VET & Culture has a versatile range of activities of experiencing and experimenting with academic apprenticeship:

• Thesis collaboration
• Teaching and learning collaboration
• Research projects

The apprenticeship model

The apprenticeship model indicates a strong link to vocational education, where forming the vocational identity is crucial and often a combination of learning by doing and learning by knowing leads to a more or less holistic understanding of a subject. A “vocational identity” can be (and has been) also developed within university learning and teaching as well as research. The focus lies on an academic community. This process could be named as “academic apprenticeship”. It is combining a way of learning by experience with a way of becoming a university researcher and/or teacher.

Additionally this approach could represent a tendency to organize the issue of globalization and internationalisation from a grass-roots level of personal research, learning and teaching experience. It takes into account that cross-cultural research expresses a step away from a one-dimensional, nationally restricted comparison, towards a reflective dialogue on cultural characteristics of vocational education.

Partly cited from

Heikkinen, A. (Ed.) (1994). Vocational education and culture – European prospects from history and life-history. Hämeenlinna: Tampereen Yliopisto.

Weil, M., Stolz, St., Otazo, P., Baumgartner, E. (forthcoming) Academic apprenticeship: Impacts on university learning and teaching in cross-cultural settings? in: Korhonen, V.: Experiences and Expectations in Crosscultural Learning and Work.