fear losing their position might withhold access to tasks or guidance (Lave & Wenger, 1991), in an attempt to secure valuable opportunities for advancement or remuneration (Billett, 2004). In summary, the workplace is a place full of authenticity and opportunities for trainees or new workers to take appropriate actions and make application of their knowledge gained from training. However, whether such an important feature of sense-making could be manifested is highly affected by whether workers are given the support and encouragement from the work environment to do so. Therefore, as claimed at the beginning of this section, inclusion of workplace learning does not guarantee the action aspect of sense-making by workers; rather, other affordances, such as organisational cultures, supervisor support and peer support, may need to be considered as well in order to support sense-making. This section discusses the studies on how workplace affordances can promote or impede learners’ sense-making, particularly the role of peer and workplace supervisor support in workplaces. Merely including workplace learning in BL may not contribute to learners’ high quality of sense-making without corresponding opportunities for them to take actions to make application from training to work.
2.3. Conclusion This chapter firstly introduces the concept of sense-making and its theoretical underpinnings. Drawing on the current understanding of sense-making, this chapter also reviews some empirical studies on how pedagogy, curriculum design and workplace affordances can exert influences on learners’ sense-making effort. The review of the empirical studies confirms the theoretical underpinnings of sense-making, which is not only a cognitive process, but also a sociocultural process for the learners. Every minute part of BL may play a critical role in the sense-making experience. Design and delivery of BL requires a lot of attention in order to ensure a high quality of sense-making experiences for adult learners. Chapter Three and Four will present the main findings of the case studies on the quality of the learners’ sense-making experience in this research study and how different contextual factors working together influence their sense-making experiences in BL.
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