Work-linked training programmes, referred to as training by alternance, combine inputs from vocational schools and work contexts (Veillard, 2009; Barbier, 2009; Billet, 2000).  Vocational training in the fields of health and social work in Switzerland, in particular, is carried out by alternating internships in the work place and teaching at universities of applied sciences. In addition to the prescriptions, collaboration between schools and the workplace takes a concrete form during tripartite contract discussions. These interviews take place at the beginning of each professional internship and involve a student in training, a teacher from the tertiary school and an experienced professional who acts as a practitioner-trainer, designed as a “praticien formateur” in the swiss context.

The vocational training system gives the practitioner-trainer a mentoring role for the duration of the training course. A practitioner-trainer has specific contractual guidelines, training time in addition to his or her work activity and a remuneration, sometimes symbolic, for his or her tutorial activity.  He also follows training through a certificate of advanced studies covering the fields of health and social work. Some recent research on the activity of these practitioner-trainers in the specific context of tertiary level education focuses on the issue of mentoring in practical training, particularly in the social field (Goldoni, 2019; Mercolli, 2018). Despite the diversity of their approaches, these works share common objectives which question in particular the inter-individual relationship between practitioner-trainer and student, but also the methods of cooperation in vocational programmes by alternance.

According to several studies, collaboration between school and workplace is often reduced to a juxtaposition between training offered at school and practical learning in the workplace (Maubant, 1994). The tripartite contract interviews provide an opportunity to question the notion of training by alternance and the concrete practices mobilised to implement it. During these meetings, the coherence and complementarity of the two training contexts must be negotiated (Veillard, 2009, p. 2).Our contribution aims to gain a better understanding of the actual conditions of mentoring carried out by tertiary school teachers and practitioner-trainers and to study the distribution of roles during tripartite contract interviews.  Generally speaking, our approach aims to contribute to the recognition of these actors who work at the crossroads of two interlocking logics well identified in the literature, referred to as hybrid (Rémery & Markaki, 2016), centred on the one hand on the production of services and on the other hand on the production of skills (Barbier, 1996). Within schools of social and health work, this issue is also well identified by practitioner-educators, teachers and students who use the metaphor of wearing a "double hat" to refer to this tension between work and training.

Our contribution focuses in particular on the work placement contract and the elaboration of work placement objectives as one of the "means taken by the school institution to intervene in these didactic systems that take place in another institution" (Veillard, 2009, p. 3). How are the document and the related prescriptions negotiated, adapted and transformed in the course of interactions? What are the similarities and differences between tripartite contract talks in the fields of health and social work? These two professional fields have very different contexts and vocational training periods differ in terms of their duration, frequency, learning content and organisational structures. Is it possible, despite these differences, to identify similarities between the training modalities in tripartite contract interviews, in particular, and training by alternance in general ?

In order to go beyond the discourse on mentoring practices, we adopt a perspective which allows us to analyse the work of the practitioner-trainer from the point of view of his or her actual activity. Numerous studies show that the various prescription discourses established to organise the activity prove to be insufficient both to predict and to account for the resources mobilised by individuals and groups involved in real work situations ( Clot, 1999). Indeed, the hazards of these situations - incidents, unforeseen events, emergencies - lead operators to implement in situ reasoning which allows the action to be carried out successfully but goes beyond the prescription, or even contradicts it. It has thus become commonplace to distinguish between the 'prescribed task' and the 'actual task' (Leplat, 1997). In our research, we will also take a particular interest in the "collective and language dimension of work" (Boutet, 2001). In this context, the focus on the analysis of interactions is proving to be a fruitful approach to the study of the activity of vocational trainers. The study of interactions developed from the work of Goffman who, breaking with the traditional perspective of sociology, was interested not in "the structure of social life, but [in] the structure of individual experience of social life" (1991, p. 22). Subsequently, researchers in the currents of ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967) and conversational analysis (Sacks, 1992; Goodwin, 2000; Schegloff, 2007; Filliettaz, 2018) developed methods for the systematic analysis of the way in which participants in interactions contribute to making manifest, but also to producing, an organised and interpretable social order. Within this body of research, some work focuses more specifically on workplace contexts, and on the way in which the collective dimension of work is accomplished through participation in interactions (Drew & Heritage, 1992; Heath & Luff, 1994), including in areas of interest to us, those in social (Stroumza et al., 2013) and health work (Cosnier et al., 1993; Filliettaz & Durand, 2016). In order to focus on the challenges of training by alternance, this contribution will propose an analysis of the interactions taking place in six different tripartite contract interviews, carried out in the fields of health and social work.These are authentic training situations involving a student, a tertiary school teacher and a practitioner-trainer and taking place on the site of the work placement.

A systematic analysis of the interactions between students, tertiary school teachers and practitioner-trainers during tripartite contract interviews makes it possible to study the interactional resources mobilised, the roles assumed by the various participants and the epistemic positions adopted. By studying interactional resources and the interweaving of verbal language with gestures, body positioning, facial expressions and the use of materials, it is possible to look at the sequential order of discussions. In particular, patterns of participation and the roles of speaker and listener can be explored by investigating who is speaking to whom. In this way, the analysis focuses on the discursive roles adopted which reflect the different institutional anchors of the participants, actualising or transforming them. During these interviews, a wide range of knowledge is made mutually visible. In a training system by alternance, theoretical contributions, work experiences, the contractual modalities of the tripartite interview or knowledge of the student's training trajectory constitute multiple epistemic territories (Drew & Heritage, 1992). Between training and work issues, it is interesting to explore how the different actors adopt different epistemic positions. At certain times, different types of knowledge are juxtaposed by one or more players. At other times, this knowledge can be crossed, negotiated and adjusted. The elaboration of vocational objectives can be a means of identifying common and reciprocally shared goals between school, workplace and students.The analysis looks at the conditions that favour or hinder the construction of common objectives, carried by various actors with different social roles. More generally, a detailed analysis of the interactions aims to reflect on the conditions favouring vocational training by alternance and the circulation of multiple types of knowledge.Taking into account the specific contexts of social work and health professions, this contribution questions the existing systems through a focus on the details of collaborative practices.

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