Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and major organizational changes, took hold of this training opportunity
to 'come to an agreement'. The integration of this novice was no longer
the business of a single two-person team, but of the collective as a whole:
the collective loosened up its time constraints to provide some additional
quality training time, and provided its members with the possibility of
joining the pair of workers. The involvement of a nursing auxiliary, newly
arrived in the department, whose own work history has exposed her to
an extensive experience of caring for elder patients, sparked off a debate
regarding the connection between the technical aspect of work -
cure
-
and the psychological aspect -
care
. From then on, the situation of welcom-
ing a student became a special time for discussing the past experiences
of each auxiliary, the conditions of transmission, and to design the rules of
the trade to plan out courses of work for every auxiliary in the ward. In a
sense, transmission became a developmental task.
This role of the collective becomes all the more crucial when employ-
ment is affected by low job security, as is the case in the cinema industry,
which primarily employs freelancers. A study carried out in a popula-
tion of cinema technicians showed that the lack of job security affected
the transmission of knowledge in various ways (Cloutier et al., 2012).
Considering the fact that most knowledge is acquired on the job, the
requirements of the industry concerning novice workers are paradoxical.
The expert workers who were met agreed together that progressing in the
industry is a long process, comprising many stages, that trade knowledge
is acquired through a confrontation with various situations and through
repetition, and that the process requires a lot of time. However, the way in
which the cinema industry is organized, including the lack of job security
and fierce competition that characterize the trade, forces novices to 'prove
their worth' very quickly. A novice's 'performance' is often assessed based
on only one day or even only a few hours' work. Indeed, although the
educational, social and professional history of the worker does play a part
in the integration, the strongest factor of integration is subscribing to the
culture of the trade. This relates strongly to respect for the hierarchy and
for the rules of the trade, such as mutual aid and adaptation to modes of
communication. The more the novice worker adopts behaviour that is true
to the culture of the trade, the faster he or she is taken in by the work col-
lective. It is access to this collective that will then open up opportunities
for learning through transmission. The transmission of this 'culture of
the trade' becomes a key, both to accessing means to learn the trade and
to being hired in future productions. However, this lack of job security
can also become a major obstacle for transmission on other levels, since
the various protagonists involved tend to have to compete against one
another when looking for employment in other productions.
Placing the issue of the links between past, present and future at the
heart of a developmental approach of courses of work leads us to revisit
