The Burlesque and other tropes: Andragogical content knowledge in the 2014 OSHA Oil and Gas Safety and Health Conference

This investigation focuses on what Roessger (2012) has described as the kinds of andragogy held in “hotel rooms across the country,” as foundational ways of educating industrial workers about ergonomics (p. 377). While Roessger (2012) has focused on motor skills courses and how they are delivered by industry experts to trainers, this investigation focuses on Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) courses held in an international hotel conference setting. These courses deliver best practices for safety trainers who then use this content to shape their training practice with skilled workers in oil and gas companies.

The investigation is taken under Knowles, Holton, and Swanson’s (2005) andragogy as a theoretical framework forwarded into the present through empirical investigations with questions deriving from Shulman (2004b) assisting the study. This investigation recognizes andragogy as the politically–established educative framework endorsed by OSHA. Safety training in the field of oil and gas has continually attempted to refine itself due to high accountability standards in the United States and beyond, in addition to the high costs of life and environmental damage resulting from failed safety barriers. Because of these combined forces, safety trainers find themselves constantly pulling from a variety of sources to update their andragogical content knowledge (ACK). The term ACK is purposely defined here, and is used to interpret a trainer’s conception of how best to train learners; as the term is interpretive, it reflects a number of alternating frameworks. Chalofsky, Rocco, and Morris (2014) have observed that training is an interdisciplinary undertaking, borrowing from curriculum theory, training practices, and applied psychology, among other disciplines. This is borne out in the literature, sometimes in competition with or in addition to Knowles et al.’s (2005) andragogy in the situated present.

After a thorough review of the literature, it is determined that an examination of professional development safety training sessions in the field of oil and gas is a novel investigation, but one that is much needed. This is because a variety of literatures in different fields currently accumulate in the name of safety training and andragogy, but also in the name of statistical accountability, assistive technologies and intelligences that impact human safety measures, and finally wisdom articles devoid of American Psychological Association (APA) guidelines for manuscripts, but which make up a considerable and important portion of knowledge on safety training in the field of oil and gas. These literatures reflect-to a greater or lesser degree-the political obligations of OSHA that training be conducted within andragogical frameworks.

It has been unknown whether training sessions in an international OSHA sponsored safety conference adhere to andragogical constructs. The investigator sought to answer questions related to that concern. To that end the investigator used Schreier’s (2012) qualitative content analysis (QCA) as a method of investigation. Coding frames were established, texts were unitized, segmented and coded against the coding frame, and inter–rater reliability and internal reliability measures were calculated using percentages and qualitative consensus to determine the internal and external validity of the codes. The analysis section examines the results in light of the literature and co-existing frameworks such as pedagogy, applied psychology, anthropology, wisdom articles and so forth.

The findings include that many practitioners used lectures, embedded narratives, and maxims as ACK to lead their professional development sessions. It was discovered that social forces particular to the oil and gas field perpetuated propositional support for ACK that held few to no guarantors of reliability and validity guiding practice assumptions. As a consequence, ACK in the field is based on tentative, albeit pragmatic understandings of ACK with appeals to weakly-founded knowledge.

Reform is recommended where an adapted Vail Model is used to guarantee consumption of relevant research literature and opportunities to develop practice (Craig, 1992).