Negotiating Engagement: The Personal Practice of Learning at Work

Abstract

In a desire to more comprehensively understand the personal contributions of individual workers to their learning at work and to more fully account for the complexities that define these contributions, this chapter argues that the relational interdependence that constitutes workers, learning and work may be best conceptualised as negotiation. Within this negotiation, individual workers' participative practices may be seen as transacted through their agentic conduct and control of their engagement within them. The agency of the individual worker becomes the locus of action that initiates and sustains the negotiation of worker, learning and work. Learning as mediating practice may then be understood as a transaction, an exchange of value that enacts the personal value of the capacities, interests and priorities of the individual worker. Doing so, offers a means of overcoming the inaccurate separation of worker and work that characterises sociocultural models of learning based in conceptions of co-participation as interactivity.