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Center for Research 
on Education and Work

University of California, Berkeley

Welcome to CREW!

CREW (Center for Research on Education and Work) is located in the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Education, Tolman Hall, and is dedicated to the study of education and work. You can read part of the text from the original proposal to establish CREW, below.

The purpose of this web site is to archive and disseminate some of the activities CREW students and facultyhave done:

CREW's research areas include:

The CREW Proposal: Introduction

December 1, 1996

A Unique Opportunity

Learning at work has long been a neglected topic of research. The average person spends about 45 to 50 years working, compared to 15 or 20 years attending school. It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that a large part of what is learned over the course of a lifetime is learned at work. Employers also spend large amounts of money on training and "human resource development". The mass of research on learning in school settings, however, vastly outweighs the research on learning at work. Among the hundreds of sessions at the annual AERA meetings, for example, it is rare to find any that focus on learning at work with the important exception of discussions about how teachers learn from their own work.

In recent years, the issue of learning at work has become more prominent in discussions of economic policy, organized labor, and corporate management. It is commonly said that the industrialized world is undergoing an economic and social transition as fundamental as the shift from agriculture to manufacturing. Whether or not the emergence of the so-called "information society" can be considered an epochal event is a question for future historians. But it is plain that advances in information processing and telecommunications have made capital more mobile and contributed to a faster rate of change in the introduction of new products and services. Businesses have been forced to become ever more nimble, and workers more adaptable. Continual learning at work, formerly important only for the learned professions, has become a necessity for larger numbers of people, either because they are employed in organizations that are pursuing so-called "high-performance" or "lean" models of decentralized responsibility and continuous improvement, or because they are obliged to move from one employer to another. Growing proportions of the working population are self-employed or employed by temporary staffing agencies. In all of these situations, learning and work are increasingly intertwined. That is why discussions of economic policy, labor, and corporate management have been emphasizing the importance of continual learning at work for the economic survival and success of individuals, firms, and nations.

In other industrialized countries, researchers have begun to devote serious attention to learning at work. For example, small research centers have been established by professors of education at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, the University of Linkoping in Sweden, and the University of British Columbia in Canada. In France, which passed a unique law in 1971 requiring employers to pay about 1.5 percent of their payroll for continued training of employees, various agencies and university researchers have analyzed the evolving consequences. In the United States, however, we are not aware of any university-based research center that focuses primarily on learning at work. LRDC at the University of Pittsburgh is investigating this area, but it has not been their primary focus. Researchers at Xerox PARC have done some pioneering studies of learning at work, but this is not a university center.

Here is a unique opportunity for the University of California at Berkeley. We could be the first department of education, and arguably the first university, in this country to establish a research center dedicated to the study of learning at work. This field is likely to grow, and Berkeley is in a strong position to shape it by focusing the research and cultivating graduate students who can become its future leaders. The reason Berkeley is in such a strong position is that several members of the existing faculty already have produced some of the pioneering research in this fledgling field. The 1993-95 Graduate Division review of the School of Education noted that a number of faculty members have been conducting influential research on education and work, but they are scattered among the various divisions of the School. Organizing this group in a new Center for Research on Education and Work would improve communication and increase the likelihood of creative collaboration. A new center would also make the existing group more visible to funders and prospective students.

The research agenda of CREW will include studies of learning in a variety of workplace contexts: the factory floor, the corporate office, the scientist's laboratory, the community agency, the institution of school. There are a number of compelling reasons for making studies of work the point of departure for studies of learning. We are mindful, to be sure, of increasing public concern that schooling be made more directly responsive to the demands of work. However, our interest in these issues includes but goes beyond this practical and political impetus. First off, we know that most of the learning that happens in the world goes on outside the traditional school room, and consequently we believe that any theory of how people learn in school must be informed by and joined to understandings of how people learn successfully in a variety of contexts. Part of the work of CREW, then, will be the generation of theories of learning informed by studies of work and productive activity in out-of-school contexts. Secondly, given immigration patterns and global shifts in the nature of work, both of which have enormous implications for the provision of training and education for adults, we believe that serious (if belated) attention must be given to learning throughout the life span. It is no longer wise for educational researchers to limit their focus to children; we need an understanding of adult development that is at least as robust as our notions of childre's maturation as thinkers and learners. Third, there is much talk these days about the changing nature of work, and although some of it must be just that -- talk -- there is sufficient evidence that how people construct careers and job paths, how they experience their work day, how they interface with their employers and their co-workers, is changing and changing radically. Schools and their agents do need detailed knowledge about these changes, not necessarily to produce workers that will fit the new mold (though this is admittedly the goal of many), but to respond to the changes in ways that enable young adults to develop appropriate, proactive identities as citizens and workers...

e-mail: crewinfo@socrates.berkeley.edu

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