Abstract:

The universities and the curriculum are asked to fulfill numerous demands. It should introduce students into the field they are studying and critically engage with the concerns, discussions, and knowledge of the discipline as well as introduce students to ways of doing (skills and practices) and ways of being (behaviors, values, ethics) and facilities for students to acquire and master these over time [1]. At the same time, many researchers highlight a gap between education and work (e.g.[2-4]). In this article, we propose a framework for addressing work-integrated learning (WIL) in a higher education context. We build on the work of Shulman’s Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) [5] and extend it to address teachers' effort of incorporating WIL into their teaching. This calls for a complex knowledge base that we named WIL-PACK (Work-Integrated Learning Pedagogical and Content Knowledge). By WIL-PACK we try to capture fundamental qualities of teacher knowledge required for addressing WIL in teaching and offer a tool to highlight the pedagogical and content aspects of WIL. The work is a result of many years of work in higher education where we discussed, analyzed, and practiced issues of learning and teaching in general and work-integrated learning in particular. The contribution of the paper includes theorization about WIL in a higher education context, and future directions for research are discussed.

References:
[1] L. Quinn and J.-A. Vorster, "Why the focus on “curriculum”? Why now?," in Re-imagining curriculum: Spaces for disruption, L. Quinn Ed., 2019, p. 1.
[2] J. M. Allen, "How front-end loading contributes to creating and sustaining the theory-practice gap in higher education programs," Asia Pacific Education Review, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 289-299, 2011.
[3] W.-M. Roth, T. Mavin, and S. Dekker, "The theory-practice gap: Epistemology, identity, and education," Education+ Training, 2014.
[4] S. Gravett, E. Henning, and R. Eiselen, "New teachers look back on their university education: Prepared for teaching, but not for life in the classroom," Education as Change, vol. 15, no. sup1, pp. S123-S142, 2011.
[5] L. S. Shulman, "Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching," Educational researcher, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 4-14, 1986.

Keywords:

WIL-PACK, Work-Integrated Learning (WIL), Higher Education, Pedagogical Content Knowledge.