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Miners, like many skilled blue-collar workers, are not traditional learners.
They have not generally been successful in classroom-type settings, preferring
to learn on the job in a hands-on environment. U.S. miners are required to have
annual safety training, but they rarely view this positively. In fact, it has
been called "safety jail" by many of them, who regard it as a time to get a
little extra sleep. The challenge then, was to find a way to develop effective
safety training for these people, particularly in view of the fact that their
work is among the most dangerous of all occupations.
Miners are born story tellers. They share "near-miss" stories, stories about
master miners they have known, and stories about how things used to be. These
stories not only pass along information about what will happen if a miner fails
to respect the mining environ-ment, they also instruct listeners in the culture
of mining and the values it embraces. Stories, it seems, are a way to get safety
messages to miners, especially inexperienced ones, and using older, wiser miners
in these stories is an obvious choice. This paper will discuss how the training
videos created to get safety messages to miners were developed, how "master
miners" and story lines were chosen, and how the resulting videos have been
received in the mining industry.
Author(s): | Cullen-ET |
Reference: | In: Proceedings, Risk and Safety Management in Industry, Logistics, Transport, and Military Service: New Solutions for the 21st Century. London: U.S. Navy, Office Of Naval Research, International Field Office, 2003 Mar; :1-4 |
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