| Summary: | This thesis is about recognising and analysing learning from experience in community
organisations. It critically examines not only the possibilities, but also the challenges
and difficulties involved in that approach to learning. The thesis documents positive
and innovative strategies for learning and providing services in a particular Women's
Refuge, while at the same time offering a critical engagement with those
interventions. Women's Refuges exist to support women and children victims of
domestic violence, and to work towards the elimination of domestic violence, but like
many voluntary organisations in New Zealand, they rely on volunteers to provide
many of their services. This qualitative case study focuses on the induction and
training of the Refuge volunteer advocates in one particular Refuge in Christchurch in
1998 - 1999. It examines the tensions inherent in a pedagogy of learning from
experience, which operates in a wider context of state funding and state surveillance
of the quality of services.
Within the Refuge, the notions of 'experience' and 'learning' were not neutral or
value free. What counted as learning within the Refuge context was not generalised
knowledge, but an ability to engage in certain practices and talk about these practices
in particular ways. Throughout their training volunteer advocates were learning not
just how to support women and children escaping violence in their homes, but how to
manage their identities as learners and workers within the institutional regimes of the
Refuge. The volunteer advocates had to learn to demonstrate reflexivity, and be
'honest,' but they also learnt to manage that honesty. They were learning about the
Refuge work, what 'experience' was valuable, and how to demonstrate that they were
learning in this particular environment by demonstrating a capacity for self reflective
talk about those experiences. In this respect they had to engage in 'experiential
learning' by overtly reconstructing their own actions, interactions and feelings.
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