The pandemic and its economic effects may accelerate the outflow of male and female workers, due to a possible reduction in production and cessation of activities in various sectors, including that of specialized craftsmanship, a fundamental branch of Made in Italy and Italian creativity at the international level (Micelli, 2011). Among those who will lose their jobs, there will be people who, at the threshold of retirement, will leave the world of work permanently, taking with them the knowledge developed in their professional lives. That knowledge is at risk of being lost if it is not transmitted to other generations (Migliore, 2021) and to the vocational education system. 

The paper represents the theoretical preparatory work of an intervention research aimed at extending the research work conducted in the Brenta footwear production district, in the Italian North East, based on the “Professional  Didactics” (PD) approach (Pacquola, 2017; Magnoler & Pacquola, 2016; Pastré, 2010), in other Made in Italy territories and workplaces, combining this approach with the perspective of the Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Migliore, 2015). The objective is to draw attention to the relevance of the issue of collective and material knowledge diffused in workplaces and not formalized in the education system, which risks being dispersed if not analyzed and supported in the sharing and formation of knowledge of younger generations and novices. 

The implicit assumption of the paper is that collective activities, and ultimately society as a whole, that value the knowledge accumulated by previous generations and  transpose it in a pedagogical way to 'transmit' it to new and other generations (Migliore, 2021), inside and outside the workplace, are advantaged over activities and societies that rely predominantly on knowledge formalized in the educational system (Guile, 2003). 

In order to argue the relevance, in particular for the Made in Italy sector, of the knowledge developed by the generations about to leave the world of work, the paper discusses the relationship between formal learning at school and workplace learning. The education system elaborates and provides knowledge that is primarily relevant to the society as a whole, identified by representatives of public power and specialists of the disciplines in such a way that it can be considered as legitimate for the disciplines in question.  Moreover, in recent decades, even the schools that are most devoted to professionalization have become in part 'licealized', focusing on abstract knowledge, on transversality and connection between disciplines, but disinvesting in laboratory activities. On the contrary, continuing training and workplace learning derive their legitimacy from the evaluation of relevance and pertinence expressed by the professional community to which they belong (Pacquola, 2017) and by the corporate culture specifically.

The paper discusses how to improve, in the Italian context, the relationship between the school system and the world of work, with reference to the professional tertiary education (ITS, “Istituti Tecnici Superiori”) in the case of the Made in Italy sector. In this case the link is secured by the fact that half of teachers are professionals in the production sector of reference for the ITS. However the paper questions whether this is enough, knowing that the elicitation of tacit knowledge needs a specific analysis, as argued by the “Professional Didactic”(PD), a French approach to this issue. Moreover job tasks and actions are part of collective activities, and other theoretical approaches, such the Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), draw the attention on the fact that it is not enough knowing “how to do” to carrying out tasks and actions successfully, for motives to act are linked to the object of collective activity.

The paper puts forward the combination of those two mentioned theoretical approaches, which share the reference to the Leontiev’s works. From one side, the PD approach provides a framework to elicit tacit knowledge from the work practices to improve the educational system. From the other one, CHAT offers at the same time a perspective of what kind of organizational development is needed, so that the elicited knowledge could find the most appropriate context to be used to mediate the actions in that collective activity. CHAT allows highlighting the elements of tension within activity systems to expand the analysis of work situations by including a collective, cultural, and historical dimension and contradictions (Engeström, 1987). In addition, CHAT offers a perspective to unify the analysis of subjectivity and work situations through the concept of the object of activity (Stetsenko, 2005), the driving element of actions, which can be identified in the production strategies of companies (Migliore, 2015). Subjectivity, seen as a hierarchy of motives, is a crucial factor of influence in the paths of elicitation of tacit knowledge and training. Alongside this contribution, PD shows how the subject is at the same time an activity producer and constructor of knowledge (Rabardel, 2005): s/he constructs "pragmatic concepts", forms of knowledge that are operational and functional to action, and for the collective, in the form of the social and cultural dimension derived from the different professional communities (Pastré, 2011): making explicit, verbalizing action produces knowledge and its possibility of being transposed in a pedagogical and didactical way and transferred to work, professional (Pacquola 2017, 167) and training environments (Magnoler, Pacquola, & Tescaro, 2014). CHAT and PD can integrate their mutual findings and perspectives: the first offer the possibility of taking into account the collective activity and the subjectivities, as well as the contradictions and tensions, in providing the indications about what organizational context is necessary for the elicited knowledge to be adopted to mediate the actions and operations in the production departments; the second, offers the ergonomic, pedagogical and psychological theoretical and methodological base to analyse work activity and the cognitive development of worker to design training curricula.

The paper concludes that experimental policies are needed, through intervention research, for the elicitation of the tacit knowledge in the workplaces. This is useful to update the content of the learning activities in the VET system, especially the one linked to the Made in Italy, whose workforce is ageing and approaching retirement or redundancy in the economic crisis unleashed by the pandemic of Covid-19. The combination of CHAT with PD allows to draw the attention to the needed organizational context to provide motives to use the learned knowledge to mediate the required actions in the collective activity. The approach put forward highlights that the relationship between schools and workplaces is about changes on both sides: for schools, with an enrichment coming from the knowledge elicited from the working practices, and for firms, with a discourse on organizational changes to support the use of the elicited knowledge, in case the analysis shows tensions in the emersion of the “pragmatic concepts”. The next step is going to be the choice of the production district to analyze, the design of the intervention research, the raise of funds.

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