L'argomento scelto riguarda l'apprendistato italiano, comparato con le principali esperienze europee, con particolare attenzione al modello nordico (Germania e Svezia). Si è poi guardato all' Europa e alle sue politiche di inclusione dei giovani, attraverso le vaire iniziative lanciate e di cui vengono forniti i dati. Nelle conclusioni, a seguito di un riassunto dell' intero elaborato, viene proposo un miglioramento di tale istituto, nella prospettiva di rendere tale strumento efficace ed efficiente. / The thesis' topic concers the Italian apprenticeship,compared with the main European experineces, particularly the Nordic model (German and Sweden).After this I direct myself to Europe and his inclusion policies for young people, analyzing the main initiatives, and providing the current data. Finally, after a brief thesis' resume, it is offered a possible improvement of this institut, in order to make it effective and efficient.

Magister Philosophiae - MPhil / This research set out to explore cognitive processes involved in learning among help desk consultants, both apprentices and experts. / South Africa

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Skills development policies in South Africa and further afield consider learning in and from the workplace as critical to the training of artisans at intermediate level. Since the inception of democracy, South Africa has become part of a globally competitive economic arena where highly skilled workers capable of engaging with new technology in a changing environment are increasingly required. Continuous innovation, it is held (Kraak, 1997), is dependent on the presence of two knowledge forms in society and work: an abundance of formal (scientific and technological) knowledge, and skilled worker 'know-how' or tacit knowledge. In the present system of technical and vocational education, theoretical learning and some practical skills are obtained in institutions, mostly in the recently renamed TVET colleges, while job specific training occurs through prescribed periods of work placement. In light of common assumptions about the value of workplace learning, this research was concerned with exploring whether, and how such learning is taking place. It sought to understand the methodologies, practices, and affordances available to learning in the workplace, from the perspective of candidate apprenticeship/learnership students. To this end this study employed a qualitative approach for investigating how candidates experienced and interacted with the 'real world environment' of the workplace. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposively selected sample comprising candidates engaged in programmes that necessitated a workplace learning component, namely, the apprenticeship and learnership in fitting and turning, motor/diesel and the auto electrical trades. Data analysis was undertaken using both Atlas ti software and manual methods for coding and identification of themes. Lenses used to describe and explain learning in the workplace included the conceptual frameworks of Engestrom‘s (1987) Activity theory; Vygotsky‘s (1978) notion of learning via the 'expert other' within a Zone of Proximal Development; and Lave and Wenger‘s (1991) theorising of situated learning in Communities of Practice. This triangular juxtaposition of complementary theories formed a richly informative explanatory system for my further exploration. As a qualified artisan myself I was familiar with the negative connotations of a historical 'sit by Nellie' approach, a phrase used to caricature the way apprentices learned in the past, by simply being passive observers of the experts. However, my findings were to reveal a vastly different picture of learning in this modern, visual and tactile age. Learners in this study experienced a range of learning modalities, methodologies and affordances that were reported in 'thick' descriptions, building a vivid picture of engagement and interaction. In addition to the abundance of learning opportunities candidates experienced, their responses revealed the indisputably central role played by 'expert others' in moving them towards competence – the expert artisan emerging as the quintessential didactic practitioner. This thesis proceeds to highlight the experiences of candidates on their learning journey in the workplace, and suggests recommendations in respect of these. Key learnings are distilled, which ultimately point to the need for collective effort in appreciating and retaining for the benefit of future generations of artisans, the mentoring potential that exists in our expert artisans wherever they may be found.

Commentary on skilled trades occupations in Canada has been framed by two main paradigms: The dominant policy discourse has applied human capital theory to the dynamics of the skilled labour supply, often concentrating on intractable “problems” such as low apprenticeship participation and completion rates and an extreme gender imbalance in the trades. Sociological research has portrayed trades occupations as positions of structurally reproduced social disadvantage. This study adopts an alternate, neo-Weberian framework centred on the theory of economic social action. Social structure is treated in strictly nominalistic terms, and social action is rooted in the interest-oriented behaviour of socially embedded individuals. The study, undertaken in a large public-sector shipyard, involved both a pen-and-paper survey (N=509) of skilled trades workers and ten focus group interviews with 49 respondents from labour and management. The research questions addressed indicators of structural (dis)advantage and reproduction, as well as the specific mechanisms of social action operating within the study environment. The population shows a very distinct profile in terms of gender, ethnicity, and educational investment. Data on earnings, job security, and working conditions dispel any suspicion of economic disadvantage. Although a high proportion of incumbents have family connections to the skilled trades, an analysis of their siblings’ occupations refutes the supposition of structural determinism through the family. Instead, it is argued that both the social profile of the workforce and the high density of family and network connections reflect the use of “bridging” and “bonding” social capital strategies by study population members. The operative mechanisms include formal elements of the organization’s hiring practices, as well as institutionalized group norms and workplace culture. Through a “separatist” discourse that invokes notions of both “trade stigma” and “trade pride,” incumbents ascribe a particular set of cognitive and moral attributes to trades workers, which also contribute to defining the formal and informal membership requirements for their occupations. By approaching occupations as sites of economic social action, this research concludes that some of the intractable “problems” in Canada’s apprenticeable trades reflect individual behaviours that are enabled and incited by institutional features integral to the present skilled trades system. / Education, Faculty of / Graduate

