Abstract
Next to highly regarded varieties of apprenticeship-based vocational education there are, in many countries, forms of mainly school-based VET (vocational education and training) that suffer from a clash of expectations between schools and workplaces as sites of vocational education. School-based VET is viewed as of lesser value compared to work experience or workplace based training and one reason for such negative views on mainly school-based VET is the lack of authentic work-related experiences in schools. In what follows I will, based on a case study of a social development project, argue that there is a potential hybrid form of school-based VET that could deal with this issue of authenticity by working around the usual binary of school and workplace. This has resulted in some suggestions for how to reconsider vocational education curricula in schools, aiming at authentic learning environments through the systematic enactment of social and cultural developmental projects. The result is not only a way of dealing with the problems that face school-based VET but an argument for how to take advantage of schools being predominantly cultural institutions.
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Notes
The so-called dual system with four days of workplace based training and one day of school. In the following I will be using the term more generically to refer to any training system where the amount of workplace based learning is greater than the time spent in school.
Eurythmy (a movement art) and Waldorf (Steiner) education both spring from the work of Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925).
The argument is that students experience schooling institutions as inauthentic on account of curricula that generally focus on doing things that matter only within the institution itself. This is not the place to prove or disprove such an assumption (to say nothing of the many different explanations that might be offered) since it is not a central element of what I believe the case can tell us. This is not to say that it is irrelevant, I find it very important, but I am not sure that there is evidence to support what such a curriculum could achieve in this respect on the grounds that there are hardly any such curricula that have been systematically examined from such a perspective (a single case can’t tell us much about it on a general level but for practitioners already struggling with the issue it offers a source of alternative thinking).
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Tyson, R. When Expectations Clash: Vocational Education at the Intersection of Workplace and School. Interchange 47, 51–63 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-015-9271-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-015-9271-5