We believe so. The previous example with florists convinces us that the IDC theory would be relevant to VET. We focus on the Swiss VET system as our experience with it has led us to observe that it has many connections with IDC theory. The Swiss VET system, similarly to the German and Austrian ones, is mostly based on a dual mode where apprentices spend 3–4 days per week in a company and 1–2 days at school with a culture focused on creation and practical skills. The jobs encompass many manual workers (e.g., carpenters, mechanics, electricians, gardeners, and bakers), salespeople, office clerks, and social/health professions. This approach concerns no less than two thirds of Swiss teenagers. Since many of these professions are endangered by the advances in robotics and artificial intelligence, the reflections that underlie the development of the IDC theory are especially relevant for VET and are at the center of multiple debates and initiatives.
The apprentice’s learning path in a VET system matches several points of the three IDC loops. During their initial months at their workplace, apprentices have a low level of responsibility and they mostly practice elementary professional gestures by imitating (first step of the IDC creation loop) the examples provided by the supervisors. As they gain responsibility, their supervisors allocate them more complex tasks which require combining (second step of the creation loop) multiple basic gestures or sub-tasks. In their final year, as in the staging step (third step of the creation loop), many apprentices have to develop their masterpiece, an original demonstration of their craftsmanship and creativity, and present it to the examiners, their peers, and their community.
Another central concept that connects IDC theory and VET is the notion of meaningfulness within the extending step of the interest loop. The authors define interest as the fact that students “associate the context of their real-life situations with what they are learning” (Chan et al. 2018, p.445), which is also central to VET since skills are acquired in the context of their future use (i.e., the workplace). However, this meaningfulness is sometimes questioned in a dual system because of gaps that emerge between the skills taught at school and those practiced at the workplace. Even if the school curricula are defined by the corporate associations, these gaps exist. In terms of the nature of knowledge, more conceptual/declarative knowledge is taught at school versus more procedural/practical knowledge at the workplace. In terms of the time horizon, at the workplace, apprentices perform the tasks required by the company on a daily basis while schools have long-term ambitions for their apprentices. For example, warehouse apprentices learn how to optimize the layout of a warehouse at school, but in the workplace, this skill is practiced by their bosses and not by them. This school-workplace gap creates a breach of meaningfulness, since they are taught skills that they do not have immediate use for. To restore meaningfulness, we designed the “Erfahraum” model (translated as “experience space”), a pedagogical design that consists in capturing experience at the workplace in order to exploit it in the classroom. Experience has become a digital substance that is captured everyday through using the mobile phone. All pictures or videos students take at their workplace can be stored in the digital flow of their class, which acts as a social media platform where apprentices from the same class may comment and tag posts as well as annotate pictures. Teachers can exploit this experience during their lectures in order to increase meaningfulness by supporting apprentices to connect theoretical concepts with their personal experience in authentic contexts.
In our recent work on training gardeners, we provide an example of associating real-world situations and learning to create meaningfulness. For training gardeners, we developed a virtual reality application for designing and simulating garden designs where the key idea is to use a place from real-life in a digital learning activity (Fig. 2). Learners can create a 3D model of a site that they are working on by taking pictures or videos. Once a 3D model is generated, apprentices can start designing a garden in the virtual world. They can add, move, rotate, or remove plants instantly with a few clicks, walk inside the garden immersively with the virtual reality headset, and simulate seasonal change, growth of trees, and the time of the day. In this learning activity, we create meaning by using a 3D model of a real-world place for students to practice designing and try different design principles. In this way, what they learn can be better connected to their real-world practice.
The IDC theory is not just relevant to the European VET system but also relates to the situation of VET in Asia. In many Asian countries, including South Korea and Singapore, students choose or sometimes are forced to choose VET because they are not doing well in schools academically. Given the situation, it is generally the case in vocational schools that the pressure of the test-based evaluation is relatively low for students and teachers. This phenomenon is not only limited to Asia but present in many other countries in the world. As the motivation behind the IDC theory is to move away from the test-centric approach, VET can be used as an example of promising starting points and an interesting testbed based upon the connections it already has with the IDC theory. Moreover, it is also interesting to note that there is an increase in the number of students in Asia who choose VET because of their interest in the profession, not because they are failing in schools. Additionally, it is not difficult to hear about successful startups that are founded by VET graduates. We find that this shift towards the interest-driven choice of the students shares the same spirit with the authors’ effort on developing IDC theory.
In addition to the current connections between IDC theory and VET mentioned above, IDC also provides direction in regards to the future of VET. VET is facing a future of transformation due to changes in culture and society brought on by digitalization, which is impacting the skills being taught, the tools used for learning, and the educational data being collected. The core ideas presented in IDC theory can help to guide this transformation as our efforts are required to be scaled-up to impact the VET system at the cultural and societal level.