Surgical observation is an integral part of surgical training. Junior residents, who have limited understanding of the procedure being performed, frequently engage in observation in order to gain exposure to surgical techniques. This limited experience, and the relative lack of guidance currently provided to them, might limit their ability to learn by observing. This thesis examines learners’ perceptions of the value of surgical observation, the barriers to learning in the surgical environment, and the factors that facilitate learning within the context of the operating room. An intervention, employing predefined objectives in the form of sets of questions, was introduced and the impacts of this intervention in terms of junior residents’ attitudes toward observation were explored. Two rounds of focus groups examined learners’ perceptions: one before introducing the intervention and one after it. Transcripts from these focus groups were analyzed using a qualitative interpretative approach and focus group participants provided considerable insight into observational learning. Many barriers were identified, including logistical constraints and lack of guidance. The surgical culture, within which observation is perceived as less effective than performing the surgery itself, was also mentioned as a factor that impedes learning during observation. Following the intervention, participants felt more validated as learners in the operating room and appreciated having clear objectives when observing procedures. Participants did mention that their busy clinical obligations would likely limit their use of any educational intervention. It was also noted that interventions to promote learning through observation would have to be fully supported by their program to be used on a regular basis. In conclusion, many factors that impact learning during surgical observation were identified. While trainees felt that increased guidance for observation was helpful, the environment in which learning takes place would have to be optimized to facilitate junior trainees’ learning.

This research looks thoughtfully and deeply at the relationship between art education and signs, as defined by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1964/1998). Signs, as articulated by Deleuze (1964/1998), are violent disruptions to our way of understanding the world, causing us to think again and/or re-consider what we once knew (or thought we knew). This study looks generatively at how these kinds of disruptive and disorienting moments might be mined for possibilities in art education and remind us of our own relationality. As a post-qualitative lived inquiry, it asks how might art education be-with apprenticeship to signs and what might art education do-with sign-encounters? Using the theoretical lens of transcendental empiricism and new materialism, this study considers how art educators might hold open the space of sign-encounters for oneself and one's students by turning towards the rhizomatic cut and staying with uncertainty. It is focused on the doing-with, making-with, and thinking-with of art, pedagogy, and philosophy/theory, investigating their deep entanglements in spaces of disruption and ultimately developing frame-works for engaging in this kind of work in the classroom. Drawing from Erin Manning and Brian Massumi's theory of research-creation, this research was experienced in an emergent, layered, and complex way over the last two years, including the construction of this dissertation presented as an assemblage all of its own.

This study examined how middle school students planned to obtain future STEM college majors and careers through a possible selves curriculum in a 13-week, in-school cognitive apprenticeship model. STEM undergraduates mentored STEM-interested middle school mentees (N= 21) from six under-served middle schools. Through possible selves activities, mentees worked on strategies to avoid becoming their feared possible self and become their hoped-for possible self. In the middle of the semester, mentee self-reported competency in STEM fields, motivation, administrator-reported STEM course grades, and STEM attendance were collected. On average, mentees felt 10.67% more motivated to pursue STEM than they felt competent in STEM. Mentees who reported higher competency tended to have higher course grades, and mentees who reported higher motivation tended to have higher attendance, although attendance was high overall, indicating insufficient sample size or variance to demonstrate significance. Mentees who attended class more tended to have a higher course grade but the same statistical issue occurred in that there may not have been a significant correlation due to sampling and self- selection biases. The majority of mentees identified unrelated possible selves, defined concrete self-improvement and abstract self-maintenance strategies, identified self-discipline as a requirement in middle school, described intellectual independence and teacher harmony strategies to solve everyday problems in middle school, identified instructivist college requirements, described responsibility as a transferable strategy, and dependence on an expert as a nontransferable strategy to solve long-term problems in college to obtain their STEM possible self.

Poor children are elusive in historical records, essentially invisible and unheard, and there is a significant gap in the secondary literature for the period 1700 to 1780. This thesis uses a range of largely unexplored material to access the experiences of poor children in London. By placing children in the foreground and examining their experiences by reading archival sources ‘against the grain’, it reveals details of individual lives and substantially changes our understanding of growing up poor in eighteenth-century London. Experiences are explored in five areas where poor children were found in significant numbers: in parish workhouses and as recipients of outdoor welfare relief; in the capital’s charity schools; in the Marine Society, a charity that sent poor boys to sea; in casual work and apprenticeship; and in the courts of the criminal justice system. This project re-appraises the contribution of poor children to the life of the capital, incorporates their experiences into the historical record, and creates a rounded and substantial picture of their lives in a variety of situations. The thesis argues that the deepseated prejudices of the elite, clearly evident in the rhetoric of eighteenth-century social reform, misrepresented and denigrated the children of the poor, a misrepresentation that has been assimilated into the historiography of the capital. It also suggests that recentb historiography has given us an inaccurate account of the functioning of charitable institutions aimed at children and a limited assessment of the capital’s apprenticeship and criminal justice system.

