Contribution
Description: The common theoretical framework of this round table is "vocational didactics" The aim is to understand "the nature of expertise" (Chi, Glaser, Farr, 1988), and the role of experience in expertise.
It refers to the model of " scheme " (Piaget, Vergnaud 1996, Pastré 2002) in order to study the skills used and developed at work or at school, through practice. The main hypotheses are:
action is organized at the conceptual level
people build specific knowledge by doing specific activities, (including "pragmatic concepts" and specific know-how),
this knowledge is different from formal knowledge.
The point is to study how different kinds of formal knowledge (academic, social knowledge, prescription etc.) are transformed (reorganized and adapted) by work activities, becoming "pragmatic knowledge". This "pragmatization" process is understood as a part of culture (Vygotski 1934, Bruner 1990).
Attempts to improve vocational training are being carried out through understanding these processes.
Methodology:
This round table will present the results from four different pieces of research into vocational didactics. All use different methods in terms of their field and the questions posed, but they are based on the same research instruments: task and prescription analysis, instrumented field observation and interviews.
Conclusions: Each speaker will present the specific results of his/her own research in line with the knowledge transformation process:
Claire Tourmen will illustrate how the concept of "indicator", a classical concept in evaluation, is defined in the literature and how it is transformed by professional evaluators through work activity. It becomes a "pragmatic" concept. Indeed, professional evaluators add some properties (such as "feasibility") to its formal properties. These results are based upon work observations in programme evaluation activities (France).
She will then draw lessons for professional training in evaluation.
Charles-Antoine Gagneur will show how conceptualisation can change within a working group, as a result of the collective or individual work situations experienced by its members. The point is to understand how they build and reorganise a schemes system as a situated operational knowledge transformed by collective learning. For this purpose, the verbal interactions and activities within a group of co-operative vine growers during the grape harvest will be analysed. Interactions have been recorded, transcribed, coded and analysed. Crossed ergonomic and psychological methods will be used to understand how words realise and transform thought through speech (Vygotski, 1934/1997), especially while working.
Otilia Holgado will examine people enrolled on vocational training courses learning to use a land management tool: Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Each person has a certain image of the training object, according to the use that they intend to make of it. The trainer has his own representation of GIS and a prior idea of the trainees' representations of the same object. Analysing video recordings of a whole training session, she notices how everyone is continually transforming his/her former representation: trainees by exploring the instrument and by making links with learned concepts, and the trainer listening to new potential work-situations presented by the trainees.
Borhène Chakroun will present the first results of a research project on the activity of APEL candidates. In this work, it is mainly the French case, through the system introduced by the new law on social modernisation published in 2002, that will be developed and analysed. It focuses on the understanding of a concept that is central to the APEL process, namely, "self-reflection". The study aims to identify schemes in APEL candidates' activities that require reflection. It will be carried-out through a thematic analysis of problem-solving situations developed by the APEL candidates in their portfolios "Dossier VAE".
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