Wim H. Gijselaers – författare

Advances in Business Education & Training is a Book Series to foster advancement in the field of Business Education and Training. It serves as an international forum for scholarly and state-of-the-art research and development into all aspects of Business Education and Training.

This new volume deals with several aspects of the challenge to design learning in and for a changing world. The first part concerns program development.  How to build curricula that are future-proof? Principles to innovate our curricula are identified. It answers the question how we can incorporate the need for change in our thinking about curriculum-development and identify the necessary elements to incorporate in our curricula. The second part focuses on the increasing diversity of students and employees within our schools and organizations, in terms of culture, language, and perception of ability, gifts, and talents. This offers a range of opportunities, but at the same time can possiblyjeopardize some processes that are taken for granted. Chapters in this part analyze the processes that play a crucial role in dealing with this diversity and identify educational practices that can help to harvest the potential that lies within this diversity. The third part of this book digs further into the possibilities that are opened up by the implementation of ICT-support in our learning environments. E-learning provides tools to adapt these environments to the needs of an increasingly diverse student-population. In the last part we focus specifically on the workplace and how learning can be designed in such a way that employees are equipped for a shifting workplace. On the one hand it is looked how training can affect performance in the workplace. Does learning transfer to the work environment? On the other hand it is questioned how one can design affordances to trigger learning in the workplace. 

Core concepts in education are changing. For example, professional performance or expertise is not uniquely the fruit of specialist knowledge acquired at professional schools, but the sum of influences exerted by a complex web of continuous learning opportunities for which an individual is well (or ill) prepared by their schools and their workplace. The key contributory factors to professional expertise are how professional schools connect to professional practice, how schools prepare graduates for continuous learning, and how the workplace endorses continuous development. Thus, the question this volume addresses—how to design learning and working environments that facilitate the integration of these three elements—is at the heart of contemporary pedagogical theory. The authors also ask a second vital question: how do we educate learners that go on to maximize their life’s learning opportunities by regulating their own ongoing learning?

Learning at the Crossroads of Theory and Practice argues that with the theory of learning at a crossroads, this is an unprecedented opportunity for learning about learning. The book sheds light on different elements of this challenge: integrating theory and practice in business education, generating and fully exploiting workplace learning opportunities, and enriching our classrooms by coupling theoretical knowledge with the richness of real-life experience.

This book tackles the latest challenges in education in the business sector, outlining how the students of the future must be taught to adapt to a highly fluid business environment in which their ability to acquire new skills and collaborate with others is more important than possessing facts. Taking its cue from the growing body of theory advocating multi-faceted and often multilingual education, the book focuses on ‘competences’ and collaborative, team-oriented, project-based learning.

Beginning with a set of studies on the differences in individual learning and ways of supporting students, the volume moves on to a collection of papers on learning at the level of the group, which include material on team learning, and the sharing of knowledge in problem-based learning. The editors view these factors in education as an inevitable feature of pedagogy, reflecting the fact that knowledge, and its acquisition, is increasingly collaborative in our working lives, and especially in business. A final section applies the principles developed in the first two parts at an organizational level, evaluating the enormous implications these developments in our ideas about learning have for the educational institutions charged with teaching future generations. Combining research and theory with practical factors in business education and training, the volume provides wide-ranging perspectives on developing best practice in the sector.