How Students Learn on Placement: Transitioning Placement Practices in Work-Integrated Learning
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How Students Learn on Placement: Transitioning Placement Practices in Work-Integrated Learning Bonnie Amelia Dean 1
& Christopher
Sykes 2
Received: 26 January 2020 / Accepted: 1 September 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Examining learning in work-integrated learning (WIL) courses is complex. WIL traverses work and university spaces, which can be challenging for the way student learning is conceived, planned, supported, assessed and reported. This study strengthens our understanding of how students learn on placement by going directly to the source and observing learning unfold, in situ. Using an ethnographic methodology, this study adopts Schatzki’s (1996, 2010) practice-based lens to illuminate how students learn to embody and accomplish their assigned tasks on WIL placement. Findings suggest that students initially learn through performing an intermediary cluster of practices that enable them to orient, adapt and conform to new configurations of people, things, spaces, tools, bodies and technologies. These temporary transitioning placement practices are distinctive to WIL and take their shape within social practice arrangements. The study offers empirical evidence to ground and theorize learning for WIL curricula and support an emerging, materially-significant and entangled conception of learning on placement. Keywords Ethnography . Internships . Learning on placement . Transitioning placement
practices . Work-integrated learning
* Bonnie Amelia Dean [email protected] Christopher Sykes [email protected]
1
Learning, Teaching & Curriculum, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia
2
School of Management, Operations and Marketing, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia
B. A. Dean, C. Sykes
Introduction Work-integrated learning (WIL) is a prominent pedagogical strategy in higher education that assembles the formal academic curriculum with experiences of work (Billett 2006, 2009). WIL courses equip students with employability skills to effectively operate in work settings (Jackson 2014) and provides opportunity to develop professional identities (Trede 2012; Bowden 2016). Designing WIL curricular however is challenging as it bestrides dual sites of learning (Billett 2009). The WIL curriculum connects university and workspaces through a program that imposes academic methods of assessing and measuring learning against outcomes. It is nested within a broader discipline-specific course (unit) of study and adheres to levels of reporting through governing bodies that review subjects for quality assurance purposes. Because of this engrained socio-political context, the risk for educators is to view learning in work placement sites through the same lens as learning in university spaces. However, student learning in the workplace is markedly not the same as learning at university through the formal curriculum. Over the last two decades or so, scholars in the field of WIL (or related areas such as work-based learning or practice-based learning) have sought to distinguish learning in t
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