Il volume presenta framework teorico-concettuali, prospettive metodologiche ed esperienze di formazione che condividono l’interesse verso gli apprendimenti che gli adulti costruiscono attraverso la partecipazione ai contesti sociali naturali della vita quotidiana, della famiglia e del lavoro. Sono illustrate le più recenti articolazioni di una visione dell’apprendimento che ha acquisito nell’ultimo decennio una grande centralità nel dibattito nazionale e internazionale, sottolineandone le caratteristiche di processo costruttivo, sociale e contestualizzato. Il lavoro analizza, inoltre, esperienze situate di ricerca e formazione che esplorano le opportunità e i vincoli legati alla scelta di approcci educativi diretti a sostenere gruppi di adulti (genitori, artigiani e designer) nell’assunzione di azioni trasformative e nello sviluppo di capacità riflessive sulle loro pratiche.

This article presents a case study focusing on the dynamics present within an organizational context and aiming at analyzing trajectories of educational practice and professional development designed in a company in northern Italy, mainly of a craft nature, which represents an excellence of the Made-in-Italy luxury.

Work-based learning is Joe Raelin’s unique way of incorporating a number of action strategies―such as action learning, action science, and communities of practice―into a comprehensive framework to help people learn collectively with others. In this thoroughly updated and revised edition, he demonstrates how to engage our reflective powers to challenge those taken-for-granted assumptions that unwittingly hold us back from questioning standard ways of operating. A well-known popular author, Joe is an avid student of the many traditions that support work-based learning, so he presents an inclusive model that has wide appeal across disciplines and occupations. He provides readers with the most recent updates in the field, such as his coverage of virtual team learning, portfolios, multisource feedback, critical and global action learning, and changes in educational policy. Whether you're an organizational or college educator, this book will help you make learning accessible to everyone―and even contagious within your organization.

This research, conducted by the author when a Senior Researcher at Newcastle University, UK, was funded by a UK governance organisation to help them assess, integrate and improve their understanding of the governed population.

ABSTRACT: Governance organisations have been urged to develop more holistic evidence-based approaches with partners to better deal with issues affecting the governed population. This presupposes an understanding of the population, yet there has been little research work addressing how governance organisations come to understand their governed population, nor how this understanding can be improved upon within such organisations.

This case study examined in-depth how understanding of a governed population was developed within one UK local governance organisation and it explored how such understanding might be developed and improved through more holistic and evidence-based organisational learning within the organisation and its governance partnerships.

The research methodology involved placement within the governance organisation, participant observations on several projects and innovative initiatives, observations within, across, and outside the organisation, and also interviews with varied key stakeholders.

The study examined:

- stakeholder engagement and networks
- current and varied understandings of the population
- mechanisms actually used for developing understandings
- the influence of context on organisational learning

and analysed these to arrive at a recommendations to improve organisational understanding of the governed population.

In the case studied, significant strengths were found: including innovative past learning trials for development, extensive ongoing networking activities, and many varied and accumulating quantitative datasets available across partnerships.

However, entrenched organisational approaches and practices constrained the development of holistic evidence-based understanding, for instance: the absence of systematic maintained collective learning processes; weak recording and forgetting of understandings; methodological exclusion of stakeholders from the development of understanding; the relative neglect of qualitative data, explanations, investigations, interpretations, and reflexivity; and also implicit organisational acceptance of such limitations and low aspirations.

Nonetheless, untapped opportunities existed to enable change including: latent practitioner knowledge and innovative management champions, the desire for improvement and raised aspirations within learning networks, and the development potential of alterative learning approaches.

It was concluded that more holistic evidence-based understanding was possible, but required new learning approaches beyond those then in use in both local government or academia.   

Recommendations are made to utilise and develop improved organisational learning approaches trialed and reported in the case study.

It is argued that the case study findings, conclusions, and recommendations may be applicable to other similar local governance organisations and partnerships that seek to better understand local populations, services and interventions.

The work was also submitted for, and awarded, an MPhil (at Newcastle University, supervised by Prof. Patsy Healy)

Som følge av økt grad av gjensidig avhengighet i oppgaver og kunnskap i teams forstås effektiv kommunikasjon som sentralt for koordinering. Som følge at oppgaver i dag ofte er karakterisert ved usikkerhet og
tidspress anses koordinering som viktig. Kunnskapen teams anvender anses ofte å være distribuert i organisasjonen og utenfor deres kontaktpersoner samtidig som de baserer seg på mengder erfaring og kunnskap som de andre i teamet ikke besitter. Kunnskapsdeling har blitt lagt vekt på som sentralt for prestasjon i slike tilfeller, og mange har lagt vekt på en delt forståelse i teamet for effektiv kommunikasjon og prestasjon. Dette forstås gjennom forskning på delte mentale modeller og hvordan implisitt kunnskap kan artikuleres. En delt forståelse i teams kan forstås gjennom systemperspektivet der mønsteret i organisering er lokalisert i handlingene og samtalene som skjer på vegne av den antatte organiseringen. Weick’s sensemaking og Action Science undersøkes  som prosesser for å belyse prosessene som leder til delt forståelse og kunnskapsdeling for koordinering av teams.

