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Miettinen, R & Peisa, S. (2002). Integrating school-based learning with the study of change at work: the alternative enterprise method. Journal of Education and Work, 15, 303-319
Abstract:
A constitutive problem of vocational education is how the content and methods of studying and learning are connected to the rapid change in working life. A new type of vocational education, inspired by cultural-historical activity theory, was developed in Finnish Commercial colleges to solve this problem. A student collective, helped by the teachers, and working together with a partner firm, makes business plans for a hypothetical new firm, which is called an alternative firm. In making their business plan, the students investigate how the main functions of the partner firm are organized. They try to develop a better or alternative solution for their own plan. The object of learning is, simultaneously, the tools and social procedures of establishing a firm and the developmental challenges or the zone of proximal development of the partner firm. The paper analyzes the results of this kind of project realized in the schoolyear of 1996-1997 in Rauma, Finland, in collaboration with a technical college, a commercial college, and a partner firm, Laimu Inc. It is suggested that method is a promising way of solving the epistemological problems of work simulations in schools as well as of making school studies sensitive to the change in working life.
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