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Existing literature on international health partnerships is largely normative, with an evaluative interest in their impacts in terms of learning and knowledge transfer. Rarely has research attended to how learning and knowledge transfer transpire in practice. This paper addresses this gap with a case study of a partnership between two hospitals in Canada and China. Conceptually, drawing on Actor Network Theory, it posits learning and knowledge transfer as a process of translation. Empirically, it traces the assembling of the programme, and identifies the pedagogical features at nodes of associations. It reveals that health professionals in both countries have expanded their clinical and medical knowledge and practices, and professional senses and sensitivities, which were subsequently amplified, deferred or diminished within their respective practices. It argues that the capacity of individuals to translate learning into practice is contingent on institutional and cultural differences that constitute the ecology of work for health professionals.

"Diversity work" is an area of growing interest for organisations in both the private and public sectors. In a nutshell, the term refers to the work conducted within an organisation that promotes inclusive and equitable engagement with people and communities across social differences such as gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality and religion. Related research has generated relatively more knowledge about the challenges and problems of diversity initiatives than about effective practices that genuinely foster social equity and inclusion. This article contributes to the latter with a partnership case study involving the United Chinese Community Enrichment Services Society (S.U.C.C.E.S.S.), a large non-profit immigrant services organisation headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. Specifically, the study presented here focuses on the organisational practices that are constitutive of frontline workers' engagement with diversity work and learning. It shows that (1) building a diverse and inclusive organisation, (2) supporting continuous learning opportunities at work, and (3) providing diversity training, both directive and generative, form the organisation's diversity "curriculum". This study also demonstrates that the strength of this workplace curriculum is that it has the potential to challenge the boundary between instrumentalism (harnessing diversity work to business success) and equity activism (prioritising diversity work in its own right), and that it creates space for collective reflection in the presence of others. Conceptually drawing on the "practice turn in social sciences," particularly Steven Billet and Jennifer Newton's "learning practice," and what David Boud terms "the reflective turn", this article positions diversity work as a reflective and iterative process of lifelong learning for both organisations and individual workers.

Employment training services are provided for immigrants to integrate them into the Canadian labour market. Evaluated on short-term labour market outcomes, these programs typically focus on enhancing individuals' employability, while risking naturalizing and reproducing the dominant social and cultural order. "Entry to Hospitality Careers for Women" is a government-funded program based on a partnership between a community organization and a community college specialised in vocational training. Uniquely, this program aims to expand immigrant and refugee women's employment skills as well as their social and cultural spaces. A community-based partnership research project was conducted to explore how the program worked towards these goals. It finds that the program contributed to the personal development of the women, expanded their social space and enhanced their social and economic opportunities to varying degrees. It also points to a set of women-centered pedagogical and programming practices that were conductive to women's learning through the program. Firstly, as a partnership, the program leveraged the resources and expertise accrued in both the community organization and the community college. Secondly, while navigating institutional mandate, the program was oriented towards the needs of the women. Finally, the women-centered and care-based pedagogy was found to be of immediate influence on the program participants. Theoretically, this paper adds to feminist pedagogy by grounding it in the actual work of immigrant service workers, which defies any abstract attempt to fix it within the binary frame of social reproduction and transformation.

In the context of flexible capitalism, lifelong learning has been posed as a pathway for individuals to accumulate skills and actualise potentials. What is overlooked, however, is that the process of accumulation and actualisation is embedded within the culture of recognition. People who are historically constructed as "the anthropos," a legacy of the colonial history struggle to appear as equals vis-à-vis the gaze of "the humantias." With this critique in view, I reviewed the field of immigrant and lifelong learning in relation to a postcolonial politics of appearance. I sought to understand how lifelong learning settles itself in immigrant consciousness, and how it shapes immigrant experiences in the West. My review points to three metaphors that speak of the challenges and possibilities for immigrants to appear: fixation of the Eurocentric gaze, re-credentialing as precarious investment, and lifelong learning as trans/formation. Together, these metaphors suggest that lifelong learning has conjured a racial contract, which ironically binds immigrants to the labour of learning and yet continuously suppresses their appearance. To unsettle this racial contract, borders need to be reimagined and crossed/vexed by recentring immigrants as knowing subjects.

