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Workplace education's interest in spirituality is examined, with an emphasis placed on why this interest might be increasing and what challenges it presents. This article interrogates commonplace strategies to integrate spirituality in workplace education,--providing holistic education, creating sacred spaces and mentoring--questions each approach and suggests ways that they might be integrated in an authentic manner into the workplace. The authors then examine how educators might interrogate their teaching practices by inquiring into their own motivations, ethics and values. An attempt is made to stem the flood of spirituality in workplace education by asking: For what purpose is spirituality being promoted in this workplace? And in whose interests?

Practice-based or experiential learning has come to be dominated by mentalist models of reflection on experience. The argument here is that these models split mind from body and subject from environment in ways that yield problematic practices. An alternate conception of practice-based learning is offered here, based on the notion of "co-emergence." According to complexity theory, co-emergence is a key dimension characterizing complex adaptive systems such as classrooms, schools, and communities of practice.

Recent critiques have drawn important attention to the depoliticized consensus and empty promises embedded in network discourses of educational policy. While acceding this critique, this discussion argues that some forms of network analysis--specifically those adopting actor-network theory (ANT) approaches--actually offer useful theoretical resources for policy studies. Drawing from ANT-inspired studies of policy processes associated with educational standards, the article shows the ambivalences and contradictions as well as the possibilities that can be illuminated by ANT analysis of standards as networks. The discussion outlines the diverse network conceptions, considerations, and sensibilities afforded by the ANT approaches. Then, it shows four phenomena that have been highlighted by ANT studies of educational standards: ordering (and rupturing) practice through "immutable mobiles," local universality, tensions among networks of prescription and networks of negotiation, and different co-existing ontological forms of the same standards. The conclusion suggests some starting points, drawing from these ANT-inspired network analyses, for examining the policy processes associated with educational standards.

Purpose: The paper aims to explore "Portfolio work", an emerging form of flexible self-employment, which has been identified as significant but under-researched. This paper also seeks to explore the challenges and benefits of portfolio work from the perspective of individuals' experiences. Design/methodology/approach: The argument draws from a qualitative study involving 31 individuals practising portfolio work in two different occupational groups: nurses and adult educators. Participants were interviewed in semi-structured in-depth conversational interviews to explore their everyday experience and work history in portfolio work. Findings: Two dimensions of portfolio work, work design and client-relations, are found to generate experiences of both deep satisfaction and deep anxiety and stress. The paper argues that portfolio careers simultaneously embed both liberating and exploitative at dimensions for workers, which are at least partly related to their own conflicting desires for both contingency and stability. Further, portfolio work embeds labour that often remains unrecognized, even by the self-employed individuals assuming responsibility for it. Practical implications: Portfolio workers need to recognise and document their unpaid but necessary labour in work design and client relations that sustains their careers; portfolio workers may need to educate clients about the nature of portfolio work; and employers who contract to portfolio workers must take more responsibility for negotiating fair contracts that are sensitive to overwork and unfair time pressures, and that anticipate and compensate contractors. Originality/value: These findings challenge existing conceptions of portfolio work as either exploitative or liberating, and expose contradictions embedded in both the conditions of the work and individuals' expectations and attitudes towards it.

Portfolio work has become recognized as a significant if under-researched form of work emerging in changing work structures. This article presents findings of a qualitative study of nurses and adult educators who function as 'portfolio professionals', in that they contract their services to multiple employers and organizations. Proceeding from interpretive analysis of their narratives, the focus here is their learning processes, particularly in relation to innovation. It is argued that they must learn how to perform innovative work while learning and acting within innovative work. Three learning/acting processes are identified: discerning and rendering something that others understand to be innovative, mobilizing others' activities around the innovation, and anchoring or integrating the innovation within existing systems. These processes inevitably entwine portfolio professionals' identities (as innovators) and their knowledge (as innovative models). Thus they are in danger of becoming fixed or anchored along with an innovation, and an important contrary movement is slipping away and beyond the very anchors they work to render.

This qualitative study explored the implementation of a supervision policy that mandated teacher professional growth plans across the province of Alberta. That policy and the present study are situated within the larger question, How can supervisory policy and practice foster teacher learning and school improvement? Alberta teachers, principals, and superintendents in various jurisdictions were interviewed about their experiences, perceptions, and challenges in the implementation of these new growth plans. Reported benefits of growth plans included greater authenticity and teacher commitment to their own professional development; increased teacher focus, accountability, and collegiality; and teachers' self-affirmation. Still, significant concerns became apparent; they included the rather rigid linearity of goal-action planning in shaping teaching practice and knowledge development, the concern for trust and teacher confidence, the ever-present time squeeze, and what some informants believed to be unclear links between professional development goals and practice. Both teachers and administrators developed approaches to work through some of these tensions.

