Theme one presents an analysis which explores the process of knowledge integration between the context of placement and related experiences of work and academia. Initially explored is the way in which students on placement use their experience to better relate to the content they learned in earlier years of work and study. This precedes an exploration of how students apply the skills and knowledge learned in the early years of academia to their learning and practice on placement. Toward the latter half of the theme, the return to university is explored in relation to the process of integrating placement learning into the academic context. To meet each of the study aims, the analysis depicted in this theme explored how students experienced knowledge integration on their placement programme, the meanings they formed in relation to experiences of knowledge integration, and their perceptions of the practices which facilitated and hindered this process. Applying sociocultural theory to these experiences, I explored the mechanisms underpinning how knowledge integration influenced placement related learning and identity development.
For many of the students in the current study, the work placement year was viewed as an opportunity to gain some hands-on experience of working in industry. Before their placement, many admitted that like Sam in his narrative, they had struggled with the heavy emphasis on theory and felt their practical sessions had been lack-lustre.
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Kareem: “I was hoping to sort of gain more practical skills the thing with the course at university is its very, there's a lot of theory and the practical things you do do are very lab based, and they kind of focus towards things you might do as a researcher rather than things you would do in industry”. [Interview 12]
For Mathew, the abstract nature of much of his course meant he had struggled to understand certain industrial processes. On placement however, he was able to clarify his course content with a frame of reference developed through a lived experience of seeing and working with the processes first-hand: Mathew: “Someone could sit with a PowerPoint and go through how it all works but then to go and actually physically see it, so erm what’s it called Kanban which is how you order parts which is like 2 bins and as one bin empties you replace it and then as you're replacing that bin you use the parts in the other bin. And I remember we had like an hour lecture on this and the history of how it all works and I didn't understand it and then I went and saw it ... And just to actually physically see that happening was like why did we have an hour lecture on that that made no sense? …It just seems common sense to me once you saw it”. [Interview 8]
To integrate evidence into practice requires a complex process of converting explicit and tacit knowledge into activity, to apply this in practice a person must to make sense of the information in the context in which it is used, this process of meaning making can be enabled by discussions with colleagues and by observing the way in which others apply the knowledge before then attempting one’s own application (Li et al, 2009). At university Mathew learned about industry procedures in the form of didactic lectures, but without a contextualised frame of reference, he struggled to understand the processes being described. Having begun his placement and witnessed and experienced the process in use first-hand, he was able to visualise the procedure and its purpose much more clearly, facilitating his understanding through the integration of his theoretical knowledge with observations of its direct application in industry.
For some, conceptual knowledge was viewed to lack value when there was not a solid understanding of where and how it can be applied in practice:
Kevin: “the theory is kind of it's alright but unless you can physically see what your applying the theory to, it’s sort of, to me it seems a bit pointless perhaps”. [Interview 3]
Sam: “I wanted to apply what I'd learnt at uni, I wanted to see where it fit in if that makes sense because it’s alright learning all this stuff but if you're never going to use it, it’s a bit pointless”. [Interview 10]
In some instances, this perception led to a propensity for disengagement:
Mark: “I probably just didn't take as much note at uni as I should have, I didn't think a lot of it would be applicable”. [Interview 4]
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Many students upon commencing their placement were however able to gain a better insight as to the relevance of their practical sessions and theoretical lecture content and began to better understand how what they had learned at university formed a necessary contribution to the development of competence within their profession.
