Workforce and Workplace Learning Concentration Proseminar

EDU T452AY Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Adults spend most of their working lives learning, in roles and organizations with their own demands, incentives, and constraints. This seminar treats that learning as its own subject, from the cognitive processes that shape how an adult builds skill to the institutional systems that decide where and how that learning happens. It is a required part of the Workforce and Workplace Learning Concentration.

The fall semester looks at how adults actually learn. We cover cognition, motivation, skill acquisition, and the way identity keeps forming long after formal schooling ends. The spring turns to the organizations and systems that shape learning at work, from how firms decide to invest in their people to how whole sectors build talent.

The seminar also works as a place to connect ideas across your HGSE coursework. Many courses here deal with concepts that carry straight into adult learning, even when they are built around children or formal schooling. Each session we grapple with how to extend educational research into workforce and workplace contexts, and reason through where it holds and where it falls apart.
The concentration prepares students for the full range of roles in this sector, from learning and development leaders and chief learning officers to instructional designers, workforce development program leaders, edtech founders, and the funders and policy people who shape the system around them. By the end of the year, you should be ready to step into one of these roles, fluent in the current science of how adults learn and clear-eyed about the nuance and complexity of putting it to work inside real organizations.