At the VETNET assembly in Istanbul the issue of interdisciplinarity has been discussed as a topic needing closer consideration. The proposer has been nominated as responsible person for this issue in the VETNET board. The proposed symposium is a first step in this direction.

Instead of discussing ‘interdisciplinary’ generally as an abstract topic, a topic of interest in the field of VET has been selected, in order to explore how different disciplinary perspectives might deal with this topic. The concept of ‘collective skills formation’ in the version of Busemeyer/Trampusch seems an interesting selection. First, the concept deals with apprenticeship (‘Dual System’) as an important sector of VET, underlined by contributions at ECER’13, and which is currently pushed forward politically. Second, this VET sector/practice is highly complex, to some degree disputed, substantially under-researched and poorly understood. Third, the concept of collective skills formation provides an understanding from the perspective of Political Economy that is at the same time situated outside the disciplines primarily dealing with learning and teaching, and that is in itself interdisciplinary, combining Economics and Political Science perspectives. Fourth, the concept deals in a rather critical fashion with governance topics, which are in itself an important contemporary topic in VET and education research.

The perspective from outside the core pedagogical/educational disciplines might lead to tensions/critique pointing to a rather abstract institutional view and/or the omission/neglect of core problems in education and training processes. The Political Economic perspective calls for attention as to how the involved disciplines might look at the issues, and whether their view might be at stake or compatible to the concept. Here not only different theoretical paradigms but also the empirical basis of statements might be of interest.

The concept of collective skills formation has been applied to a set of countries with strong apprenticeship (Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Netherlands), and the analysis has been strongly confined to the apprenticeship field. The question arises, how this concept might apply to other parts of VET frameworks in additional countries, in particular school based public VET that exists in parallel to the ‘collective formation’.

The symposium deals with these questions, combining the countries’ perspectives with the disciplinary perspectives. Two contributions (Wolter, Michelsen) take a disciplinary perspective, and look at the political economic concept from the separate perspectives of Economics and Political Science. The latter one expands the view from the core apprenticeship countries to the Nordic region, where apprenticeship exists in different combinations with school based VET. The other two contributions challenge the concept of collective skills formation from a different view on apprenticeship focused on the learning model (Fuller/Unwin, United Kingdom), resp. from a different assessment of the national problem situation (Jorgensen, DK).

We think that the symposium cannot ‘solve’ the problems involved in interdisciplinarity, however, that it will provide a rich basis for a first more in-depth discussion and awareness of the topic and the problems involved.

Reference: Busemeyer, M.R.; Trampusch, C. eds. (2011), The Political Economy of Collective Skill Formation, Oxford.