~Electronic Vitae~

Peter H. Sawchuk

Contact:

 

 

Areas of Specialization:
Cultural Historical Activity Theory; Sociology of Work & Learning; Technological Studies; Adult Education; Labour Education; Labour Studies; Transnational Labour; Computer-Mediated Distance Education. Currently teaching courses in the department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education as well as the Centre for Industrial Relations (University of Toronto). Courses include: sociology of work and learning, industrial relations, Marxist theory, and school & society. Peter Sawchuk is a founding member of the Centre for the Study of Education and Work, and the current chair of the International Advisory Committee of the Researching Learning and Work International Conference Series.

 

Current Research and Organizational Projects:

I. I am just beginning research on labour union and community collaboration in a large-scale research project entitled "Understanding Educational Capacity for Urban Community Unionism: Exploring the Developmental Foundation of a New Labour Relations Regime in Canada" (SSHRC Standard Research Grant). See introductory, draft articles from this project: "Learning Community Unionism in Canada: Towards a Labour Relations / Education Research Program" and "Anti-colonialism, Labour and the Pedagogies of Community Unionism: The Case of Hotel Workers in Canada".

II. I have just completed research on a large-scale research project on work, learning and technological change in the public sector in Canada in partnership with the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE - Ontario) and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU). The project is entitled 'Working IT: Learning New Technology in the Public Sector'. (Read a national newspaper article featuring the research project) (Read an OpEd Newspaper Article on the Project). This project is part of the Work and Lifelong Learning Research Network.

III. I recently completed (with Jorge Garcia-Orgales, Canadian Research Director, USWA) research grant project entitled "Education Credentials / Skills Recognition in the New Economy". It aims to compare the promises of learning opportunities and skill development in the new economy with the reality of a range of different workers in the Greater Toronto Area. A specific objective is to understand the needs of workers occupying seemingly 'dead-end jobs', and the means through which these workers can develop satisfying and productive career trajectories. We are particularly interested in studying the role of foreign credential recognition (or lack there of), and its affects on workers achieving their preferred career trajectory. (see a recent journal article).

IV. The International Conference on Researching Work and Learning (RWL)is a conference series that was initiated in Leeds, U.K. in 1999. I chaired the Second International Conference on Researching Work and Learning (University of Calgary, Canada; July 26-28, 2001), and have continued to serve as the chair of the International Advisory Committee of the series (2003 - Tampere, Finland) as well as for the Fourth International Conference on Researching Work and Learning (2005 - Sydney, Australia). Information on RWL5 in South Africa is also available.

V. The Design, Delivery and Evaluation of Union-Based Telelearning: Phase Two project (Taylor and Sawchuk) forms the basis of a variety of research activities, reporting, policy recommendations and publications. This project tests the ability of a variety of distance education and telelearning programs to contribute to labour education initiatives in a way consistent with the organization values and goals of the labour movement. This is accomplished through the collection and analysis of large-scale survey data, participatory observation and analysis of actual online labour education workshops, as well as qualitative analysis of telephone interviews with trade union participants. Download a powerpoint presentation from Telelearning Network of Centres of Excellence conference (November 2001) Social Movement E-Learning by Sawchuk and Taylor. Or, view working papers based on the project Sawchuk, 2001a or Sawchuk, 2001b, and a summary publication by Sawchuk, Taylor and Gawron (2003). Also see "Curbing Our Enthusiasm: The Underbelly of Educational Technology" (Academic Affairs, 2006).

 

Links to Selection of Recent Books:

The Future of Lifelong Learning and Work: Critical Perspectives

By D. W. Livingstone, K. Mirchandani and P. Sawchuk (Sense Publishing, Rotterdam, The Netherlands - 2008)

For a Flyer outlining the book including ordering information Click HERE.

Chapter on "Lifelong Learning and Work as 'Value' Production". Click HERE to order.

 

 

 

Work and Organizational Behaviour.

By J. Bratton, M. Callinan, C. Forshaw and P. Sawchuk (Palgrave, UK - 2007)

"Chapters on "Equity in Work Organizations: Issues of Gender, Race, Disability and Class", "Power", and "Technology in the Workplace" in Organizational Behaviour: Understanding the Workplace (2007, co-edited with J. Bratton, M. Callinan and C. Forshaw from Palgrave, UK). Click HERE to order.

"'Work and Organisational Behaviour is a groundbreaking book that bridges the gap between mainstream organisational behaviour texts and more critical sociological accounts of work. It includes a host of illuminating examples and reflective exercises, as well as a useful glossary, and is strongly recommended as essential reading for business and management students at all levels."

Dr Melissa Tyler, Loughborough University, UK

 

Critical Perspectives on Activity: Explorations Across Education, Work & Everyday Life.

