Search results for "vocation"
showing 10 items of 446 documents
Factors promoting vocational students’ learning at work: study on student experiences
2012
In order to promote effective pedagogical practices for students’ work-based learning, we need to understand better how students’ learning at work can be supported. This paper examines the factors explaining students’ workplace learning (WPL) outcomes, addressing three aspects: (1) student-related individual factors, (2) social and structural features of workplace and (3) educational practices related to the organising of WPL periods. The data were collected from final-year vocational students (N = 3106, n = 1603) via an Internet questionnaire. The findings from regression analysis showed that students’ WPL outcomes cannot be seen merely as consequences of student-related individual factors…
Building workplace learning with polytechnics in Finland: multiple goals and cooperation in enhancing connectivity
2013
This article examines the goals of employers when they organise work placements for students. It explores how far, in cooperating with polytechnics, employers adhere to a connective model of students’ work experiences within their organisations. The paper makes use of a quantitative study based on employers’ responses to a questionnaire (n = 269). The study identifies four groups of employers: employers who emphasise the employment perspective, cooperative developers, employers with multiple goals and employers concerned with the development of their own work. The differences in employer profiles are discussed with respect to development of curricula and the higher education system. The pap…
Vocational teachers in the face of a major educational reform: individual ways of negotiating professional identities
2009
This paper examines how vocational teachers negotiate their professional identity in the context of a major externally imposed curriculum reform. The focus is on the teachers’ orientations towards the reform in its initial stage. Sixteen Finnish vocational teachers were interviewed using open‐ended narrative interviews. The data were analysed in accordance with data‐driven qualitative analysis methods. From the teachers’ accounts, three main orientations towards the reform were identified: a resistant orientation, an inconsistent orientation and an approving orientation, each based on the teachers’ individual self‐positioning towards the reform. Each orientation is illustrated using two nar…
Integrating theory and practice? Employees’ and students’ experiences of learning at work
2003
The integration of theory and practice has been recognised as one of the key questions in the development of professional expertise and vocational competence. In this study the question of how theory and practice meet each other during professional development was approached from the point of view of two different groups of learners: employees with varying length of work experience and university students taking a working life project course. Altogether 18 employees and 51 students were interviewed, after which transcribed interviews were qualitatively categorised. The opinions expressed by the informants indicate that work‐based learning is not a unified phenomenon but varies in different …
The Italian Version of the Career Factors Inventory
2015
This study attempted to examine the validity of the Italian version of the Career Factors Inventory (CFI), a psychometric tool widely used in the assessment of cognitive and personal–emotional dimensions of career indecision, among a sample of 2,060 Italian students attending high school and university. Recurring to both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, the original four-factor structure was confirmed and returned, in line with the literature, satisfactory reliability indices; moreover, CFI subscales showed intercorrelations consistent with previous studies, albeit lower in some cases. Subsequently, convergent validity between the four CFI subscales and other scales via zero-o…
Desigualdades de género y formación profesional : elecciones, abandono y expectativas.
2020
Este artículo tiene como objetivo analizar las desigualdades de género con relación a las motivaciones escolares a la hora de escoger un ciclo formativo de grado medio, las motivaciones del abandono femenino y las expectativas para después de la formación profesional. Se parte del contexto sociohistórico e institucional de la formación profesional en España, del marco teórico de las elecciones escolares y de la perspectiva de género en la segregación laboral y educativa. A través del análisis del discurso de 12 jóvenes entrevistadas, se ha podido comprobar la persistencia de las desigualdades de género en la formación profesional, en las elecciones y las motivaciones y también se han encont…
Single trajectory characterization via machine learning
2020
[EN] In order to study transport in complex environments, it is extremely important to determine the physical mechanism underlying diffusion and precisely characterize its nature and parameters. Often, this task is strongly impacted by data consisting of trajectories with short length (either due to brief recordings or previous trajectory segmentation) and limited localization precision. In this paper, we propose a machine learning method based on a random forest architecture, which is able to associate single trajectories to the underlying diffusion mechanism with high accuracy. In addition, the algorithm is able to determine the anomalous exponent with a small error, thus inherently provi…
Professional Role Requirements and Universal Morals
2013
The enduring commercial and financial crisis that originated in the US and flashed over to Europe in 2008 raises a lot of serious questions not only about economic interrelations between nations but also on the behavior of political actors and financial managers in banks, hedge funds and other comparable enterprises.
The power dance in the research interview: manifesting power and powerlessness
2012
We examine the power that is manifested between interviewers and interviewees in research interviews. Our empirical examples are drawn from interviews conducted with: (a) a vocational teacher; and (b) a senior researcher. We analysed the manifestations of power both in the course of the interviews and across interviews. We found that power is exercised and distributed diversely and situationally between the interview participants (interviewer and interviewee) during the interviews. It appeared that in a given interview, the interplay between individual backgrounds and the interview setting was connected to the activities through which power was manifested, and that these activities played …
Training for Work at the Margins of the Projective City
2020
Drawing upon the work by Boltanski and Chiapello and Boltanski and Thevenot, the training provision that is offered in Spain both to vulnerable youth and to socially excluded adults is analyzed here. It is too often the case that trainers in those programs work under temporary contracts. The reason for this is that the institutions they work for, often Non Governmental Organizations but also municipalities or trade unions, work under the so called projective city—i.e., a connectionist rationale. This fact has an impact upon the notion of work that these trainers portray to trainees attending their vocational training schemes, on-the-job training as well as guidance support. It is also the c…