Working outside the comfort of competence in a corrections centre

Abstract

Contrary to popular myth, modern prison environments are often workplaces that embrace change and reform. Stakeholders such as policy makers, managers and administrators currently look for innovative ways to rehabilitate offenders and re-integrate them back into the community, rather than continuing to incarcerate offenders to reduce harm to the community. In some cases, innovative models of offender rehabilitation require new ways of working among staff, whose typical roles are functional and well-defined within the disciplines of custody, medical care, counselling, education and probation and parole. This paper discusses the informal workplace learning experiences of staff members working through a new model for offender rehabilitation at a corrections centre. Our findings are developed from examining daily work and critical incidents as change triggers through observations and semi-structured interviewing. The deliberate multi-disciplinary staff team approach adopted by the director of the centre has been a significant change intervention that has challenged work roles and work practices. Yet in environments of ongoing and rapid change, it is the emergent quality of creative human interactions that generates understandings of collective competence (Boreham 2004, 2007) rather than individuals staying within the comfort of individual competence. Such relationally-constructed learning that require ‘working in the overlaps’, signal a possible convergence between theories of workplace learning and organisational change / development that can reshape human resource development (HRD) research and practice and improve understandings of learning.