Kevin: “You can develop a massive design for something and there can be eight or nine different ways of making it and it's sort of, I didn't really think about it before… I looked back at what I'd done in my first and second year and like 'oh actually yeah this is what we've got at *Placement organisation name* but if we send it somewhere else its cheaper and they've got this tool and so we can do it that way instead”. [Interview 3]
Adam: “Pre-placement I didn't really care much about the content of the course because I couldn't see how it related to the outside world it was very contained. I also do not possess an aptitude of coding from scratch, because of the focus on this I wasn't able to find ways to get around this problem which would be available in the real world such as Wordpress, Joomla, Bootstrap and other frameworks you can make use of…however by going on placement I saw how the skills were translated into a real world environment”. [Facebook group]
Will: “I was working in a pharmaceutical environment working with a lot of machinery and a lot of products that you've never seen before in your life, and you can only understand that if you've done a degree to actually get your head around it”. [Facebook group]
For Mathew, work placement participation fostered the development of new epistemological understandings as to what it means to learn as an engineer, from his experience of working in practice he came to realise that university cannot teach what it is to be a competent engineer in every workplace, because competence differs as a consequence of context, instead they must teach the general principles of engineering to then be adapted and applied as required by the workplace:
Mathew: “They can't teach how *placement company* build a car because *other car company names*, everyone does it differently and not everyone wants to go into car manufacturing, so it’s very difficult for uni. They have to teach general engineering and they try and cover everything but that was the biggest thing I found or one of the things I found in industry was erm just how different it is and how specific things are to *placement company name* … I feel like an engineering degree teaches you the really basic stuff but then you have to really apply it in a way that the company wants you to apply it”. [Interview 8]
Many students were able to learn through placement participation where general skills and principles learned at university underpin tasks within the workplace.
Tom: “No, it was different to what I'd done I'd never erm 'cause it was all about your pressure of your flanges and things like that your pressure of your bolting cover and we hadn't covered that at uni, so that some was something I learned on the placement, but the principle was the same. It’s all just maths it’s all calculations but applying it to that was different so that was something I learned there.” [Interview 2]
Martin: “No in fact actually we didn't do anything on statistical process control until fourth year so I knew more about that when I came back than I did before I went, we'd done all the maths was useful especially looking at statistics because I'd done statistics at A level but it had
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been such a long time if I hadn't covered it in second year I'd have probably struggled to pick it up as fast as I did”. [Interview 7]
Kevin: “I was hoping to get some experience of where my university knowledge would be applied in the real world, rather than the mainly theoretical environment of university. It was kind of surprising that the majority of the subject knowledge did not directly apply to the work that I was doing, although I think if I had not studied the subjects I would have been at a disadvantage, as it laid the foundation skills required for me to find information, use new software, and even work better as part of a team”. [Facebook group]
For Kevin, an ability to recognise where his university knowledge applied on placement also served as an opportunity to identify how much he had actually learned whilst on his undergraduate course.
Kevin: “I learnt so much and sort of I didn't really realise how much I'd learned until I was on placement and I was like 'oh I know that'!”. [Interview 3]
Though many of the students suggested they had come to recognise the value of theoretical knowledge and had identified instances of where it applied in industry, the suggestion that students struggled to engage with this aspect of their learning prior to placement is somewhat problematic. Particularly so where certain students suggested they had then felt almost completely unable to form these connections between the two contexts:
Phil: “it’s quite theoretical a lot of it so what I was able to bring from my actual first two years probably quite a, I wasn't necessarily in engineering prior to that but I had a very strong practical background so that would probably dominate and did dominate and even now I kind of think to myself in a kind of priding myself ironically in saying even after a degree I've still managed to have learnt nothing and kind of behaved like the erm sledgehammer type I was before you know”. [Interview 1]
Robert: “University, erm, not a lot, is my first opinion to that. I think with the concepts and the engineering understanding of problems yes to a degree, but I didn't really use as much in my work experience where I worked in manufacturing. I'd say I gained a lot probably more from my placement than university”. [Interview 9]
Kareem: “I'm pretty certain most of the things I learnt at university I didn't really use on placement”. [Interview 12]
Litzinger, Lattuca, Hadgraft, and Newsnetter (2011) propose that the knowledge of experts and novices has been demonstrated to differ both qualitatively and quantitatively. New learners, they argue make only superficial connections between their knowledge and the domain in which it can be applied, whereas expert knowledge is organised based around key concepts and a clear understanding of the domain. The ability to transfer knowledge however requires this ‘expert’ understanding of general principles and the specifications of the contexts in which it would be of use. And so, they argue, learning environments must be designed in a way that assist students to develop contextualised knowledge as opposed to leaving them to learn on their own the conditions under which their knowledge and skills can and cannot be applied. Thus, Litzinger et al suggest, instructors must create
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effective learning experiences which support the development of a deep understanding which is centred around: key concepts and general principles, the development of technical and professional skills, and the application of knowledge and skills to problems representative of those they would experience in professional practice. This has been described as a deep approach to learning and has had a significant volume of research dedicated to its study, part of which has demonstrated that where students approach learning with different intentions, they will adopt different learning strategies. If students in the present study as many suggested were unable to see the use of the theory, its relevance to industry and its value to their development as engineers, their intentions to learn it and thus their approach to learning must have been affected.
