Situated Learning Perspective: Identity Work in Institutions of Adult Education

Adult Learners' Formation of Identity in a Situated Learning Perspective
In a situated learning perspective we do not only acquire professional qualifications in learning situations, we also work on our identity when we engage in change processes. Identity formation is part of our change as we learn through our participation in communities of practice. In this view, learning entails both personal and social transformation. In late modernity the concept of qualification has been replaced by the concept of competence pointing to several changes in our view of work, education and labour. One of them is an extension of the demands in working life. Now it is not enough that you are skilled, you must also have the right attitude and personality and therefore education and development project not only facilitates development of skills and knowledge but also tries to work on participants' opinions and attitudes. How is the interplay between institutions ways of culturing learners' identities and the identity formation connected to participation in communities of practice? How do educational institutions work on the students' identities? What are the possible tensions involved in negotiating identity change along the maybe colliding institutional and the personal trajectory of participation? These are the central questions addressed in this symposium.

IDENTITY WORK IN INSTITUTIONS OF ADULT EDUCATION

Some of the effects of globalization are outsourcing of low-skilled jobs to low-paid countries and centralization of branches into urban areas. These changes imply that many low-skilled workers are threatened by unemployment and forced to rethink their prospects. Required changes from unskilled to skilled work involve negotiation of the individuals' social identity in general. How can institutions of adult education facilitate the learners' process of both qualifying and negotiating their identity? To which extent and in what way do they actually support the identity work of the learners? And to which degree are the institutional and the personal perspectives compatible? Applying a social learning approach, these questions are explored through a case study concerning general education for dismissed low-skilled workers.