Abstract
Since the end of the 1980s, ‘alternance’ training courses, consisting in combining learning phases in an educational institution with some others in the workplace, developed quite well in France, especially at tertiary level. An important pedagogical question about this type of course is about how to organise the workplace learning phases in order to guarantee good learning opportunities, in line with the training aims. A possibility is to develop a pedagogical partnership between the training and working institutions in order to take into account both the workplace learning specificities and the pedagogical aims and organisation of the training course. In this chapter, this issue is addressed within the specificities of the French educative context, where the VET system is historically mainly based on school teaching situations, and thus, several historical choices and events can explain why the workplace learning culture is still weak compared to other countries like Germany, Switzerland or Australia. However, several francophone and anglophone authors have proposed some concepts that can help think and organise such a pedagogical collaboration between scholar (or academic) and productive institutions. Based on these concepts, two case studies in a master course (production management) illustrate different aspects and issues of a concrete pedagogical collaboration between a tertiary institution and two of its professional partners in order to organise workplace learning. The last part of the chapter is dedicated to a more general discussion, from the findings of the 2 case studies and other additional studies, on the ways of improvement of this type a pedagogical collaboration.
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- 1.
Alternance training in France can be compared to other forms of work-integrated learning that developed in several countries like apprenticeship, cooperative education, sandwich courses, etc.
- 2.
The first ‘Grandes Ecoles d’Ingénieurs’ were created in the military domain in the sixteenth century. Then some civil schools were opened during the eighteenth century. These institutions were formed separately from the universities which remained very traditional in terms of academic knowledge. For the state, this was a way to circumventing the corporatist resistances of academics to develop more vocational courses.
- 3.
Alternation can be organised on a weekly rhythm (3 of 4 days in the workplace and 1 or 2 days in the vocational school or at the university) or on a monthly base (15 days/15 days or 1 month/1 month).
- 4.
Dual training courses in Germany, Austria or Switzerland can be considered as some associative forms of alternance training. As a matter of fact, some authors in these countries suggest to go further than a clear division of the training labour between schools and companies, to solve transfer and knowledge integration difficulties for apprentices (Deitmer and Heinemann 2009).
- 5.
Some francophone researchers consider that a more integrated form of alternance training is not really possible. For them, the real interest of this type of pedagogic organisation is to confront the learners to tensions and contradictions between different types of social practices, roles and learning forms. In their mind, the trainers have to concentrate on a meta-reflexive support of the learners to help them to identify these tensions and contradictions in order to use them as personal and vocational development opportunities (Charlot 1995; Kaddouri 2012; Lerbet-Séréni and Violet 1999).
- 6.
Comparatively, in the traditional ‘Grandes écoles d’ingénieurs’ in France, students are only recruited on the basis of their academic merit. Before entering these graduate schools (the most famous are ‘Polytechnique’, ‘X-Mines’, ‘Ecole des Mines’, ‘Supelec’, etc.), students must follow a preparatory cycle (‘Classes préparatoires’) mainly based on scientific and mathematics courses.
- 7.
Basically, the collaborative design process has consisted in the main three steps: (1) building a typology of tasks from an analysis of several apprenticeship booklets and the expertise of several experienced school tutors, (2) defining what could be the a priori conceptual and methodological resources for each of these types of tasks, (3) specifying the disciplinary courses where these concepts and methods have been (or will be) studied. This study is based on new sociocultural perspectives on transfer of learning, from researchers like Tuomi-Gröhn et al. (2003) or Beach (2003). We tried to design the new tool as a boundary object which can be used in some collective boundary-crossing activities between the two tutors and the apprentice.
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Veillard, L. (2015). University-Corporate Partnerships for Designing Workplace Curriculum: Alternance Training Course in Tertiary Education. In: Filliettaz, L., Billett, S. (eds) Francophone Perspectives of Learning Through Work. Professional and Practice-based Learning, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18669-6_13
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