Browsing by Author "Ayres, Kurt Rand"

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    An Exploration of Passionate Vocational Learning in Adulthood
    (2016) Ayres, Kurt Rand; Kawalilak, Colleen; Butterwick, Shauna Jane; Groen, Janet Elizabeth; Patterson, Margaret Edna; Mendaglio, Salvatore
    Fortunate adults are able to spend a great deal of their lives doing work they feel suited to perform; they are working in a vocation. As an adult educator, I am interested in understanding how adults find and form their vocations and, in particular, how adults become passionately engaged in vocational learning. This study provides an exploration of the life experiences of six adults, including myself, who are all self-professed passionate learners in their vocations. The research draws upon underlying theory from the psychology of human motivation, interest development, vocation, vocational identity and narrative identity, in addition to the theory of transformative learning. I use Narrative Inquiry as a research methodology to reveal the experience of the participants who have become passionate learners in their vocations. I develop vocational narratives for each participant to provide the life context for the participant’s vocational decision-making. I further isolate narrative threads from each vocational narrative, which are smaller narratives on vocational development and tend to reoccur throughout the lives of the individual. They provide insight into each person’s vocational decision-making. In response to the research questions, I organize the experience of each participant in six zones of activity, which enable the reader to visualize how, over time, each participant has developed and learned the skills, values, goals, and roles associated with their vocation. I named the six zones Vocational Interest, Disruptive Events, Choosing and Entering Vocation, Vocational Identity Development, Vocational Learning and Possible Stagnation. In the study, I show how vocational interest sometimes emerged from the early lives of the participants. I also provide insight into the way vocational interest developed, in some cases, into vocational identity; for example, when an individual interested in nursing became a nurse. I show how participants sometimes encountered disruptive events in their lives, which may well have triggered periods of both transformative learning and vocational change. I develop evidence that some participants may have experienced transformative learning as the process by which they created new vocational identities. Finally, I show how some participants developed multifaceted collections of vocational identities, as in nurse-educator-counsellor.