Higher vocational learning and knowledgeable practice

Approaches to the long-standing challenges of ‘integrating’ subject-based and work-based knowledge in higher vocational learning have typically focused on questions of how learning can be ‘transferred’ from one setting to another, relating the assumed ‘abstract’ nature of theory to the assumed ‘real’ nature of practice. This is often seen as a single movement, as encapsulated in the term ‘from theory to practice’. A fresh approach that takes a more differentiated approach to forms of knowledge has examined the ways in which these forms are contextualised and ‘recontextualised’ in movements between different sites of learning in colleges and workplaces (Evans et al., 2009).