One engineering student Mark, provided a salient example of this. Mark explained that whilst on placement he had been unable to fulfil his role as a design engineer due to a lack of knowledge about machinery. Initially he had attributed this issue to be a result of a lack of practical experience, however upon further reflection he began to recognise where an inability to engage with his supporting lectures had exacerbated the issue:
Mark: “In hindsight, if I'd have took note more in sort of the practical lectures not the practical sessions that we went off and did at the college, but in the lectures where they were talking about the practical side of engineering that would have been miles more useful than it actually was. 'cause I probably didn't take note as much as I should have knowing that in the end I was going to be designing stuff using that machinery… I think it would have helped more if I'd have took more notes”. [Interview 4]
Mark described how he had begun his placement in the company’s design department where he worked for a few weeks, before his colleagues eventually came to deem it necessary to send him to work on the shop-floor, to build a foundation of understanding about the potentials and constraints of the machinery used to produce his designs. When asked why he felt it was that his training was altered in this way he explained how his lack of practical awareness had hindered his ability to fulfil his role as a design engineer.
Mark: “I sort of didn't know what I was doing, I could use the design software and I could design anything that they wanted me to draw on the screen but how they go about making it in the workshop, I didn't have that knowledge in my head… I was going on with my merry way drawing stuff thinking oh this looks good and then they'd be like ‘but how are they going to make it though?’ And that's just that's the side of it I just hadn't even thought about”. [Interview 4]
Mark’s introductory experience in the workplace had resulted in him feeling as though he was ill prepared for work, an issue he attributed in large part to his course but also to his own failings based upon the notion that he should have been better able to translate his university experiences to an understanding of how his workplace machinery worked, and in what ways that impacted his own role.
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However, Mark also made reference to the fact that he had felt his colleagues did not know his capabilities, that they had been unfamiliar with placement students and had assumed he would be more capable than he was:
Mark: “They were actually looking for a full time engineer a design engineer… I sent them a letter saying do you want to take on a student for a year and they said yeah basically”. [Interview 4]
Mark: “I don't think they knew how much I knew, I don't think they'd done it before, I don't think they'd took on a student before”. [Interview 4]
Mark: “I think I was expecting to be eased in a bit more erm because I don't think they really knew what they were getting I think they thought I could do a lot more than I could”. [Interview 4]
It is interesting that Mark felt that his company’s lack of familiarity with placement students, meant they were unaware of what he should and should not be capable of at this stage in his learning, but still appeared to feel that his inability to perform his role resulted from his own shortcomings and those within his course. Mark appears to have adopted a perception associated with a cognitive perspective on learning, that is, where learning involves the individual acquisition of knowledge and skills, an inability to integrate said knowledge must therefore be the fault of the student. Learning however is a complex phenomenon and whilst Mark’s inability to engage with his course content may have contributed to his initial struggles on placement, this had not been the only influential factor. Lave and Wenger (1991) stress that it is more important to explore what kinds of social engagements provide the best context for learning to take place than to focus solely on individual cognition. They reject a view of understanding as the acquisition of knowledge but instead suggest it involves building increased access to participating roles in expert performances through the process of legitimate peripheral participation. Through legitimate peripheral participation a person’s intention to learn becomes engaged and the meaning of learning is formed in the process of working toward full participation in practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991). This can be achieved in a variety of ways including special assistance, lessened risk and responsibility, increased supervision or lessened production pressures and must involve access to the three dimensions of practice: mutual engagement with other community members, with their actions in the negation of enterprise and to their shared repertoire in use (Wenger, 1998).
The partial participation of new members provides access to sources for understanding through a growing involvement in practice. As a place where a learner is able to work toward more intensive participation, peripherality is empowering, it provides an observational look out post alongside experiences of participation so that the learner may absorb and become absorbed in the culture of
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practice and gradually assemble an idea of what constitutes their community’s practices. Legitimate peripherality is important for developing naïve perspectives or questions. As a legitimate peripheral