Improving Workplace Learning by Teaching Literature

Towards Wisdom

This book investigates the integration of literary writing into work based or business writing.  It proposes ways of how to help people with considerable work experience use literature to engage with the problems they face in their work.  Many people like to read for pleasure, but their skills in reading could always be improved. This book makes an original contribution to the fields of education, work based learning and business by encouraging students to explore history, memoir, fiction, and non-fiction to model their own writing and widen their knowledge beyond the work place and their customary reading. Inside are onsite experiments with fiction and non-fiction prose that show how people in the workplace respond and grow from contact with significant literature and culture that relates broadly to their work. As a Coaching Master’s student observes:

“I have not been a prolific reader. It has been a weakness and a gap.  I have probably read more in the last year [during the project course] than I have read in the past twenty years. So that says something. My ability to attend to what in a book has weight or relevance has markedly improved. In the past I banked largely on my opinions because not being a prolific reader, I had to. It can be incredibly empowering to see that there are so many assets outside of my own mind.  When something comes up now, I tend to weigh it. I am more specific about how I use words.”