition of prior learning in the Australian higher education sector.

In Proceedings Western Australian Institute for Educational Research Forum 2010.

http://www.waier.org.au/forums/2010/pitman.html

Press releases (Justice Kirby) http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/retired-judge-spotlights-mallard-

20090317-90wl.html 2009 http://www.vu.edu.au/media/media-releases/michael-kirby-to-receive-

honorary-degree-tomorrow 2008 http://www.unsw.edu.au/news/pad/articles/2008/sep/Kirby.html;

Statement of claim: http://www.unimelb.edu.au/unisec/calendar/honcausa/citation/kirby.pdf

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Samelewing, Jeug, J. L. van Schaik,Pretoria, 1979.Accessed 1st November 2011,

http://georgeyonge.net/sites/georgeyonge.net/files/Pretorius_socio_Ch1.pdf

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Cambridge, Harvard University Press.

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Labour Market. The case of skilled migrants and refugees. ISBN 186341 824 5, 90

Wagner, R. and Childs, M. (2006) Exclusionary narratives as barriers to the recognition of

qualifications, skills and experience – a case of skilled migrants in Australia, Studies in

Continuing Education, 28 (1) 49-62.

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Wagner, R. and Childs, M. (2005) Critical social pedagogy: Colliding with neo-liberal education

management, International Congress for Social Education, Barcelona, March .

http://www.eduso.net/archivos/iiicongreso/31.pdf

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Knowledge: Productive Learning at Work, International Conference, UTS, Sydney. pp551-

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Addendum

An excerpt summarising the approach of the speakers; taken from Solomon, N. & Boud, D.

2011, 'Researching workplace learning in Australia', in M. Malloch, L. Cairns, K. Evans & B.

O'Connor (eds), The SAGE Handbpook of workplace learning, SAGE Publications, London,

pp. 210-223:

As RPL has been a strong feature of work-based learning degrees, some academics involved in the

development and delivery of these degrees have focused their research on knowledge and learning

that crosses institutional boundaries. Working within a social justice and social participation

framework, the research of Regine Wagner (RMIT, formerly of University of Western Sydney) and

Merilyn Childs (Charles Sturt University, formerly of University of Western Sydney) has contributed

to pedagogical practices in educational institutions in recognition to recognition of prior learning

(Wagner, 2007; Wagner and Childs, 2006; Childs et al 2002) and post-graduate work-based degrees

(Wagner et al., 2001). They have also researched the nexus of work, learning and social change in

industrial settings such as fire fighting (Childs, 2006, 2005), community service and private

organisations. Central to their work is a questioning of the way higher education institutions act as

gatekeepers and mediators of social, educational and labour market change. More recently they have

focused on critical social pedagogy at the nexus of work and learning within the professional practice

of university learning and teaching (Childs and Wagner 2010). They define critical social pedagogy

approach as „the application of an inter-disciplinary action focus with the aim to balance power

inequities and economic, social and political disadvantage”. This particular take on social pedagogy

adds a cohesive critical theoretical f framework to the activist and pragmatic traditions of social

pedagogy in the nineteenth and early twentieth century (p.219, bold in original).

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