VET Congress 2013 

Beginning: 3/13/2013 8:00 AM 
End 3/15/2013 5:00 PM 
City Bern/Zollikofen 

Vocational Education and Training Research: Supporting Teachers, Practitioners and Policy Makers

Call for papers:

For the third time since 2009, the Swiss Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training SFIVET invites researchers to exchange VET research findings and reflect on VET issues.

In general, VET research can be structured as follows: a) knowledge is created for teaching and learning purposes or b) knowledge is produced with regards to the overall VET sector. Examples of type a) questions include topics such as the definition of skills and competencies for a given occupation; the teaching and learning concepts that enable one to acquire these skills and competencies; and the specificities of the cooperation between different learning locations. Knowledge production for type b) questions is more oriented towards VET governance and deals with topics such as the individual choice of education and training programmes; the reasons that motivate companies to offer apprenticeships; social integration and exclusion processes within the VET sector; reasons for youth unemployment and skills shortage and so on.

To help teachers, practitioners and policy makers to enhance the quality and provision of VET, especially important is the aspect of the systematic, methodologically controlled and reflexive production and interpretation of knowledge in contrast to non-reflexive everyday knowledge or unrepresentative personal experience. However, systematic knowledge production is just one part of the story. Another question is how the findings can be successfully transferred to practice in schools, companies, public administration and policy in order to have an impact.

The congress seeks to make a contribution to these topics and provide an overview of VET research activities, to facilitate academic exchanges between leading institutions and to present the latest international research findings.

Further information: www.congress13.sfivet-switzerland.ch