Lifelong learning is necessary for nurses and caregivers to provide good, person-centred care. To facilitate such learning and embed it into regular working processes, learning communities of practice are considered promising. However, there is little insight into how learning networks contribute to learning exactly and what factors of success can be found. The study is part of a ZonMw-funded research project ‘LeerSaam Noord’ in the Netherlands, which aims to strengthen the professionalization of the nursing workforce and promote person-centred care. We describe what learning in learning communities looks like in four different healthcare contexts during the start-up phase of the research project. A thematic analysis of eleven patient case-discussions in these learning communities took place. In addition, quantitative measurements on learning climate, reciprocity behavior, and perceptions of professional attitude and autonomy, were used to underpin findings. Reflective questioning and discussing professional dilemma's i.e. patient cases in which conflicting interests between the patient and the professional emerge, are of importance for successful learning.
MULTIFILE
To adequately deal with the challenges faced within residential care for older people, such as the increasing complexity of care and a call for more person-centred practices, it is important that health care providers learn from their work. This study investigates both the nature of learning, among staff and students working within care for older people, and how workplace learning can be promoted and researched. During a longitudinal study within a nursing home, participatory and democratic research methods were used to collaborate with stakeholders to improve the quality of care and to promote learning in the workplace. The rich descriptions of these processes show that workplace learning is a complex phenomenon. It arises continuously in reciprocal relationship with all those present through which both individuals and environment change and co-evolve enabling enlargement of the space for possible action. This complexity perspective on learning refines and expands conventional beliefs about workplace learning and has implications for advancing and researching learning. It explains that research on workplace learning is itself a form of learning that is aimed at promoting and accelerating learning. Such research requires dialogic and creative methods. This study illustrates that workplace learning has the potential to develop new shared values and ways of working, but that such processes and outcomes are difficult to control. It offers inspiration for educators, supervisors, managers and researchers as to promoting conditions that embrace complexity and provides insight into the role and position of self in such processes.
This paper deals with the problematic nature of the transition between education and the workplace. A smooth transition between education and the workplace requires learners to develop an integrated knowledge base, but this is problematic as most educational programmes offer knowledge and experiences in a fragmented manner, scattered over a variety of subjects, modules and (work) experiences. To overcome this problem, we propose a design approach and shifting the educational focus of attention from individual learners to learning environments. The broader notion of learning environments facilitates transitions by establishing horizontal connections between schools and the workplace. The main argument of this paper is that combining or connecting aspects of school-based settings only is not sufficient to ensure learners will develop an integrated knowledge base. The concept and examples of “hybrid learning environment” show how formal, school-based learning and workplace experiences can be closely connected. The paper offers a framework of four coherent perspectives that can help to understand the complex nature of such environments and to design hybrid learning environments: the “agency perspective”, the “spatial perspective”, the “temporal perspective”, and the “instrumental perspective”. The framework is applied to three cases taken from vocational education in the Netherlands to describe what hybrid learning environments look like in contemporary educational practice. RÉSUMÉ
