Vocational Learning: Contributions of Workplaces and Educational Institutions

Abstract

This chapter identifies contributions to the learning of vocational practice from experiences in both educational institutions and workplaces. It proposes that each of these setting potentially provides particular contributions to learning vocational practice. When each set of contributions is usefully exercised and integrated they stand to purposefully support rich and robust vocational learning. Yet, this integration is not possible in all circumstances. Therefore, it is important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the contributions from both kinds of settings, and how best their learning potential can be maximised and their weaknesses limited. This paper is structured to achieve these purposes. Consideration is given first to the kinds of knowledge required to be learnt for effective vocational practice. Next, the contributions to learning vocational practices from both workplace and educational settings are discussed through a consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of their respective contributions. Consideration is then given to how best to integrate the contributions of both environments to provide optimum learning experiences.