By P. Sawchuk, N. Duarte and M. Elhammoumi (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Introduction & Chapter 12 of Critical Perspectives on Activity: Explorations Across Education, Work & Everyday Life (2006, co-edited with N. Duarte and M. Elhammoumi from Cambridge University Press) Click HERE to order.

[from Foreword] "Despite the generally acknowledged significance of Marx's ideas in the historical development of the cultural-historical tradition, it is still rare to find texts in the cultural-historical tradition that explicitly address Marx's ideas in relation to research about concrete, historical practices (such as education, work, and play). This volume helps address this seemingly paradoxical situation with its inspiringly wide range of topics and themes that are being considered or oriented by a dialectical perspective, as well as several different disciplinary perspectives… This volume formulates ideas and issues that need to be explored and interiorised (through critical discussion) as part of the tradition's further development."

Professor Seth Chaiklin
Department of Educational Psychology
The Danish University of Education

"What differentiates the current book is the critical Marxist perspective that the authors in various ways bring to bear on their subject matter…. The book challenges us to think about learning in new ways, and draws on a broad range of themes. For these purposes it is highly recommended."

Journal of Industrial Relations

Hidden Knowledge: Organized Labour in the Information Age.

By D.W. Livingstone and P. H. Sawchuk (Garamond Press, 2004).

Introduction of Hidden Knowledge: Organized Labour in the Information Age. Click HERE to order.

  • "Hidden Knowledge goes to the very heart of the claims of a knowledge-based economy and demonstrates the realities and depth of workers' knowledge in powerful ways. This is a major contribution to our understanding of the real connections between knowledge and power in our societies."
Michael W. Apple
John Bascom Professor of Curriculum, Instruction and Educational Policy
Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison

"Hidden Knowledge is an important and valuable academic look at knowledge and learning. It is a reference that labour educators will no doubt use over and over again. It shows that, as working people, we are all virtual sponges for learning throughout our lives and deserve to be recognized for the knowledge and skills we acquire at work, at home and at play."

Leo W. Gerard
International President
United Steelworkers of America

"This exciting book will change the debate on knowledge-based production. Hidden Knowledge demonstrates that the main barrier to 21st century work forms stems from managements' continued insistence on control over workers and refusal to rely on worker intelligence and ingenuity. Policy makers and workplace advocates need to read this book!"

Ruth Needleman
Professor of Labor Studies and Women Studies
Indiana University
Coordinator of Swingshift College

"This book is an excellent challenge to the claims of the "knowledge-based economy": It uncovers the depth of learning that is taking place and how it tends to be hidden by the power structure of society."

Contemporary Sociology

"This book is a valuable addition to any graduate course reading list examining work and learning. The case studies provide current insights into the world of workplace learning defined from a worker perspective."

Labour / Le Travail

"The issue of workers' role in the increasingly 'knowledge-based' economy and the necessity to create a 'lifelong learning culture' in every workplace have been the focus of official studies in industrialized countries around the world over the past ten to fifteen years. These studies, as Livingstone and Sawchuk write, 'impl[y] that most workers suffer from a deficit of necessary skills and knowledge which must be rectified by greater education and training efforts'. This book details a sophisticated study that explicitly challenges these assumptions…In many ways, the book is a paean to workplace activists, particularly those in unions. The ethnographic accounts report what workers say about their work, their companies, their training, their workplace situations, and provide a rich understanding of the knowledge that almost all workers develop in the workplace. It also introduces those of us outside Canada to some Canadian working-class history as well as to the economic changes taking place there."

Labor Studies Journal


Adult Learning & Technology in Working-Class Life.

By P. H. Sawchuk (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Introduction of Adult Learning & Technology in Working-Class Life
(2003, from Cambridge University Press) Click HERE to order.

"Learning and new technologies are too often discussed as if they had nothing to do with social class. Sawchuk's book is a welcome reversal of this trend. It takes a decidedly working-class perspective, passionate but also carefully documented and theoretically open-minded. This is an important contribution to sociocultural studies of learning."


Yrjo Engestrom
Professor of Communication, University of California, San Diego
Professor of Adult Education, University of Helsinki

"Sawchuk has written an important book for anyone interested in technology, learning and the future of organized labor. He emphasizes the importance of unions more effectively tapping into these capacities both to democratize the workplace and to revitalize labor through combining the best traditions of working-class cultures of solidarity, collective action and learning."

Elaine Bernard
Executive Director, Harvard Trade Union Program, Harvard University

"This is a complex work with a social improvement goal.... Recommended."

Choice

"…Sawchuk is able to detect subtle strategies used by workers to increase their own store of cultural capital at the employers' expense. His analysis also succeeds at relating the concerns of Marxists with relations of production to those of postmodernists focused on identity formation and cultural appropriation. The result is a new set of perspectives on the relationships suggested in the title, and a new appreciation of the complexity of those relationships."

