Emerging Perspectives of Work: Implications for university teaching and learning

Abstract

Given that higher education is increasingly focused on the preparation for and continuing development within occupations, it is necessary to understand the nature of this work in order to inform educational purposes and processes. This chapter discusses the emerging requirements for occupations and how educational purposes and processes need to be shaped in order to address these emerging needs. In all, it is proposed that the development of occupational specific conceptual, procedural and dispositional knowledge needs to include: i) a consideration of both the canonical and the situational renderings of this knowledge, ii) the broader sets of capacities that underpin employability, and iii) the development of agentic capacity within learners. In all, it is proposed that, whilst very important canonical occupational knowledge alone will be insufficient. Hence, more than providing experiences within educational settings, there is a need to provide experiences that provide access to situational requirements for performance, mechanisms for understanding variations in these requirements, a broader range of capacities such as interactions with others and developing higher education students as agentic learners.