Professionalization has become a given in the worlds of work and education. For a wide variety of professions, public and private organizations and training and further education courses, professionalization is an inescapable reality. However, it takes on diverse, even contradictory meanings, according to what it represents: a managerial imperative imposed by public or managerial policies, or a set of goals defined by an ideal of service or quality of work. The purpose of Encyclopedia of Professionalization is to discuss the current challenges facing professionalization and, by exploring major research traditions, to clarify the meanings associated with this concept and the various phenomena it encompasses. Three major notions of professionalization are examined: the manufacturing of professions in pursuit of autonomy, the rise of professionalisms embodying notions of a job well done, and the construction of renewed professionalities at the very heart of work situations and training systems.

This book generates a comprehensive account of ways in which practice-based learning has been conceptualized in the Francophone context. Learning for occupations, and the educational and practice-based experiences supporting it are the subject of increased interest and attention globally. Governments, professional bodies, workplaces and workers are now looking for experiences that support the initial and ongoing development of occupational capacities. Consequently, more attention is being given to workplaces as sites for this learning. This focus on learning through work has long been emphasised in the Francophone world, which has developed distinct traditions and conceptions of associations between work and learning. These include ergonomics and professional didactics. Yet, whilst being accepted and of long standing in the Francophone world, these conceptions and traditions, and the practices supporting them are little known about or understood in the Anglophone world, which is the dominant medium for scientific and educational discussion. This book addresses this problem through drawing on accounts from France, Switzerland and Canada that make accessible and elaborate these traditions, conceptions and practices through examples of their applications to occupationally related learning. These accounts offer variations and culturally-specific developments of these traditions, but collectively emphasize a preoccupation with how both work and learning need to be understood through situated considerations of persons enacting their work practice. In this way, they offer noteworthy and worthwhile contributions to contemporary global considerations of learning through work.

This volume presents a scientific and practical trend in lifelong education, which focuses on "human activity". This trend is particularly apparent in French speaking countries where a seminal tradition of ergonomics, born in the middle of the 20th century, produced studies about work and workers’ activity in various contexts. Results demonstrate that working activity, firstly, is always complex, creative and enigmatic despite the efforts done by the designers to create prescribing working environments and by managers to control production procedures, and secondly, cannot be understood without specific field studies about real work. This approach influenced adult educational researchers and trainers to develop programs in order to help trainers to better know human activity and its transformations in various social practices (and not only in working context). It also helps them to design learning environments accompanying human activity transformations at various time scales. The chapters in this volume present a range of original studies on human activity in various social practices, such as tourism, theatre prop-makers in opera, manual job environments, management in a small company, high level athletes illegal practices, school teaching and finally during teachers retirement ceremonies. These studies of the relationships between social practices and human activity and its transformations, give empirical and conceptual bases for designing programs aimed at emphasizing and accompanying specific individual and collective learning, and human development in a lifelong perspective. This book was published as a special issue of International Journal of Lifelong Education.

The goal for ergonomics has always been to adapt work, work environments, and machines to humans. But is this goal still sufficient? Does it satisfy the needs of the individual or of societies and organizations as they operate now? Constructive Ergonomics provides an answer to these questions. Rooted both in the academic world and in the world of p

This book offers various ways in which analyzing professional experience and activity in simulation training makes it possible to describe practice-based learning affordances and processes. Research has been conducted in various simulation programs in the domains of healthcare, victim rescue and population protection, involving healthcare workers, firemen, policemen, servicemen, and civil security leaders. "Work-as-done" (/ "training-as-done") in simulation has been analyzed with ergonomics, occupational psychology, and vocational training approaches. The authors describe and discuss theoretical, methodological, and/or practical issues related to practitioner experience and activity in simulation training. The book also provides evidence on the conditions under which lived experience in simulation can foster or hinder learning, and derives appropriate orientations for simulation design and implementation.