University-Corporate Partnerships for Designing Workplace Curriculum: Alternance Training Course in Tertiary Education

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.