Work-study: a path to excellence
While skills development (Skills Pact), and
vocational training are priorities for Europe, in France, work-study training now seems to have acquired its letters of nobility and to have become a "path of excellence". At the pedagogical-educational level, it is based on a dynamic that mobilizes the learner and his family, irrigates the partnership with the professional world and the regions and allows a “collective intelligence” at the service of the success of work-study students. This is all the more important since this type of training is regularly aimed at people with integration difficulties, often isolated (rural areas in particular) and thus participate in a social, economic and geographical logic of sustainable development.
Uncertainty as the norm
At the same time, society in general and particularly the world of training are confronted with a (r)evolution (particularly digital) whose acceleration and scale have perhaps rarely been reached. The confinements and the prolonged period of health crisis accentuate the modification of the balances and invite, if not to question, at least to rethink the established models of training in general, professional of course and in particular by alternation.
Would this observation be shared beyond national borders? This project would thus have the advantage of posing a pedagogical reflection on the levers of learning in work-study training (by insisting in particular on the place of digital technology in work-study training) and of drawing the lines of the skills necessary to feed train-the-trainer courses (innovative approach)
Exchange of good practices
It is a question of carrying out an overview of the practices within the partner structures of experiential learning in order to determine the invariants and in the future to feed and feed the courses of training of trainers.
All of the transnational meetings, training and dissemination activities will be an opportunity for production but also for the exchange of good practices. All of these activities will thus have the effect of
produce reinvestment in the participants' own practices and in the engineering reflections of the professional training systems of the partner organisations. The comparative analysis will give rise to the production of a guide laying down the outline of a European framework for "learning" by work-study program and will draw the main lines of a job reference system for "accompanying, animating, mediating" apprenticeship “by alternation”
The appEUnance project
The ApprEUnance project is part of the Erasmus+ Program in terms of strategic partnerships and brings together 6 European partners with the aim of improving work-study training, both in vocational schools and in training centers with the different nuances that can be taken into account in this training relationship which is based on field practices to implement training programs with a professional sense.
The diversity of training structures can be an asset in dealing with the methodologies and techniques that are applied in different countries, in this case in Belgium, Ireland, Slovenia, France and Portugal.
The specificity of the MFR – Maisons Familiales Rurales model in France and worldwide is also a strong point of the project. The Paris-based institution that promotes its pedagogical model poles in approximately 700 schools, of which 400 are in France, has a deep connection with the rural world and a strong relationship with the concrete practices of agricultural or local activities linked to family traditions.
The Second Chance School of Matosinhos appears as an example of pedagogical and organizational flexibility, the principle of the institution being to respect the autonomy and the options of the young person in training and, consequently, to follow his own rhythm. . The choice and the freedom to choose and change the thematic framework are central variables of a pedagogical relationship which is in permanent negotiation and in the management of instability.
The remaining European partners are developing models with strong dynamics for adapting and supporting the training paths of their trainees or students, which will constitute a fundamental challenge in the design of new solutions taking into account a greater scope of the educational process in individual and collective contexts, organizational terms.
ApprEUnance draws on this variety of learning sources and processes, making it necessary to deepen intersection and tracking systems to optimize new ways of learning.
