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Making Sense of Education provides a contemporary introduction to the key issues in educational philosophy and theory. Exploring major past and present conceptions of education, teaching and learning, this book makes philosophy of education relevant to the professional practice of teachers and student teachers, as well of interest to those studying education as an academic subject. The book is divided into three parts: • education, teaching and professional practice: issues concerning education, the role of the teacher, the relationship of educational theory to practice and the wider moral dimensions of pedagogy • learning, knowledge and curriculum: issues concerning behaviourist and cognitive theories of learning, knowledge and meaning, curriculum aims and content and evaluation and assessment • schooling, society and culture: issues of the wider social and political context of education concerning liberalism and communitarianism, justice and equality, differentiation, authority and discipline. This timely and up-to-date introduction assists all those studying and/or working in education to appreciate the main philosophical sources of and influences on present day thinking about education, teaching and learning. © 2003 David Carr. All rights reserved.

The following outline of a workplace landscape of learning is one way of charting some of the learning resources outside of the current educational system. Whereas learning in schools has been extensively researched, workplace learning has enjoyed less attention from educational researchers. The purpose of this chapter is to describe key learning resources at the workplace. Vocational students tend to prefer learning their profession in the workplace rather than at school. In the dual system of vocational training in the Scandinavian countries, students spend part of their four years of training in a workplace and part of it at school. In a Danish questionnaire survey, the majority expressed a preference to learning their profession in a workplace rather than at school (Nielsen, 2003a). Similarly, a Norwegian study found that more than 90% expressed how they preferred the workplace to the school (Mjelde, 2003). © Elena Antonacopoulou, Peter Jarvis, Vibeke Andersen, Bente Elkjaer and Steen Høyrup 2005 and contributors 2005.

It is commonly argued that young people’s transitions from school to work in the UK have changed radically since the middle 1970s, with the result that the experience of cohorts today differs markedly from the generations growing up in the 1950s and 1960s (see for example, Nagel and Wallace, 1997; Roberts, 1984; Bynner, 1991; Furlong and Cartmel, 1997; and for a moderating view Vickerstaff, 2003). In particular, the fact that most young people in the earlier period left education after the compulsory school leaving age (15 and then 16 in 1972), and went into a labour market where jobs were relatively plentiful, contrasts sharply with the 86 per cent of 16-year-olds who now stay on in some form of education or training (DfES, 2002). It has been an aim of successive governments to encourage the numbers staying on in education and training after the school leaving age, and this has been combined since the late 1970s with the argument that compulsory schooling has been failing to provide young people with the key skills needed to make them employable. As a recent government document asserted: Employers have consistently said that too many young people are not properly prepared for the world of work … In particular, they may lack skills such as communication and teamwork, and attributes such as self-confidence and willingness to learn that are of growing importance across a range of jobs. (DfES, 2003, p. 78). © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2005.

This article considers teaching and learning as a collaborative enterprise in the workplace. The empirical data have been extracted from a field study among apprentices engaged in electromechanical vocational training and education in a major Danish industrial company. Typically, studies of apprenticeship learning do not view aspects of teaching as decisive parts of workplace learning. In this article, I will pin down the specific character of collaborative teaching and learning in the workplace, and compare this with the features of a teaching situation in school with a teacher transmitting knowledge to the pupils. While instruction at school is organised as part of a specifically planned teaching situation, the instruction in the workplace is a more loosely organised part of the joint activity structure of the daily work tasks. The conclusions reached in the article should be useful for the conceptual understanding of instruction and teaching in workplace learning, as well as for policy makers and professionals responsible for the design of apprenticeships and workplace learning. © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

