6533b7dbfe1ef96bd126fee1

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Work Experience Constructed by Polytechnics, Students, and Working Life: Spaces for Connectivity and Transformation

subject

description

This chapter discusses the role of the connective model of work experience (Griffiths & Guile, 2004; Guile & Griffiths, 2001) in the context of higher education and identifies some of the limits and challenges that may be encountered in seeking to implement connectivity in practice. The question considered here is that of organising placements through cooperation between working life and the polytechnics1 in Finland. The process of introducing connective links appears to be somewhat contradictory but nevertheless negotiable, with plenty of room for improvement. As one teacher in social and health care put it: “Our students, when they go on a placement and they have been given the task, like, to figure out the central processes of the workplace, those main rehabilitation processes, this is a task the existing employees would not be able to do. That’s what it is . . .And our students will have to, they won’t get any guidance at the workplace, they will have to invent and think and that is what it is all about. And when we ask the employees, they say that students’ competences don’t meet their requirements, and our students are thinking about completely different things. They are thinking holistically about processes and actions at the workplace and then they are expected to open doors, and serve food and that sort of mechanical work.” This chapter seeks to scrutinise the contradictions in the relationship between polytechnics and working life. The question to be examined here is: How does