If you couldn't do the job you do now because of injury, what would you choose to do instead? How would it affect you? What if you had to go back to school to learn a whole new job?

Macquarie University research has looked at how injured workers go about formal and informal learning during retraining, the influences they identify during their rehabilitation and how these influences can impact on their learning as they retrain for a new career.

Dr Jeanne Boote, who works as a teacher consultant for students with physical disabilities at TAFE NSW's Hunter Institute, recently graduated with her PhD from Macquarie's Australian Centre for Educational Studies. Her doctoral thesis was titled Learning during vocational retraining: an interpretive case study of injured workers in the Hunter Valley.

“Injured workers face many adjustments in their lives after injury,” Boote says. “Many of these adjustments require change - whether intentional or forced. These changes, right from the moment of injury, often involve learning activities but most people don't recognise the experiences as ‘learning'”.

Boote says that according to the theories of adult learning, adults will be more self-directed, use their previous experiences as a resource, be ready for learning related to real-life problems, and be more motivated. Her research confirmed these aspects, but she believes a permanent state is highly questionable for injured workers.

Boote studied 36 injured workers from various occupations, industries, educational backgrounds and ages. The only criterion she had for participants in her study was that their physical work-related injury had to be serious enough to prevent return to their previous occupation, and so retraining was essential.

Among the participants, she found four different patterns in personal responsibility for learning, and rather than being automatically progressive in self-directed learning, she found that more frequently participants responded to the particular issues affecting them at any given time.

“While overall, participants generally became more independent in their learning, they tended to fluctuate in their progress. They go up and down in their learning all the time - they can seem to be independent learners one day, or even one moment,but the next they can seem quite dependent because of all the other influences in their lives,” she explains.

What the injured workers had in common was a preference for an initial foundation period where they had a ‘teacher' of some sort who could give them structure, direction and feedback. “They were seeking a firm base from which to get it right and someone to confirm they had,” Boote says.

She concluded that if the injured workers had ‘significant others' [family, friends, a case worker, or doctor] who could draw their attention to the learning being achieved in rehabilitation, they might more confidently and independently progress through that foundation stage into the next stage - the exploration stage.

“When they were comfortable within the foundation stage, they were more prepared to independently explore their particular topic of learning,” Boote says. “At this time they demonstrated their abilities to be self-directed and self-managing in their learning and they were more willing to experiment. They were also less (or differently) dependent on other people. They could recognise what they had learnt and what they wanted to know.”

Boote developed a model to explain how individual injured workers go about learning during vocational retraining. This model demonstrates the complexity and potential variations of factors that influence learning.

This, she explains, is important because by understanding the model and the different patterns of learning, various professionals can be aware of the issues affecting injured workers during their retraining, and respond more appropriately to their needs.

“The workers too can benefit by understanding that many of the changes they have had to make in their lives after their injury involve learning, and that during rehabilitation they can acquire learning skills which they can adapt to other events in their lives,” she says.

Boote found that there are three major forces influencing how an injured worker will manage the learning process - ability, preparedness and context. They way these forces interact, and the many different influences on each, will determine an individual's personal responsibility to self-manage their learning at any given time.

“Ability relates to issues such as the individual's educational background, existing study skills, cognitive capacity and their own perception of that, and their interpersonal and organisational skills,” Boote says.

Preparedness relates to issues within the person. “Pressures on their preparedness to learn independently might include a wide variety of personal issues, confidence, willingness and interest, motivation, level of stress and/or depression, and the individual's level of commitment to their goals,” she explains.

The context of learning is where it is all happening and includes issues relating to the environment - whether there is a teacher up-front or whether they are expected to do things for themselves. “The physical facilities and layout, adjustments for pain management, and peer acceptance might all influence the degree of personal responsibility in learning the injured worker is willing to take,” Boote adds.

Boote believes that if rehabilitation and education professionals can work together, they might be able to help injured workers identify and use the skills they gain through rehabilitation to apply them to their formal study.

“Workers could feel more ready to make choices about how they like to learn best, how to be most confident in their learning environment, possible adjustments and strategies to suit their physical needs, or what mode of study to choose,” Boote says. “All this makes for a smoother transition to a new career, and helps make what is already a very stressful time a little less fraught.”

This is one of the main applications of Boote's research, which she hopes will be the catalyst for injured workers to better understand the process they are going through and to take more responsibility for those learning opportunities.

She also hopes that others involved with the injured workers will see themselves as potential ‘teachers' in more learning incidents, and to assist injured workers in those teachable moments, whether they involve formal or informal learning.

Story by Kathy Vozella
Photos by Effy Alexakis

Disclaimer | Responsibility: Phillipa Janos