A Practitioner’s View: Building Participation Stretches Creativity

RUTH FARRELL

Our primary goal as workplace educators is to build participation at work: to make conversations, meetings, informal learning and formal training times and places for people to get involved, to understand new ideas and share their thinking and suggestions for improvement. From this goal comes the moment by moment opportunity to learn more about the employees and how they learn as individuals and group members and to build meaningful, relevant learning activities and resources. Even the company as a whole is like an organism that has certain learning predilections, certain strengths and soft spots. This becomes a highly dynamic and creative work process: each day we listen with intent to synthesize the current learning and communication realities of workers and managers with our current (teacher’s) understanding of education theory and lean manufacturing principles.

Embedded in the complex structures of workplaces are the differences of education, job tasks, autonomy and communication expectations. Embedded too are the abiding commonalities of working in groups and the urge to improve work and communication processes. In a very basic way we work to reveal the commonalities and find ways for employees to work from their strengths, thus building the learning and growth potential for the whole workplace organism.

Much of our teaching activity takes place in informal conversations in hallways, on the shop floor or in the office of an manufacturing engineer, a quality inspector, a shipper/receiver or a production manager. We coach, we mentor, we encourage and we laugh. Often production stress overwhelms our capacity to schedule and run regular group sessions. But when we do get a group scheduled for 1 hour to meet in a room, we try to set up the best learning environment we can for that sixty minutes. Considering who will arrive, we might move the furniture, plot for optimal grouping of participants, inject colour and tactility with props, Post-it® notes, felt pens, digital pictures of work, training and workers. We plan and choreograph every one of those sixty minutes so that the participants feel comfortable while being offered the chance to take up a learning challenge and to share their knowledge with other people in the room.

Ruth Farrell leads informal learning on the shop floor.