This thesis explores shifting ideas of youth work, and the changing notions of professional competence that have shaped it since its emergence at the end of the last century. It begins by discussing Foucault's distinctive conception of power. This analysis is applied later in the thesis to youth work itself and to its forms of professional education and training. It is argued that modem professional practices illustrate the changing nature of disciplinary techniques in modem societies. These techniques are employed to discipline both professions themselves (by 'normalising' professional practices), and their client groups, and are also part of the contemporary problem of 'government'. Indeed, it is argued that models of professional education reflect the historically changing rationales on which British society has been organised and managed. The thesis identifies three phases of this: 'emergent welfarism', social government' or 'welfarism' and 'neo-liberalism. Drawing on a range of historical sources, a number of changing assumptions about young people in the context of youth work are identified, such as their characterisation as an inherently and naturally problematic social category. The 'discourse of adolescence' which draws on a range of knowledges about young people (from scientific to moral) is seen as providing a powerful justification for the expansion of youth work over the last hundred years or so. The youth worker's modem role in managing groups, offering counselling and acting as a 'broker' of social and moral knowledge is discussed. The progressive development of the professional education and training of youth workers since the 1930s is examined together with its curriculum content and the techniques and practices through which youth workers have been socialised into their occupational roles. After the initial tendency towards leadership training through apprenticeship, the professional model became organised on 'technical-rational' principles, with various 'techniques of the self' by which youth workers became disciplined into their professional identities (for example by 'surveillance' and 'confession'). Focus is given to the paradigmatic development and deployment of such techniques at the National College for the Training of Youth Leaders in the 1960s. The thesis concludes with an analysis of the intense criticism to which professional education and training in youth work has been subjected in the last decade, including the separation of theory and practice, unclear curricula, academic and professional elitism, and the marginalisation of learners' experience. The 'discourse of competency' is identified as being important in shaping current approaches to professional education and training in youth work. Finally, it is suggested that the emergent model of professional education is, ironically, characterised by an increasingly intense and invasive application of the techniques of disciplinary power identified earlier in the thesis. Competency practices we suggest facilitate the attempt to govern, professionals ahd professional practice. The thesis is broadly structured in four parts, and in the following way: Chapter 1 provides a broad introduction and context for the thesis. In Part One, Chapter 2 discusses Foucault's concept of power which informs the thesis. In Part Two, Chapter 3 discusses the managerial and disciplinary functions of the human service professions, providing a context for the subsequent analysis of youth work. Chapter 4 goes on to identify models of professional education in their political and social contexts and concludes with a discussion of the 'competency model'. In Part Three, Chapters 5 and 6 explore the distinctive contribution which youth work has made to the regulation and disciplining of young people. In these chapters links are made between broad political objectives and the evolving knowledge and practices of youth workers. In Part Four, Chapter 7 identifies the earliest attempts to identify and enhance competence through the training and education of youth workers. Chapter 8 explores youth work training in the 1960s and 1970s, identifying the essentially humanistic discourse which subsequently dominated youth work and the training of youth workers. In the context of political shifts beginning in the 1970s, Chapter 9 analyses the emergence of a 'discourse of competency' in youth work, and its challenge to the prevailing humanistic orthodoxy which characterised the professional education and training of youth workers. Finally, Chapter 11 draws general and particular conclusions to the thesis.

Despite years of attention, gender inequity persists in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Female STEM faculty, positive social interactions, and enrollment in advanced STEM secondary coursework are supportive factors in promoting female students' persistence in STEM fields. To address the gap in understanding these factors, this study employed a sequential mixed method design using a framework of social cognitive theory. Research questions focused on how levels of self-efficacy and perception of personal and social factors among female secondary students related to their enrollment in advanced STEM coursework and extracurricular activities in a rural New England school where gender parity exists. All 18-year-old female students (N = 82) were invited to complete the self-efficacy subsection of the Science Motivation Questionnaire II (SMQII). Self-efficacy and enrollment in advanced STEM courses and extracurricular activities were analyzed using a Pearson correlation (N=35). Self-efficacy levels did not correlate with the participants' enrollment in advanced STEM courses and extracurricular activities. In addition, a purposeful sample of participants (N = 7) who completed the SMQII was used to conduct individual interviews investigating how the community of practice contributed to female students' decisions to pursue advanced STEM coursework. Two themes emerged: the roles of the personal landscape (e.g., resilient mindset) and the social landscape (e.g., peer interactions). Professional development materials to support staff in implementing a cognitive apprenticeship were created in response to the emergent themes. In addressing the lack of understanding of female secondary students' engagement in advanced STEM coursework, positive social change may be achieved by supporting a greater percentage of women who can pursue STEM career opportunities.