Nicky Solomon
Phone: +61-2-9514-3700
Fax: +61-2-9514-3737
E-mail: Nicky.Solomon@uts.edu.au
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Nicky Solomon
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Bachelor of Arts (University of Sydney), Diploma in Education (Sydney Teachers' College), Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics (pass with merit) University of Sydney
Nicky Solomon is Senior Lecturer in the UTS Faculty of Education as well as Senior Research Fellow in the RCVET. She is also currently Program Manager for Work-based Learning for the University.
Her teaching and research experience has focused on issues to do with culture and difference in workplace learning.
Her writing has challenged what is considered to be the significant mainstream concerns of workplace learning as both a field of practice and a site of academic study. She argues that culture and language are not only access and equity issues but are integral to the theory and practice of workplace learning. Her work draws on social theories that account for the global, social and cultural changes and their relationship with local workplace practices. In particular her focus has been on:
- the use of 'culture' as a management tool and its influence in the shaping of subjectivity in the workplace
- understandings about 'difference' and the potential tensions around working with a common set of values and attitudes at the same time as 'celebrating difference.
Some of her research work for RCVET and the Faculty has involved collaborative projects with government and industry partners, focusing on:
- ‘writing in’ language and culture in industry competency standards, thereby extending the technical meanings previously attached to competence, so that the policies and systems around ‘competence’ acknowledged work as a social activity;
- problematising contemporary plain English practices by understanding plain English as part of the democratisation and conversationalisation of language. My writing helped to move plain English debates from discussions around specific language features to discussions around the significance of the personalisation and detechnicisation of language in terms of broader social and cultural changes.
As a follow-up to this work Nicky is currently researching the methodological issues emerging in the collaborative research partnerships between the academy, industry and government.
In addition her current research examines the relationship between workplaces and universities and the pedagogical and epistemological implications of this relationship. As Program Manager for Work-based Learning her work addresses many of the conceptual and professional questions that are surfacing in Australian work-based learning initiatives.
‘Workplace Learning: Culture and Difference’ in Understanding Workplace Learning, eds Boud & Garrick, (Routledge)
Methodological dilemmas in collaborative research practice’ in Culture and Text, eds A. Lee & C. Poynton, (Allen & Unwin)
Technologies of Self-Regulation in Training’ in Making Space: Reframing Practice in Adult Education, eds, V. Sheared & P. Sissel, (Greenwood) ‘Publishing; Experiential learning and the shaping of subjectivity in the workplace’ to appear in Studies in the Education of Adults.
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