AbstractIt is known that skilled immigrants learn to integrate professionally. This paper complexifies this image. By following the experiences of ‘successful’ immigrants working in the engineering profession in Canada, it argues that immigrants engage in not only learning but also knowledge ‘transfer’. Their learning at work often starts as legitimate peripheral participation, and evolves through expansive participation in work activities. Meanwhile, they also ‘transfer’ knowledge and practices, a role that could be amplified given their transnational experiences. Immigrants’ learning and knowledge practices can also be understood as a sociomaterial process of translation, through which they knot together people and objects, while negotating power, position, and positionality at the same time. Through continuous learning and knowledge practices, the paper further highlights that immigrant engineers necessarily articulate themselves into, and to some extent, reticulate the epistemic ‘machineries’ or ‘culture’ of the profession, which is constituted through a nexus of professional associations, societies, institutions, and practice communities that are bounded by professional domains and interests, and lifeworld exigencies. Conceptually, this paper draws on practice-based theories and views continuous learning and knowing as an effect of the sociocultural and sociomaterial organization of professional practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research shows a positive association between skilled migration and innovation. Related literature however is largely limited to the use of proxies such as patents, and publications. There is also a lack of attention to how innovation is accomplished in practices. This paper addresses these gaps with an examination of the innovative contributions made by immigrant engineers in Canada. Conceptually, informed by practice-based theories, it conceives innovation as a sociocultural and sociomaterial process that leads to the transformation of the object/motives of activities, i.e. the problem space to which actions are directed. Empirically, drawing on a thematic and situational analysis of the career accounts of 32 immigrant engineers, it shows that immigrants expand engineering practices by introducing, inter alias, new technologies, products, processes, policies and standards. It further traces the rise of the problem spaces, and the ways in which engineering objects and other practitioners are knotted into practices of innovation. It argues that while immigrants manage to introduce epistemic objects through continuous learning and knowledge translation, it is through the enrolment of other practitioners, and technologies and tools that relations of differences and power are (re)negotiated, and new ways of doing become amplified as innovation at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for a more nuanced view of mobility through education within an era of increased globalisation. We explore questions of transnational mobility through the lens of underexplored Bourdieusian concepts, specifically transnational habitus and habitus clivé. Our analysis shows how one's perception of a "better life" and one's ideology of "entrepreneur self" are produced despite one's encounter with disparity between their fields of their host countries and countries of origin. We therefore assert the need for a more complex conceptual work to unpack the lived experience of mobility especially for those who are unable to operationalise their capital in the transnational field.

Researchers in China have keenly explored how lifelong education and lifelong learning, as imports from "the West," may become localized in China, although a small chorus has also tried to revitalize Confucianism to bear on the field. This paper adds to this domain of discussion with a critical discourse analysis of Chinese lifelong education/learning policies. It finds that lifelong education and life learning have been positioned pragmatically to support the country's modernist project of development, which culminates in the proclamation to shift from "made in China," i.e., a manufacture-based economy, to "created in China," i.e., a knowledge-based economy. Within this overall picture, the Marxist socialist and collective ideology has been made the hegemony in the promotion of lifelong education/learning practices. Western humanism and Confucian humanism have also had sketchy presence in the documents examined, although they are not necessarily invoked together with their original ideological connotations. The study also shows that given their directive genre, these policies have served to designate multiple actors to turn lifelong education and learning into practice and promote socialist lifelong learners as the ideal learning subjects; both mechanisms are implicated in entrenching existing governmental power structure.

Mentorship programs have been deployed within immigrant and settlements services to integrate newcomers to the Canadian labor market. These programs are often assessed for their impacts on immigrant mentees. Little attention has been paid to how they may have influenced mentors. In this context, this study, from the perspective of transformative learning, examines the experiences of 19 mentors who were involved in a mentorship program designed to enhance the employment prospects for immigrant professionals in Canada. Findings indicated that in the process of mentoring immigrants with diverse backgrounds, mentors engaged in both informational and transformational learning. Through informational learning, the mentors expanded their cultural and work-related knowledge, hence their life horizons. For some mentors, their learning was also transformational. Some developed new awareness of and relation to the self. Some also started recognizing the structural and cultural barriers facing newcomers, and sometimes taking actions to effect social change. Both kinds of learning--informational and transformational--we argue, may contribute to disrupting relations of inequality between newcomers and the host society. The study suggests ways through which mentoring programs can contribute to a two-way process of integration involving changes and learning for both newcomers and the host society.

In order to integrate into the host labour market, immigrants are often expected and indeed trained to minimize sociocultural differences. This paper problematizes the deficit/dismissive approach towards difference. It stresses instead that, in the context of globalization and immigration, encounters of difference have afforded a potentially productive and permeable space of living, learning, teaching, working and change vis-à-vis the hegemony of western-centric culture and practices. It then advances a distributed pedagogy of difference. The pedagogical proposals made include: 1) turning differences into strength based curriculum; 2) engaging differences to advance knowledge and practices; and 3) experimenting with sociocultural and sociomaterial power and order. Central to these pedagogical proposals is to mark differences as a space of learning and teaching for all, and a point of expansion for sociocultural and sociomaterial practices. This distributed pedagogy incorporates and extends the scholarship of critical pedagogies, and benefits from the practice-based ontology of learning.

