Workshop & presentation from Laurent Filliettaz at Victoria University, Wellington

Travelled up to Wellington yesterday to meet up with Associate Professor Dr. Laurent Filliettaz, from the University of Geneva (currently on a one year sabbatical at Griffith University).  The workshop & lunch time presentation was hosted by Professor Janet Holmes, from the School of Linguistics at Victoria University.

Both the work of Laurent & Janet's team are pertinent to my 'studying the learning of trades students using multimodal discourse analysis' project.  I will begin stage one of this project with funding from the CPIT foundation early next year. The funding provides sufficient money to obtain hardware & pays for a small amount of research time for me and for one trades tutor (Flip Leijten who teaches welding).

Laurent's work & that of his team, Ingrid de Saint-Georges & Barbara Duc is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship programme. The project began at the end of 2005 and runs until January 2011. The main objectives of the programme is to understand apprentices' perspectives of how they gain knowledge, skills and experience identity transformation during their apprenticeship, the perspectives of trainers and teachers on what skills are required to teach or train apprentices & the potentials & limitations of the Swiss 'dual' traning system.

The overall programme was to study the Swiss dual training system whereby students attend school for 1 to 2 days and work as apprentices in the workplace for 3 to 4 days.  The current system has its challenges including difficulties with placing apprentices and poor completion rates. 

The main data collection method was to collect video evidence of workplace interactions between apprentices and trainers in both vocational school workshops (3) and at workplaces (7).  Three industries, motor mechanics, automation specialists and electric assemblers were involved.  150 hours of video evidence was collected, providing a rich corpus of evidence to study.

The main activities studied were knowledge transformation and transmisson, transitions and identity construction, the aspect of time in action and learning and the continuities and boundaries between schools and workplaces.

During the lunch presentation, Laurent presented 4 video vignettes with their accompanying transcripts and interpretations.  These were based on a case study of a new apprentice starting out in a electrical assembly workplace.  The presentation provided a good example of the power of using video based evidence in collecting workplace based apprentice / trainer interactions.  Especially rich evidence of how apprentices have to negotiate for their learning opportunities, the techniques / strategies workplace trainers use and the interactions apprentices have with other workers.  This reveals issues with power, communication or mis-communication in the workplace, language use in vocational learning and the transitional issues faced by school leavers as they are inducted into the workplace.

All in a worthwhile day to talk to many of the staff at the School of Linguistics and to have see examples of multimodal data collection and analysis.

Furthering the use of workplace learning research using mobile technologies

I have recently made contact with Dr. Laurent Fillietaz, from the University of Geneva who is currently doing work at Griffith University with my PhD supervisor, Dr. Stephen Billett. Laurent has been using discourse analysis to understand how apprentices learn a trade. A paper with on situated trajectories co-authored with Ingrid de St.Georges provides an example of his work.

As a result of reading up on Laurent’s work, I have been exploring the area of multi-modal discourse analysis where there will be a workshop in Wellington and a one day conference in Auckland. The Languages in the workplace project is based at the University of Victoria in Wellington and led by Dr. Janet Holmes. Presentations in Auckland centre around the work of Dr. Theo Van Leeuwen and Dr. Rodney Jones with the conference convened by Dr. Sigrid Norris. So there is a good range of people & their work to catch up on!

The London Mobile learning group has a good resource of publications which I will be reading through over the next few weeks. I am keen to follow through on the use of mobile technology to help inform vocational educators about how their students learn in both on-job & off-job contexts. I have been reflecting on how to study the multi-literacies and multimodal means of learning which are involved in learning a trade. Mobile technologies provide for one avenue towards providing a means to collect evidence of skills learning. There is a need to drill deeper into the ‘hidden lives of learners’ in non-formalised learning settings. My goal is to try to better understand how learners learn skills, knowledge and attitudes which lead eventually to becoming skilled crafts people and trades persons. Then perhaps to investigate the current disconnect between how skills are learnt and how they are assessed using competency based assessments. There has to be a more authentic, less time consuming and effective method than what is currently the accepted practice which is heavily reliant on paper-based evidence.