American Journal of Sociology

"…a beautifully written book that carries the reader along as he unfolds its argument. He brings together insights from his data and reading in a most impressive and convincing way… This is one of the half-dozen best adult education books I have read in my 25 years in the field. I urge anyone who engages with workplace learning in any way, or who is interested in adult education scholarship, to read it."

Australian Journal of Adult Learning

" Sawchuk makes a valuable contribution to the literature on learning theory and, in particular, on adult learning theory, in his Adult Learning and Technology in Working-Class Life. Writing in a refreshingly accessible voice, Sawchuk links Vygotsky's "activity theory of personality and learning" (p. 37) with the "notion of common sense developed in the work of Antoinio Gramsci" (p. 17) and Bourdieu's "concept of habitus and field" (p. 17). This linking has been of recent interest to sociologists, linguists, and anthropologists, but it has rarely been developed with the clarity that Sawchuk's text affords... [A]n inveterate Marxist… Sawchuk's arguments are well researched… Adult Learning and Technology in Working-Class Life has a good deal to offer. Sawchuk's review of literature in and of itself is worth noting. Spanning from adult-learning theories to situated learning and critical theory, the review is both comprehensive and comprehensible. It offers an unusually accessible overview of complex theories and would be of value to classes on adult education and the sociology of work… [T]hought provoking and comprehensible."

Anthropology and Education Quarterly

 

Workplace Learning: A Critical Introduction.

By J. Bratton, J. Helms-Mills, T. Pyrch and P. Sawchuk (University of Toronto Press, 2004)

Introduction & Chapter 5: Unions and Workplace Learning of Workplace Learning: A Critical Introduction. (co-authored with John Bratton, Jean Helms-Mills and Tim Pyrch) (forthcoming from Garamond Press) Click HERE to order.

[from Foreword]
"Here is a map through contested and largely uncharted terrain…if you are exploring ways to support learning in the many waking hours that adults commit to their workplaces, this is a valuable reference guide. The text skillfully draws on both managerial and critical discourses [and] the energy of this book comes from the tension between these two basic perspectives, a dialectic that plays out in the academy as well as the workplace. In its best moments, it allows us to hold competing ideas in our heads at the same time, to see simultaneously from above and from below the drama of learning and work. In the end, it equips us to assess the moments and conditions which move adults towards insight, skill and action that will reproduce or transform their work environments…. [P]erhaps the broadest range of literatures to be collected in one place on the field of workplace learning, and students and scholars alike will benefit from the reflexive analysis offered."

D'Arcy Martin
Labour Educator and
Coordinator, Centre for the Study of Education and Work
University of Toronto

"This is the best Canadian text available on workplace learning… The strengths of the book include a sense of history and an understanding of the importance of the critical eye… This book will be core reading for my students in work and learning courses."

Labour / Le Travail

Selected Publications:

(BOOKS / CHAPTERS)
Sawchuk, Peter H. (forthcoming) "Anti-colonialism, Labour and the Pedagogies of Community Unionism: The Case of Hotel Workers in Canada". In A. Kempf (ed) Breaching the Colonial Contract: Anti-Colonialism in the US and Canada. New York: Springer.

Sawchuk, Peter H. and Taylor, Alison (eds) (2009). Challenging Transitions in Learning and Work: Perspectives on Policy and Practice. Rotterdam, NL: Sense Publishing.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (co-edited with D. Livingstone and K. Mirchandani)(eds) (2009). The Future of Lifelong Learning and Work: Critical Perspectives. Rotterdam, NL: Sense Publishers.

Sawchuk, Peter H. and Kempf, A. (in press). "Peripheralization, Exploitation and Lifelong Learning in Canadian Guest Worker Programmes". In L. Cooper and S. Walters (Eds) Learning/Work: Critical Perspectives on Lifelong Learning and Work. Cape Town, South Africa: Human Science Research Council Press.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (2008). "Lifelong Learning and Work as 'Value' Production: Combining Work and Learning Analysis from a Cultural Historical Perspective", in D.Livingstone, K. Mirchandani and P. Sawchuk (eds) The Future of Lifelong Learning and Work: Critical Perspectives. Rotterdam, NL: Sense Publishers.

Bratton, J., Sawchuk, P., Callinan, C. and Forshaw, E. (2007). Organizational Behaviour: Understanding the Workplace. London: Palgrave-MacMillan.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (2007). "Work and the Labour Process: 'Use-Value' and the Re-thinking of Skills and Learning" (pp.89-106) in T. Fenwick and L. Farrell (eds.) Educating the Global Workforce: knowledge, knowledge work and knowledge workers. New York: Kogan Page.