Since the 1970s, immigrant studies have taken a feminist turn. This paper takes stock of how Canadian adult educators have contributed to this field and vice versa. Through an ethnographic content analysis of [Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education] CASAE proceedings since 2000 and other related scholarly publications, the paper shows that adult education research has paid increasing attention to immigrant women's experiences in Canada. Feminist influence of the literature mainly comes from Marxist, anti-racist, Black, and post-colonial feminist theories. Meanwhile, adult learning theories, particularly transformative learning, informal learning, and socio-cultural learning, and the adult education orientations for empowerment and social action have also expanded the scholarship of gender, women, and immigrant studies. Yet much of the literature, limited by methodological nationalism, remains descriptive of women's experiences "here and now." There is also a need for research to move beyond including women in studies to address how gender, as a social relation, implicates both men and women, both individuals and institutions.

While official rhetoric of multiculturalism claims to value cultural diversity, everyday multiculturalism focuses on how people of diverse cultural backgrounds live together in their everyday lives. Research on everyday multiculturalism has documented ways through which people negotiate senses, sensibilities, emotionality, and relationality across intercultural contact zones. While recognizing the importance of human intentionality and community in conditioning coexistence, this article also points to the constitutive power of practice-based learning that emerges through the coming together of human and nonhuman beings. Drawing on a qualitative study of the learning experiences of six Chinese immigrants in community gardens on a university campus in Canada, this article shows three ways of learning that foster knowing, connecting, and hybrid knowledge production across cultures: (a) learning through communities of conviviality; (b) learning mediated through nonhuman things such as land, waste, and free-floating seeds; and (c) learning through assemblages that fold in culture, place, and space.

This chapter focuses on the shifting roles that settlement services play in immigrant training and education and advocates a mode of participatory governance.

A core mode of governance in the era of neoliberalism is through the production of "entrepreneurial self". This paper explores how the "entrepreneurial self" is produced for 21 Chinese immigrant women in Canada. The women displayed extraordinary entrepreneurialism by investing in Canadian education. Becoming entrepreneurial, however, is more than an individualised "choice". It is imbricated with the ideology of meritocracy cultivated in China, the "credential and certificate regime" in Canada, and the gendered expectations in the host labour market and at home. Given the ideological confluence, and the material conditions the women lived, a feminized and racialized labour is reproduced.

As industrialisation and urbanisation aggressively take hold in China, all possible labour pools are being tapped to meet the market demands. Liushou women, or women who stay behind in rural areas as their spouses join the massive migrant workforce, are one such labour pool. Vocational training has been adopted by the Chinese state as a development strategy for Liushou women. Against this background, this paper explores how the current vocational training policies and programmes have promoted gender equity for Liushou women. Specifically, it conducts an extensive literature and policy review using a mix of analytical tools: women's empowerment framework and the social relations approach. Not only does it map the changing social relations within which vocational training for the women is embedded, it also addresses women's equity in the areas of welfare, access, conscientisation, participation and control.

The last few decades have witnessed both an expansion and a transformation of immigration flows, which pose significant challenges with respect to how people work with differences across culture and space. Against this background, this paper explores how some Chinese immigrant engineers respond to differences in the Canadian labour market. It not only examines some of the learning practices engaged by the immigrants as they negotiate professional niches and professional identities, but also demonstrates how their learning process is socially mediated. In particular, it shows that licensure processes and immigrant settlement services are instrumental in entering immigrants into the cultural and social order in the Canadian labour market. It pinpoints a lack of recognitive justice in the ways in which immigrants' learning processes are institutionally reshaped. Informed by the sociocultural approach, this paper treats learning as a social participatory process, through which individual identities are constituted and reconstituted.

This article is based on a research project on the lived experiences of precarious workers in Toronto, Canada. Using interviews with women in part-time, contract, and temporary jobs in three sectors (telemarketing, retail, and garment), the project explores the ways in which racial hierarchies structure jobs as well as forms of resistance that women exercise at work. The authors find that racialized processes stereotype workers and their skill sets, organize their work, determine their access to and exclusion from certain types of jobs, and impose cultural rules that classify and essentialize them in terms of race, language, and ethnicity. In this article, the authors use ethnodrama to represent their findings from this research project. Ethnodrama is a form that is well suited for this work because it allows us to bring the data to life through an embodied performance. (Contains 3 notes.)

