Search results for "Working life"
showing 10 items of 100 documents
Agency, expertise and working life skills : Students’ conceptions of the generic competences required in the world of work
2021
Fundamental changes in working life highlight the demands on the co-operation between the educational sector and working life, that should contribute to students’ employability. In addition to discipline-specific expertise, the development of working life skills has received increasing attention when it comes to employment. Drawing on data from Finnish universities of applied sciences (n=5) and universities (n=3), this paper examines how students (n=380) value the generic competences needed in in the world of work. The study is based on European reforms of labour markets and educational structures. This paper adds to current discourses around employability by highlighting differences betwee…
The Multifaceted Nature of Agency and Professional Learning
2017
The present volume has aimed to cover a broad range of approaches to agency at work, exploring its relationship with professional learning and development. Thus, the chapters included in this book have discussed the role of agency in learning and development, considering a variety of working life contexts and applying both conceptual and empirical perspectives. This final chapter provides an overview of both the conceptual approaches and the empirical implementations. We see the perspectives as complementary. From the content of the book, we discern the phenomena as falling on two main dimensions, clustering at opposite ends of these dimensions. Thus, the following contrasts are evidenced: …
Between school and working life: Vocational teachers’ agency in boundary-crossing settings
2009
Abstract This paper investigates agency among vocational teachers with reference to boundary-crossing between school and working life. Our study utilised interviews with sixteen Finnish vocational teachers. Adopting a narrative analysis approach, we found that the teachers had a variety of forms of exercising agency in terms of decisions deliberately taken, and the discourse and actions following these decisions. These forms were: (i) restricted agency, (ii) extensive agency, (iii) multifaceted balancing agency, (iv) situationally diverse agency, and (v) relationally emergent agency. The exercising of agency was intertwined with the main resources and constraints emerging from the teachers’…
Building individual expertise in doctoral studies - the significance of everyday experiences and changing contexts
2015
High expectations for skiils are directed at doctors and doctoral students in the fast changing global time. Innovative soiutions to the genuine problems of society are expected of the new doctors. The expectations for skills that accumuIate through the evcryday experiences and difflrent contexts, and the requirements for experts in working life are experienced as partially conllicting by the doctoral students themselves. The expertise of doctoral students is individual — it forms in the long term in difkrent everyday contexts and is built from several individual elemenis. The experienccs and expertise of doctoral students forms diff’erentiy in diffirent contexts. The everyday experiences a…
The Acquisition of Professional Expertise—a challenge for educational research
1997
This article examines the acquisition of professional expertise from the educational viewpoint and outlines emerging approaches to research on expertise. The starting points are the need to reflect the nature and content of expertise in the changing world and the aim to understand the preconditions for integrating the viewpoints of working life and education in developing prerequisities for expertise in educational contexts. The section after the Introduction briefly reviews how expertise has been conceptualized in recent research. The next section deals with the role of higher education in developing expertise from the viewpoint of constructivist approaches in research on learning. Then cu…
Discursos de género de las mujeres emprendedoras por oportunidad. El caso español
2017
espanolSe presentan los resultados de una investigacion sobre emprendedoras en Espana. Se analizan los discursos de genero de las mujeres emprendedoras por oportunidad. Especificamente, se estudia la relacion entre el discurso de la conciliacion familiar, por un lado, y el de la liberacion de “responsabilidades domesticas/reproductivas”, por otro, entre las emprendedoras por oportunidad. La muestra cualitativa esta conformada por mujeres (y madres) profesionales autonomas/ empresarias del sector servicios, de elevado capital cultural. Se llevaron a cabo 40 entrevistas en profundidad y 11 grupos de discusion. Sobre la base del analisis de discurso, se elabora una tipologia de emprendedoras p…
Supporting students' pedagogical working life horizon in higher education
2013
In this article, we introduce a model of a pedagogical working life horizon. It encompasses questions posed by individual students concerning their future and incorporates the idea of a working life orientation to the pedagogical possibilities within education. Working life orientation consists of three elements: individual relationship, knowledge and skills and employability. In the model, we aim to outline how an orientation to working life might be included in higher education, providing a broad perspective on the various pedagogical possibilities. There are two key pedagogical elements supporting the implementation of the pedagogical working life horizons model: reflection and an inquir…
Using Activity Theory in Developing Instructial Tools for Project Management Studies
2014
Competence and skills of the project manager are significant to project success. The skills needed in project managersâ work cannot be learned only by reading the books or a lecture hall; one learns them by practice. Therefore, an important challenge for educational institutions is to develop pedagogical practices that allow students to participate in working life projects and to confront real-life problems. Project-based learning (PBL) offers a model that enables students to practice the skills and competences needed in working life projects by utilizing real-world work assignments in time-limited projects. Using PBL method alone does not necessarily guarantee learning result. In order t…
Higher education graduates' employment and the uncertainty of working life.
2012
The aim of this chapter is to examine how the uncertainty and instability of working life is reflected in Finnish polytechnic graduates’ employment. The present study investigates the fields of business and engineering by comparing two graduate cohorts. The societal context in which new graduates enter working life is that of an increasing precariousness in the labour market, which affects higher education graduates as well as the general population. Nowadays, a higher education qualification is not necessarily a guaranteed path to a high income and high social status as it used to be. Insecurity and uncertainty in society and working life can be considered as general features of late moder…
Introduction : Creativity and Learning as Sociocultural and Intertwined Phenomena
2021
AbstractThe importance of creativity and learning cannot be overestimated in education, in working life, and in society at large.