Integrating learning experiences across tertiary education and practice settings: A socio-personal account

• Integration of learning experiences.
• Workplace learning.
• Tertiary education.
• Occupational preparation.

There is growing interest by governments, industry, students and employers in providing tertiary education students with experiences in practice settings (i.e., workplaces) and then integrating those experiences into their educational programs. Yet, the bases for organising and securing such integrations remain unclear. There are quite diverse explanatory accounts about what constitutes such integrations and, therefore, how they might be best enacted and supported within tertiary education. These accounts often differ through their privileging of particular emphases in their conceptualisations. One emphasis is on the qualities and characteristics of each physical and social setting (i.e., workplace and tertiary educational institution) and their potential contributions to students’ learning, and reconciling what arises from experiences in each of these settings. Another privileges individuals as meaning makers and their reconciliation of what they experiences in these settings. Advanced here is an account that acknowledges and reconciles these two emphases. This explanatory account comprising a duality that emphasises both what each setting affords students, on the one hand, and, on the other, how learners elect to engage, construe and construct from each setting and then reconcile those experiences as directed by their interests, capacities and cognitive experience. This socio-personal explanation is supported by literature emphasising the contributions between the mediations of social and physical world, and individuals’ construing and construction of them, but also the relations amongst them. Having discussed this account as a means to understand the process of integrating those experiences, some considerations of curriculum, pedagogy and epistemological factors are advanced.