Making Sense of Transfer and Adaptation across Differing Contexts

This presentation will look at the findings and conclusions of my PhD research thesis entitled Situated learning, poly-contextual boundary crossing and transfer: Perceptions of practitioners on how competence is transferred across different work contexts. The aim of the research was to understand how people adapt to new learning and work contexts as the change jobs or when their jobs change. The findings suggest that there are four types of activity involved: reconnaissance, enactment, exploration and consolidation and that practitioners move between these different types of activity as part of their structured interaction between the technical, learning, social, physical, emotional and organisational contexts which comprise the workplace. The research also identifies the metacognitive skills and knowledge which enhances this interaction and argues that formal education does not necessarily do enough to ensure that graduates understand the nature of work and workplaces and the survival skills which are required.