Body image concerns have been predominantly studied in cultural groups that equate thinness with attractiveness and beauty. A large body size, however, has many positive connotations among Polynesians and may be a contributing factor to the high prevalence rates of obesity in this population. The purpose of this paper is to review, evaluate and integrate the socio-cultural influences that may determine the attitudes, beliefs and values regarding a larger body size among Polynesians. Historically, a large body size has been endorsed through social practices such as deliberate fattening of women to enhance beauty, reproductive capacity and life longevity. The traditional roles of food and community membership, together with more contemporary factors such as the media, are also important influences of body size among this population. These socio-cultural influences are reflected in the ideal, acceptable and perceived body size and also in levels of body dissatisfaction experienced by Polynesians. Whilst Polynesians have reported larger body sizes as more attractive and healthy than Caucasians, they maintain some Western standards by preferring a smaller ideal body size (particularly for younger men and women) and also report high levels of body dissatisfaction. One explanation for these findings relate to Polynesians perception of the relationship between actual weight and their beliefs about weight. Limitations of past studies and recommendations for future research are discussed.

Awareness-in-Action is a critical integral philosophy grounded in what appear to be the presupposed perspectives and practices of human awareness-in-action in all its myriad forms—from writing, speaking, and conversing to giving, taking, and trading, to working, playing, and creating to learning, developing, and evolving—inclusive of anything and everything people do, regardless of how purposeful or spontaneous, mental or physical, independent or interdependent these actions-in-awareness might seem. To whatever extent these apparent presuppositions might be regarded as provisionally valid, these would logically serve as necessary premises for all disciplined inquiries into, and hypotheses about, the many fields of human awareness-in-action, from politics and governance to economics and business to sociology and social work to journalism and activism. Awareness-in-Action may therefore provide the meta-paradigmatic means to create actionable knowledge within, across, and beyond established disciplinary and institutional boundaries, so that those of us concerned with such matters might learn how to respond more effectively to the interdependent political, economic, social, and ecological challenges of our time.

Key Words: action science, awareness, critical theory, discourse, human action, integral theory, perspectivism, post-metaphysics, pragmatics, praxiology, reason, semiotics.

Key Names: Argyris, Bühler, Derrida, Geuss, Habermas, Kuhn, Mead, Ramana, Wilber

One goal of the NATO SAS-105 Symposium is to develop strategies to influence capabilities of military and civilian organizations in order to better harmonize ways to achieve desired strategic effects and outcomes. The paper describes how the complexity of current and future security environments is best addressed through civil-military collaboration. However, given that industrial age assumptions and organizational defensive routines often impede effective interagency planning, the paper outlines how Open Systems Theory (OST) is an effective approach for active adaptation planning combined with Action Research (AR) as a form of Campaign Experimentation. AR is designed to solve complex problems by involving those responsible for the design, implementation and evaluation of an initiative while generating scientific knowledge to inform doctrine and policies. The unique position of the Centre for Intercultural Learning as a practitioner in strengthening multi-stakeholder processes will complement the theoretical basis for recommendations.

[The Process of facilitating organizational learning in reflective consultation : A case of small and medium sized enterprises in Taiwan
]
The purpose of this study is to present an enterprise case of organizational learning and the discussion and reflection of researchers’ intervention.  In this case, the theories of intervention approach are based on Argyris & Schön’s “Organizational Learning”(1996), Argyris, Putnam & Smith’s “Action Science”(1985), and Schein’s “Process Consultation”(1988).  In this study, twelve times of reflective conversations were conducted. And the intervention process can be divided into four stages, intake stage, orientation stage, conflict learning stage, and finally the ending stage.  The most important thing in this study is the outside consultants and organizational staffs can co-construct a learning field of open conversation.  At last, researchers reflect and discuss of self-learning, the construction of learning field and group, the facilitative and inhibitive factors of organizational learning, the roles and functions of consultants, the misunderstanding of organizational learning, and the suggestions to the case.  The whole process of intervention is an temptation for consultants to try organizational learning , so as for the enterprise case.  Consultants endeavor to initiate the conditions of collective reflection in the case.  The researchers hope that the intervention method which fulfills the value and spirit of organizational learning can be more elaborative and practical, so that researchers, consultants and managers of organization can have alternative approach of organizational study method and intervention in the future.

This article provides a historical perspective on developments underlying the relationship of teacher-based action research and curriculum inquiry. The exploration of the relationship begins with a historical journey tracing the roots and routes of different approaches to teacher-based or practitioner research across the past 100-plus years and moves on to factors related to their development. The historical analysis will show that the evolutionary path (Noffke, 1997) of teacher-based action research, curriculum inquiry, and practitioner inquiry is not an unbroken chain of developments, but rather a set of routes taken by researchers, educators, and practitioners at particular periods of time in response to particular intellectual, social, political, and educational conditions. Reviews over the past six decades have shown that the approaches identified are known by various names, including action inquiry, action research, collaborative action research, emancipatory action research, ethnographic action research, narrative inquiry, participatory research, practitioner inquiry, practitioner research, teacher research, and teacher action research, among others (e.g.

Participation and design. The collective process of sense making in urban projects by Emanuela Saporito Tutor: Agata Spaziante Co-tutor: Matteo Robiglio Among the ever growing scepticism and supporters and experimentations, the topic of citizen's direct participation in decision making processes is still an extreme and urgent news. In the light of the recent news which, between Naples and Val di Susa, once again demonstrates the necessity to deal with an insurgent population, it becomes increasingly coherent, in relation to territorial planning and design, to examine this controversial topic more deeply.