Work Experience and VET: Insights from the Connective Typology and the Recontextualisation Model

Abstract

The chapter compares two models of work experience – connective typology of work experience and recontextualisation of knowledge model – and uses the term work experience to refer to the way that young people enrolled in both school- and apprenticeship-based VET learn to relate their experience of education as represented by the acquisition of domain knowledge and their experience of work as represented by occupational values, skill and knowledge to one another. The common link between the two models is that they accept the existence of a mediated relationship between education and work. The former explores this relationship from a boundary-crossing perspective, focusing on learners’ movement between education and work, and identifies the outcomes associated with different models of work experience. The latter focuses on the interplay between the manifestation of knowledge in the contexts of education and work and learners’ movement within and between both contexts. It differs from the connective typology, because it takes account of the mediated nature of the contexts of education and work as well as the process of learning through work experience. The chapter concludes by using the concept of recontextualisation to highlight how digital and mobile technologies could serve as resources to facilitate learning through work experience in school- and apprenticeship-based VET.