Search

This article describes and analyzes from the point of view of their major evolutions, the purposes of the work-study training of ruralfamily houses, one of the main private institutions of technical agricultural education in France. This pedagogy of sandwich training comes from agricultural trade unionism which defined modes of intervention of training agents, called monitors. Sandwich training, initially built against public primary education, had the main goal of restoring peasant family as a legitimate educational body, considered to hold the monopoly on the transmission of agricultural knowledge. However, from the 1960s, this initial purpose disappeared. With school massification, work-study programs now play the role of a second-chance school oscillating between professionali%ation function and school remediation function. During a third period, identified from the 1990s, when the urban family homes were created, these two functions came together, as evidenced by the evolution of the role of monitor: he becomes a referent adult and a "tutor" for young people in difficulty preparing to enter adult life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ministry of Agriculture in France has recently decided to renovate its technical education diplomas with a so-called "capacity" entry and the implementation of a type of certification assessment involving an interview based on real-life professional situations. How can an interview be designed to serve the certification of skills in vocational training? On which theoretical and technical corpus should it be based ? Being in charge of councelling teachers across this renovation in agricultural education, we have tried to answer these questions by developing an interview approach, which mobilizes both explicitation as defined by Vermersch and the contributions of professional didactics. We then experimented this interview with future agricultural workers intraining in order to test its relevance and feasibility. We thus propose in the end an approach composed of two distinct phases during which the type of questions, the language rules, the posture and the intentions of the assessor vary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the existing relations between the social background, the cognitive skills, the sense of schooling experience, the relation to learning and the professional project in the construction of the meaning of their course choice for French boys living in working-class families and guided to vocational studies. It presents the results of an extensive study (by questionnaire) realised in France, in eight schools of the Midi-Pyrénées region. In each school, all the students pursuing a V-level (vocational) diploma in catering, building and car industries were selected. The multivariate analysis reveals four profiles which show the diversity in the forms of compliance to the course choice and the way this compliance is supported by identitarian dynamics of very different personalisation issues. The results show the necessity to renew the models which, in the field of psychology, head towards explaining the sense of course choice to vocational studies by a process of rationalisation consisting in validating imposed course choice decision and living conditions. It is thus necessary to take more into consideration the diversity of living conditions and of training contexts that vocational students face to understand how they manage to themselves from stigmatising verdicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]