This article draws on a case study of a school-university partnership negotiation to focus on the discursive practices at work. Two questions form the central focus of this article. Firstly, how do different discourses function in educational partnership negotiations? This highlights observations about which discourses are evident in individuals' language and actions, how these may be related to individuals' beliefs and social practices, and which tensions operate within and among particular discourses. The second question addresses implications of the case study: What does discursive analysis reveal about the work of educational administrators in conducting negotiations among different discursive communities? Employing methods of critical discourse analysis, narratives of various participants in the partnership negotiations--parents, teachers, university faculty, school and school district personnel--were analyzed. The discussion explores overlapping discursive communities, troubling discursive intersections, tensions within discourses, and the generation of resistant discourses; it then examines the discursive work of administrators within these movements. When educational administrators must negotiate differences among their constituent groups, which they are called upon to do regularly, they are doing discursive work. This is part of the "new work order," where the focus of learning is not children and schools, but knowledge distributed across lifelines, social practices and institutions: administrators must become adept at forming networks among multiple community interests and languages. As this article argues, whenever educational administrators find themselves reconciling individuals' different values, meanings or interests--arguably a fundamental dimension of much administrative activity--their success rests at least in part on their capacity to engage discursive work effectively. This work begins with critical awareness of discursive tensions at play, but also involves strategies of translating, spanning discourse communities and promoting discursive work. Particularly in situations where collaboration across differences is the objective, educational administrators are well served by an awareness of discursive dynamics and their own enmeshment and influence within those dynamics. (Contains 1 note.)

Drawing from critical management studies and critical pedagogy, this article proposes principles and practices to support the emerging critical human resource development (HRD) field as one stream among existing theories and practice of HRD. A critical HRD would challenge the subjugation of human knowledge, skills, and relationships to organizational or shareholder gain and focus on transforming workplaces and HRD practice toward justice, fairness, and equity. Because both HRD practices and critical perspectives themselves are so diverse, a critical HRD must be formulated in sufficiently broad terms to encourage a variety of conceptual developments including discursive, gendered, materialist, and anti-racist lines of analysis. Theoretical dilemmas of a critical HRD are discussed, such as ideological contradictions between the radical orientation of critical theory and the managerialist or performative frames to which much HRD practice is accountable. Possible configurations of a critical HRD are described, as these might play out in contexts of HRD practice.

Implementation of mandatory professional growth plans for Alberta teachers was studied through interviews with 12 teachers, 3 principals, and 5 district administrators. Benefits included increased commitment to learning, collegiality, and self-affirmation. Tensions between organizational control and individual autonomy were apparent. With trust, dialogue, flexibility, and patience, plans energized collective learning and professional practice. (Contains 32 references.) (SK)

Interviews with 109 Canadian women entrepreneurs explored processes of learning and change and conflicting images and messages they perceived about success, work, and competition, including discourses of self-determination and the good mother. Their experiences show how they either appropriate or resist these messages to shape their own meanings of success. (Contains 26 references.) (SK)

Examined mid-career professionals' perceptions of their long-term learning in a master's leadership program centered on problem-based learning (PBL). Found that students perceived their most valuable learning was related to two main areas: group process and self-knowledge (including sub-themes of learning to understand different perspectives, to cooperate, to lead small groups, to manage conflict, self-awareness, confidence, and systems thinking). (EV)

Proposes the conceptualization of work knowledge as co-emergence, based on the theory of enactivism. Discusses three dimensions of enactivism: (1) knowledge unfolds in systems; (2) understanding is embedded in relationships among systems, not in the minds of individual actors; and (3) learning is continuous invention and exploration, linked to disequilibrium in systems. (Contains 29 references.) (SK)

Discusses the often difficult process of evaluating teaching effectiveness in terms of student learning outcomes. Suggests approaches for micro- and macro-level teacher evaluation using student outcomes. (EV)

Responders to a journal may include peers, instructors, and oneself. Responders must balance direction and freedom in assisting the writer. Methods include descriptive personal response, holistic assessment, and partial assessment of passages selected by the writer. (SK)

Questions to consider include What drives educators' interest in spirituality? Does it have an ethical place in education? What is educators' position on individualist spirituality? What distinctions among spirituality are significant and defensible? What about the darker side? How is spirit conceptualized within larger social analysis? What is the real intent of pedagogy focused on spirituality? (SK)

Addresses the problems with conventional assessment in social studies and describes an alternative form called dynamic assessment. Explains how to use dynamic assessment in social studies, and in particular, for evaluating citizenship participation. Provides two charts that demonstrate how dynamic assessment can modify teachers' evaluation practices. (CMK)

Suggests that educational evaluation is complex and that assessing practice, philosophy of teaching and learning, and congruence between belief and action can help to improve the evaluation of adult learners. (JOW)

This paper argues that although spirituality is increasingly featured in adult education literature, much is either descriptive or enthusiastically prescriptive. A rather wild eclecticism currently prevails. As educators we lack robust theoretical tools to help illuminate the wide variation among spiritual orientations, each with different fundamental beliefs and values. The paper presents a framework comprising eight dimensions of spirituality, as a first step to illuminating important distinctions and incommensurable elements, These are (1) life and death; (2) soul and self; (3) cosmology; (4) knowledge; (5) the' way'; (6) focus; (7) practices of spirituality and the role of others; and (8) responses. Our discussion of these dimensions focuses upon the central question, What is the real intent of pedagogical interventions (in theory or practice) which integrate or focus upon spirituality? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how institutions of higher education that declare themselves to be Christian can move closer to their mandate and mission. What is their spiritual mission and focus? How can they embody a Christian spirituality in their orientation and focus? The paper explores current issues in Christian higher education and highlights the obvious need for a reappraisal of existing paradigms. The authors use the appreciative inquiry methodology as a positive approach to recovering spiritual values and mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]