The authors of this article were involved in designing and delivering a vocational education and training (VET) program for employees of a large Australian government agency. learning partnerships were included as an integral part of this program and research was conducted to determine whether learning partnerships could be used effectively in workplace training. The initial research findings confirmed that, despite the differences between higher education (HE) and VET, learning partnerships could be successfully used in VET. As the program was repeated several times, the authors were provided with an opportunity to conduct developmental research on how to set up successful learning partnerships in a VET program. This article reports on what helped and hindered the integration of learning partnerships in the program. Some of the issues explored include: how to best structure learning partnerships to encourage participation; the desirable qualities of an effective learning partner; and the critical role played by the facilitator in setting up learning partnerships. © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

The changing nature of work has and is impacting on emergency services education programs in Australia. University-Industry partnerships are becoming more common and the learning and outcome requirements at management level is becoming more complex. Professionalisation does not bring all good news for the staff receiving training. These training outcomes have become broader and less tangible than the discrete competencies of the students initial trade education. Student discomfort causes these trade professionals to scrutinise the credibility of the academics, and the university, and demands non-trade teachers to prove their relevance in an industry where work can be life threatening.

Lab courses are an integral part of higher education in engineering sciences. In this paper, we report about a blended learning approach for such courses in computer science education. We show how the project method for co-located learning can be translated into a blended CSCL setting for a lab course on distributed software development, and how the resulting learning scenario can be supported with the collaborative virtual learning environment CURE. Experiences from the application of the educational approach in two courses indicate benefits but also highlight the need for further technical support. © 2005 International Society of the learning Sciences.

Seija Mahlamäki-Kultanen INTRODUCTION Rural municipalities and villages all over the world, including Finland, are losing their younger inhabitants and enterprises at the same time as bigger centres (towns and cities) keep growing (Cecora, 2000). Sustaining the population of rural areas by increasing the number of rural enterprises is a big challenge for vocational education and entrepreneurs. According to Finnish Law, each Finnish vocational curriculum includes entrepreneurship education, and a vocational degree should guarantee the competence for independent business ownership. The restructuring of the Finnish vocational education system meant that at least 20 credit units of work-based learning and everyday contact with entrepreneurs are included in the 120 credit units of the vocational study programme. This study sets out to see what the entrepreneurial culture in Finnish rural areas is like and whether it gives cultural room for the young students from vocational institutes to become entrepreneurs. Basically, vocational education is culture-bound and the cooperation between educational institutes and entrepreneurs depends largely on mutual understanding of each other. The methodology used is qualitative triangulation; cultural narratives, metaphor analysis and theory-based rating of the sectoral business cultures according to the theory of cultural differences by Hofstede (2001) are used. CULTURE AND CULTURAL DIMENSIONS According to Hofstede (2001), culture is the collective programming of the mind. Still, not everyone in a given culture adheres to the same dominant thought pattern. Hofstede found four cultural dimensions originally from an international questionnaire study of IBM employees, which asked people about an imaginary ideal job…. © Alain Fayolle, Paula Kyrö, Jan Ulijn, 2005.

In this article I draw attention to the current legitimising of new forms of identity of vocational and higher education learners. Using identity as a lens for examining pedagogy I focus on one of these new forms–the learner-worker identity. I examine one teaching and learning practice portfolio development, by discussing the program within which this practice is located and then analysing the texts that are written by the learner-workers as they participate in this program. Through this examination I draw attention to the complex set of identities and accountabilities of learners who move between work and learning sites, and in doing so I aim to illustrate the usefulness of understanding these kinds of textual practices as identity work. © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

This article discusses aspects of the informal learning of tertiary teachers in a polytechnic, a wananga (Maori tertiary institution) and a university in New Zealand. Case studies showed that they gained their teaching knowledge and skills mainly on the job, through informal, experiential learning, and much less through formal courses, professional development or familiarity with the literature of learning and teaching: that teaching knowledge was mainly tacit and procedural, rather than propositional. The case studies also showed that the contexts in which teachers worked, such as their institution, department or programme team, were significant. This article argues that, since informal learning was shown to be so important, a ‘community of practice’ framework may be a useful new approach for supporting the development of teachers' working knowledge and identities. © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.