Sawchuk, Peter H., Duarte, Newton and Elhammoumi, Mohamed (eds) (2006) Critical Perspectives on Activity: Explorations across Education, Work and Everyday Life. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (2006) "The Impact of New Information Technologies on Paid Workplace Learning Practices and Policies" in K. Leithwood, D. Livingstone, A. Cumming, N. Bascia and A. Datnow (eds) International Handbook of Educational Policy. New York: Kluwer Publishers.

Foley, G. and Sawchuk, Peter H. (2005) "Informal Learning within Organisational Settings and Electronic Media Networks", Klaus Künzel (ed) International Yearbook of Adult Education. Cologne: Böhlau-Verlag.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (2003). Adult Learning and Technology in Working-Class Life. New York: New York: Cambridge University Press.

Livingstone, D.W. and Sawchuk, Peter H. (2003). Hidden Knowledge: Organized Labour in the Information Age. Washington, D.C.: Rowman and Littlefield.

Bratton, J., Mills, J., Pyrch, T. and Sawchuk, Peter H. (2003) Workplace Learning: A Critical Introduction. Toronto: University of Toronto Press / Broadview Press.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (ed) (2001) Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Researching Work & Learning. Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary (ISBN 0-88953-250-8).

 

(ARTICLES IN REFEREED JOURNALS)

Sawchuk, Peter H. (in press). "The Greening of the Canadian Labour Movement: International Comparisons and Educational Potential", Canadian Journal for the Study Adult Education.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (2009). "A Canadian Union Perspective on Education and Citizenship: The role of labour markets and work in the 21st Century", Education and Citizenship. [translated into English from Portuguese].

Sawchuk, Peter H. (2008). "Technological Change, Learning and Capitalist Globalisation: Outsourcing Step- by-Step in the Canadian Public Sector", Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (2008). "Labour Perspectives on the New Politics of Skill and Competency Formation: International Reflections", Asia Pacific Education Review. 9(1), pp.1-15.

Sawchuk, Peter H. and Stetsenko, Anna (2008). "Sociological Understandings of Conduct for a Non-Canonical Activity Theory: Exploring Intersections and Complementarities". Mind Culture and Activity. 15(4), pp.339-360.

Sawchuk, Peter H. and Kempf, Arlo (2008). "Guest Worker Programs and Canada: Towards a Foundation for Understanding the Complex Pedagogies of Transnational Labour", Journal of Workplace Learning, 20(7/8), pp.492-502.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (2008). "Theories and methods for research on informal learning and work: Towards cross-fertilization", Studies in Continuing Education. 30(1), pp.1-16.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (2006). "Understanding Diverse Outcomes for Working-Class Learning: Conceptualizing Class Consciousness as Knowledge Activity" Economic and Labour Relations Review. 17(2), pp.199-216.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (2006) "'Use-Value' and the Re-thinking of Skills, Learning and the Labour Process", Journal of Industrial Relations. 48(4), pp.238-262

Sawchuk, Peter H. (2006) "Labour Education & Labour Arts: Prospects of Knowing for the Left Hand" Labor Studies Journal. 31(2), pp.49-68

Sawchuk, Peter H. (2006) "Curbing our Enthusiasm: The underbelly of educational technology" Academic Matters: The Journal of Higher Education, (winter), p.9.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (2003) "Informal Learning as a Speech-Exchange System: Implications for Knowledge Production, Power and Social Transformation" Discourse and Society. 14(3), pp.291-307.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (2003) "Online Learning for Union Activist? Findings from a Canadian Study" Studies in Continuing Education. 25(2), pp.18-34.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (2003) "The 'Unionization Effect' Amongst Adult Computer Learners" British Journal of Sociology of Education. 24(5), pp.52-71.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (co-authored with Z. Gawron and J. Taylor) (2003) "E-Learning and Union Mobilization" Journal of Distance Education, 17(3), pp.80-96.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (with T. Hennessy) (2003) "Worker Responses to Technological Change in the Canadian Public Sector: Issues of Learning and Labour Process" Journal of Workplace Learning,15(7/8), pp.38-52.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (2001). "Trade Union-Based Workplace Learning: A case study in workplace reorganization and worker knowledge production" Journal of Workplace Learning. 13(7/8), pp.344-351.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (2000) "Building Traditions of Inquiry and Transforming Labour-Academic Collaboration at the Union Local: Case studies of workers' research and education" Labour/Le Travail 45 (Spring), pp.199-216.

Sawchuk, Peter H. (co-authored with David W. Livingstone) (2000) "Beyond Cultural Capital: The Hidden Dimensions of Working-Class Learning" Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, 22(2), pp.121-146.

 

Click Here to see video discussion on the question "Is Technology a Blessing or a Burden for Workers?"

Related Organizational Links:
*The Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education, OISE/UT
*United Association for Labor Education
*American Sociological Association - Labor and Labor Movements Section
*Canadian Association for the Study of Adult Education
*Mind, Culture and Activity: An international journal
*Centre for the Study of Education & Work, OISE/UT


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