Adult Learning and Technology in Working-Class Life

by Peter Sawchuk

Overview

This book explores the hidden world of everyday learning in the lives of manufacturing workers from a social perspective. It challenges the myth that everyday learning, despite its apparent openness and freedom, can be understood as class-neutral. Based on life-history interviews, selected ethnographic observations in homes and factories, and large-scale survey materials as well as the microanalysis of human-computer interaction, the analysis follows learning across the spheres of "working-class life" and draws on the author's personal experiences as a factory worker and academic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521817561
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/03/2003
Series:	Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.29(h) x 0.94(d)

Table of Contents

1. Understanding learning, technology and social class: concepts and claims; 2. A historical materialist examination of theories of adult learning; 3. 'That's technology': understanding working-class perspectives on computer technology; 4. Microanalysis of worker's computer learning: two case studies of computer learning; 5. Working class computer learning networks: exploring the elements of collectivity and class habitus; 6. Understanding working-class standpoints in computer learning; 7. Oral culture, computer learning and social class; 8. Material barriers in working-class computer learning; 9. Contradiction and commodification in working-class computer learning; 10. Conclusions and implications.

Editorial Reviews

"Sawchuk is able to detect subtle strategies used by workers to increase their own store of cultural capital at the employers' expense. His analysis also succeeds at relating the concerns of Marxists with relations of production to those of postmodernists focused on identity formation and cultural appropriation. The result is a new set of perspectives on the relationships suggested in the title, and a new appreciation of the complexity of those relationships." American Journal of Sociology

"...engaging..." Labour/Le Travail

"This is a complex work with a social improvement goal.... Recommended." Choice

From the Publisher