Abstract:

Collaboration between higher education and working life has probably never been as highlighted as it is today. From perspective of education, the core of the collaboration is in learning and developing students’ working-life competences. Work-based learning has widened this perspective from students’ learning to all collaboration participants’ learning, including teachers and working-life partners. The benefits of work-based learning relate to unifying the theoretical knowledge with practice, deep learning and developing working-life competences. Still, there are also some challenges concerning this kind of learning, which often happens in multidisciplinary networks.

This presentation is based on my dissertation study (in press) and to its third research question which cast light on the functionality of the work-based pedagogy model and its pedagogical elements seen from the perspective of the key participants. The research question was formulated: How did the cultural event test and challenge the work-based pedagogical model of vocational higher education and enhance participants’ learning? The dissertation study tested one example of work-based pedagogic model in developing process of cultural event. The event was emerged from strategic partnership between University of Applied Sciences and city theatre, and it was developed further in wide regional network.

The methodological and ontological framework for an abductive analysis was cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), particularly the concepts of the object of activity, contradictions, dimensions of expansion and a zone of expansion. The data consisted students’, teachers’ and working-life partners’ interviews. Interviews were semi-structured or open and ad hoc. Audio-recordings were transcribed verbatim. It was analyzed how the contact lessons and guiding clinics mediated students’ developmental assignments and how the model oriented the participants towards the shared object of the cultural event. As a result, a comparison of two development assignments demonstrated that even a sophisticated implementation of a work-based pedagogic (WBP) model cannot be but partial, if the working-life assignment lacks a solid knowledge orientation basis that connects between the theory and practice. In addition, collective implementation of the WBP model formed a “zone of expansion” that beyond the participant-specific features of expansive learning demonstrated the need for the expansion of pedagogical vision, pedagogical mediation, relational expertise and crossdisciplinarity.

Keywords:

Cultural-historical activity theory, contradictions, expansive learning, higher education, object of activity, work-based learning.