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Keynotes

Professor Stephen Billett

Dr. Stephen Billett is Professor of Adult and Vocational Education in the School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. Stephen has worked as a vocational educator, educational administrator, teacher educator, professional development practitioner and policy developer within the Australian vocational education system and as a teacher and researcher at Griffith University. Since 1992, he has researched learning through and for work and has published widely in the fields of vocational learning, workplace learning and conceptual accounts of learning for vocational purposes. His sole authored books include Learning through work: Strategies for effective practice (Allen and Unwin 2001); Work, change and workers (Springer 2006) and edited books Work, Subjectivity and Learning (Springer, 2006) Emerging Perspectives of Work and Learning (Sense 2008). He is currently preparing a sole-authored manuscript entitled Vocational Education Springer. He is the founding and Editor in Chief of Vocations and learning: Studies in vocational and professional education (Springer) and lead editor of the book series Professional and practice-based learning (Springer).

Stephen currently holds 4 Australian Research Council grants (Discovery, Linkage (2), International Linkage), with 2 as Chief Investigator. These grants focus on: (i) learning practices in healthcare workplaces, (ii) the personal and agentic learning of those working alone (sports coaches), (iii) enhancing participation and learning through schools for at risk learners, and (iv) sustaining older workers' competence. In addition, was an Australian Teaching and Learning Associate Fellow in 2008 with a project focussing on the development of agentic learners in higher education through the integration of experiences in university and practice settings in the fields of nursing, physiotherapy, social work and midwifery. He has also been awarded a 2009 Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) National Teaching Fellowship that seeks to identify principles and practices to effectively integrate learning experiences in practice and academic settings.

 Constituting learning experiences: Social, personal and brute factors

Two dualisms continue to beggar and mire an understanding of adults' learning through everyday experiences: informal vs. formal learning and theory vs. practice. These dualisms have become orthodoxies through which the processes and outcomes of learning through experiences, such as those in workplaces and through work are discussed and appraised. However, they do little to advance understandings about the potential or processes of this learning. Instead, they create a mire from which more helpful conceptions have to be extracted. This presentation offers an account of what constitutes learning through experience and its potential, which contests both of these dualisms. Drawing on a series of studies about how learning occurs through work and in workplaces, this presentation seeks to explain what constitutes 'learning experiences'. It does this by emphasising the central qualities and contributions to what constitutes the experiences through which we learn. These qualities include the active process of thinking, acting and learning, and the contributions to that process from society, the physical world, and also the individuals who both experience and mediate what they experience, and in doing so learn. More than experiences through which learning occurs, the other legacy is the remaking (and transformation) of the practices we engage in. In doing so, it explicitly bridges theory and practice, and proposes a way in which learning through everyday practices, such as those at work, can be understood and enhanced.

 

Kate Collier  

 Kate has been involved in experienced-based learning in Higher Education in the UK and Australia for over 25 years and is now based at the University of Technology Sydney. She has a drama background and a particular interest in the use of role-play as a learning approach in adult education. This includes working as a consultant with health professionals on the use of scenario-based learning in training.  

Kate has also worked extensively in Indonesia introducing a peer-learning approach called 'learning partnership groups' to the Indonesian Tax Office as a strategy to sustain learning in the workplace. 

Recently she contributed a chapter on 'Re-imagining reflection: creating a theatrical space for the imagination in productive reflection' in the 'Professional lifelong learning: beyond reflective practice' book due for publication in September. 

Kate is co-chair of the International Consortium of Experiential Learning and a convener of ICEL 2008 at UTS in Sydney.
 

 

UWS Hawkesbury Anniversary Event

(Sponsored by the Australian Consortium of Experiential Education ACEE) 

Presenter: Richard Bawden  

Richard Bawden has been a champion of experiential learning since his days as Master of the co-educational Drummond College at the University of New England in the late sixties and early seventies where he instituted a program of extra-curricula experience-based learning activities under the rubric of 'learning to live'.  A few years later, in 1978, and following a number of other very rich life experiences - including two years working with the UN in Latin America as an agricultural scientist - he successfully applied for the post of Head of the School of Agriculture at Hawkesbury Agricultural College (HAC) with an application in which he emphasised his profound commitment to shifting the focus of education from teaching to learning - with a special emphasis on his belief in the role of learning from experience in tertiary education.  The first undergraduate experiential program was introduced at HAC in 1979 followed by around a dozen other programs over ensuing years at both graduate as well as undergraduate levels; all created and managed by a wonderfully talented and eclectic group of colleagues at Hawkesbury (which was incorporated into the University of Western Sydney (UWS)  in 1989 - at which point Richard was also appointed Professor of Systemic Development). He withdrew from his leadership roles at UWS in January 1994 following the diagnosis of the secondary cancer that eventually took the life of his beloved wife Diane in July 1995. Her experience in learning how to die was to have a very profound impact on his ideas about learning as well, of course, on himself as a person. In 2000 he moved to the USA as Visiting Distinguished University Professor at Michigan State University (MSU) - a post from which he only retired in 2007.  

Richard is currently a Director and Fellow of the Systemic Development Institute based in Sydney Australia, an Emeritus Professor of UWS, a visiting Professor at the Open University in the UK, and an Adjunct Professor at MSU.

Hawkesbury Happenings: a retrospective on three decades of learning in four dimensions.

 In 1979, a group of academics at the then Hawkesbury Agricultural College (which in 1989 morphed into the Hawkesbury campus of the University of Western Sydney) launched the first of what became a subsequent series of undergraduate and graduate programs designed and conducted as experiential curricula. The central logic of those experiential pedagogies was that formal programs of learning based on the transformation of experience into knowledge for responsible action, was a greatly neglected initiative in higher education in spite of the ubiquity of such a process of learning and development beyond the campus walls. Over the ensuing three decades, faculty utilized their own ever-developing competencies as experiential learners to guide, not only their pedagogical practices in experiential education, but also their research methodologies in participative action research, their strategies for critical engagement with the citizenry, and indeed, the very development and management of their own formal organization as a Faculty.  

A key conceptual model to emerge from this work expresses learning as a 'four dimensional' critical system of human activity that calls for the integrated development of competencies across four domains of cognition. This presentation will illustrate the form and functions of this model as well as the logic and dynamics that have characterized its evolution.

 

Conference Dinner presenter

 Geof Hill 

Geof Hill wrote and performed his first 'academic cabaret' at the (Australian) National Experiential Learning Conference in 1994. Two years later he wrote and performed his first solo cabaret on 'Reflective Practice' at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane and followed this up some years later with 'Doing a Doctorate', a cabaret about undertaking post graduate research and 'Research Supervision' a cabaret addressing some  of the contentious issues associated with research supervision.

 Geof will provide the dinner entertainment at the conference with a newly written two act cabaret exploring the theoretical foundations of his own practice as a facilitator of experience-based learning. This practice has taken him into industry and tertiary education, through disciplines of Management, Education and Research, and created such experiential activities as 'Human Sculpture', 'Into the Woods- fairystory work' and 'Frierian Refrains'.