Improving Integration of Formal Education and Work-Based Learning

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue aims to enhance scientific excellence and research potential in the field of the integration of formal education and workplace learning (WPL) for students, teachers, schools, and in vocational education.

Since the emergence of Industry 4.0, unleashed by the technological advances of the information age, there is an increasing research interest in enriched learning in various authentic environments. The proposed Special Issue will pay special attention to students’ participation in authentic work environments outside educational settings, their practice-based learning and the acknowledgement of those learning outcomes. Also, the integration of work-related activities into classroom learning will be focused on. In the context of integrated learning at school and work, previous international research has mainly focused on vocational education, but this Special Issue widens the focus by extending the target group by including students and teachers in basic education and upper secondary general education.

This Special Issue should introduce novel approaches and methodologies in workplace learning research, and provide new insights by applying the social ecology approach for research in the field of integrated learning at school and work. The methodological knowledge and experiences gained may be of great relevance for future international research.

As a first step, we ask for an approximately 500-word-long paper proposal describing the central ideas and methods applied in the intended papers that should address attempts/approaches/studies on the integration of informal learning (at workplaces) into formal educational programs either in primary education, lower or upper secondary education, or vocational education and training. Please send this proposal to christian.harteis@upb.de or inget@tlu.ee by 1 March 2024. Feedback will be provided until 1 April 2024. The deadline for the submission of the final full paper is 20 September 2024.

Prof. Dr. Christian Harteis
Prof. Dr. Inge Timoštšuk
Guest Editors

Publisher’s notice:

As stated above, the central purpose of this Special Issue is to present research from "Enhancing Research on the Integration of Formal Educational Programmes and Workplace Learning". Given this purpose, the Guest Editors’ contribution to this Special Issue may be greater than standard Special Issues published by MDPI. Further details on MDPI's Special Issue guidelines can be found here: https://www.mdpi.com/special_issues_guidelines. The Editorial Office and Editor-in-Chief of Social Sciences has approved this and MDPI’s standard manuscript editorial processing procedure (https://www.mdpi.com/editorial_process) will be applied to all submissions. As per our standard procedure, Guest Editors are excluded from participating in the editorial process for their submission and/or for submissions from persons with whom a potential conflict of interest may exist. More details on MDPI’s Conflict of Interest policy for reviewers and editors can be found here: https://www.mdpi.com/ethics#_bookmark22.

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