The integration of learning across different learning sites, recently referred to as “connectivity”, constitutes an important yet challenging task for each Vocational Education and Training (VET) system. Especially from scholars adopting a socio-cultural perspective (Griffiths & Guile, 2004; Stenström & Tynjälä, 2009; Tuomi-Gröhn, Engeström, 2003; Akkerman & Bakker, 2012) various conceptual models have been matured in the last decades concerning both the pedagogical issues of nature and the development of integrative vocational learning (see, for example, Tynjälä et al., 2006) as well as the institutional aspects of partnership and collaboration between learning contexts (see, for example, Guile & Griffith, 2001). However, although various integrative teaching and learning models have been developed in that perspective and many reform endeavours have been fostered, their implementation is made complex by several factors. In particular,  integrating the socio-cultural research on school-workplace “connectivity” (e.g. Griffiths & Guile, 2004, Tynälä, 2008) with the phenomengraphic educational studies (Säljö, 1979; Marton, 1988; Paakkari et al., 2011; Paloste et al., 2011) on individual conception, we consider the individual ways of representing the relationship between school-based and work-based learning as implicit filters that potentially influence experience and action of VET key actors. In this perspective the present study has been developed with the main intent to investigate how vocational school teachers, company trainers and apprentices conceptualise vocational learning across learning sites and to what extend their conceptions are aligned to a socio-cultural view of integration between school-based and work-based vocational learning. The study is part of a wider research project developed, in a socio-cultural theoretical framework, in collaboration with Swiss, German and Austrian researchers with the main aim to enrich understanding of vocational learning across school and workplace, and to define learning and teaching strategies and tools for improving it (see Aprea & Sappa, 2012; Sappa et al., 2012; ). Investigation of individual conceptions of vocational learning across learning sites constitutes the first steps for analyzing implications of those conceptions at the level of vocational teaching and learning.

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