Toward a Workplace Pedagogy: Guidance, Participation, and Engagement

Abstract

This article proposes bases for a workplace pedagogy. Planes of intentional guidance and sequenced access to workplace activities represent some key workplace pedagogic practices. Guidance by others, situations, and artifacts are central to learning through work because the knowledge to be learned is historically, culturally, and situationally constituted. However, the quality of learning through these planes of activities and guidance is ultimately premised on the workplace’s participatory practices, which shape and distribute the activities and support the workplace affordance workers and fromwhich they learn. Situational and political processes underpin these workplace affordances. Yet participatory practices are reciprocally constructed because individuals elect how to engage in and learn from what workplaces afford them. A workplace pedagogy is founded in these coparticipatory practices and needs to account for how workplaces invite access to activities and guidance and how individuals elect to participate in what the workplace affords.