Contested communities of practice: who learns in aged care?

This paper arises from a research study that I have recently conducted into workplace learning in aged care workplaces in partnership with an organisation that manages a number of aged care facilities in rural and regional Australia. Twenty aged care workers were interviewed using semi-structured, conversational style interviews about how they learned to do their work. This included trainee entry level care workers who were also researched using discussion/focus groups and conversational interviews about the process of their workplace learning, tracking their learning experiences after one week, three months and eight months of full time work. This paper focuses on the findings from these trainee care workers. The study found that these trainee workers learned in the usual ways that have been documented in the workplace learning literature. The most powerful and resilient learning however, was learning the body, a process which could only occur during the process of doing their work in a community of practice. The paper will explore this body learning, its embedded nature, and how new learning is contested within this community of practice.