Social participation, altruism and learning opportunism: A phenomenography of adults’ learning through workplace experiences in rural community volunteering

Social participation, altruism and learning opportunism: A phenomenography of adults’ learning through workplace experiences in rural community volunteering

Workplace experiences are central to adults’ learning and development, providing opportunities for significant and valuable lifelong learning. Research into adults’ learning in volunteer work attests to its significance and value across the spectrum of adult learning, serving instrumental, social, and altruistic purposes for the learner and enriching lives through furnishing individual, collective and broader community benefits. But how does adults’ learning through workplace experiences in community volunteering contribute to their agency and lifelong learning while also generating wider collective benefits? What are people learning, and what are the learning incentives, processes, mechanisms and affordances at play? This article reports selected findings from a phenomenographic investigation into a group of community volunteers’ experiences of workplace learning in a social enterprise in an Australian rural town coming to grips with transitioning to life in a digital era. The findings illuminate the experience of community-based workplace learning from the adult learner’s perspective, and specifically, learning embedded in social participation in rural community volunteering and associational life, providing new insights about adults’ experience of learning through volunteering in the interests of understanding and furthering their own lifelong learning and development goals while contributing to their communities of interest, practice and place.

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