Purpose: The paper aims to explore the emotion learning experiences of some Chinese immigrants in Canadian engineering workplaces. Design/methodology/approach: The paper is based on life history style interviews with 14 Chinese immigrant engineers and 14 key informant interviews. Findings: Research respondents constructed a competitive, masculine, and individualistic engineering "culture" in Canada, where the emotional and the relational, supposedly central to the Asian and Chinese culture, are largely devalued. To fit into the individualistic culture, some Chinese immigrants learned to change their patterns of socialization and some became hard-nosed competitors. To ameliorate the deleterious effects of the alienating workplace environments, some resorted to their cultural teaching to maintain emotional health; some also tried to build collegiality and collectivity to humanize their work settings. Research limitations/implications: The study was not a comprehensive study of the emotion work in engineering workplaces. It does not capture the emotional order that may as well exist to afford different people differential negotiation power in the engineering culture. Social implications: The study suggests that while emotional connection and personalized relationship are "culturally" discouraged in engineering workplaces, they are of significant use value for immigrant workers and should be addressed to create humanized work environments. Originality/value: This is one of the few articles that examine emotion learning at the intersection of gender, race and class relations. (Contains 1 note.)

Critiques of lifelong learning have focused on the neo-liberal underpinning of state policy, where individuals are expected to take responsibility for meeting the needs of changing labour market conditions in the post-Fordist economy. We treat lifelong learning as an "ideological frame" that (re)shapes how people see and understand social reality, and organise their job seeking activities accordingly. Our argument is supported with data from two studies that examine how professional immigrant women from China navigate the Canadian labour market from their perspectives. Specifically, we identify how lifelong learning as a discursive frame intersects with credentialism, the gendered and racialised construction of Chinese women, age and gendered familial relations to channel professional immigrant women into a labour market segmented along gender, ethnic and racial lines. We end with the policy implications of our discussion. (Contains 3 notes.)

Research has extensively documented the employment barriers facing immigrants in Canada. Less attention is paid to the employment strategies that immigrants deploy in the host labour market. To address this gap in the literature, two projects are conducted to examine how immigrant women learn to optimize their labour market outcomes. Both projects employ a combination of life history style interviews and institutional ethnographic analysis. Life history interviews offer women ample space to (re)construct their experiences in relation to the social economic and political contexts. Institutional ethnographic analysis starts with people's experiences, but aims to explicate the social processes and practices constituting people's experiences. The studies find that the women often resort to re-training and re-education as a means to improve their employment prospects. The women's educational experiences help articulate them to what I call a credential and certificate regime (CCR), or the social processes and practices that attribute differential values to credentials and certificates produced at different places. The author argues that in the era of globalization, CCR helps manage the Canadian labour force with an increasing number of immigrant workers, thereby preserving patriarchal and white supremacist power. The CCR that the author explicates is predominantly Canadian centred. It is developed out of gatekeepers' anxiety towards entrance controlling in various sectors that demand and indeed produce local certificates. The CCR also speaks of a transnational trend of credentialization, which is spearheaded by influential international organizations and companies located in the economic west. Both trends have helped create an expansive training market that is instrumental in feminizing immigrant women's labour. In this paper, the author also shows different ways in which the CCR in Canada both services and disservices immigrant women, which makes it imperative to rethink the values and practices of training for immigrant women. (Contains 1 table and 1 note.)

Purpose--The paper seeks to explore workers' learning in relation to the racialized and gendered organization of contingent work. Design/methodology/approach--This paper is informed by Marxist theorization of labour power and learning. It draws on the interview data of 24 highly educated immigrant women from the research project "Skilled In Vulnerability: Work-related Learning Amongst Contingent Workers". Findings--The two types of learning that we have identified include conformative and transgressive learning. Conformative learning refers to the learning that workers engage in to conform to the workplace expectations. The workers are not rewarded or acknowledged for their learning endeavors, and their efforts end up being appropriated by employers to maximize surplus value. Transgressive learning refers to the learning initiatives undertaken by workers to challenge and transcend the depressing work environment and life conditions. Research limitations/implications--This research was not able to capture what conditions facilitate transgressive learning versus conformative learning. Practical implications--The study first calls on the state to deal with the systemic negation of professional immigrants' previous skills and learning experiences. Second, it encourages employers to provide appropriate training and reward the workers for their learning endeavor. Third, drawing on the research findings, work educators could help foster the forms of learning that are conducive to workers' better control of work and life. The authors also suggest that to optimize their work and life opportunities in general, immigrant women workers need to come together, exchange information and knowledge, learn from each other, and form collective actions amongst themselves. Originality/value--This paper contributes to the literature on workplace learning from a learning perspective. It is one of the first endeavors to look at how highly educated immigrant women learn to exercise agency to challenge contingent work structures.