Editorial

Citation

Dymock, D. (2007), "Editorial", Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 19 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/jwl.2007.08619daa.001

Editorial

Volume 19 Number 4 of the Journal of Workplace Learning marks almost the half-way mark for the present volume and it also introduces four papers with very different themes.

Professor Margaret Hutchinson and her colleagues from the Canadian-based Co-operative Education and Workplace Learning Group explore an issue not much seen in the workplace learning literature: work-based education for high school students. Perhaps of greatest interest are their findings about the connection between assessment and instruction. The paper concludes with some practical implications for teachers and workplace supervisors.

A quite different perspective on workplace learning comes from Johan Lundin and Urban Nuldén of Göteborg University, Sweden. They took to the streets with police patrols to study how specific ways of organizing work shape learning among police officers. Johan and Urban were particularly interested in the how police used the range of tools at their disposal to help them organise their work. These tools include weapons, police cars, radios, horses and dogs, as well as computers and forms, such as warrants and reports. For the first time in the seven years I have been editing the journal, there are photographs to accompany the story, which show some of these tools.

We go back to Canada for the next paper, and again it has an intriguing theme: Diego Machado Ardenghi, Wolff-Michael Roth and Lilian Pozzer-Ardenghi explore how dentists learn ethical principles and the extent to which they transfer them to the workplace. The researchers used videotaped interviews to collect their data. A finding with significant implications for dental schools is that theoretical discussions about ethics are not enough to provide practitioners with the skills necessary to work ethically.

Finally, Clare Sham adds to the rich catalogue of papers on the corporate university which this journal has published over the years, with a review of CU developments in China, the world’s most populous nation. The spread of the concept of the corporate university to a nation like China is fascinating in itself, let alone the shape it is taking there. As the CU Editor, Richard Dealtry, says in his introduction: plenty of food for thought.

As usual, good reading!

Darryl Dymock