separation of work from education, vertical development from horizontal development
etc. He acknowledges that though curricula will necessarily involve hierarchical
assumptions about learning goals, they need to be built on a more realistic
understanding of how students actually acquire the tacit knowledge involved in
participating in ‘communities of practice’, whether in workplace or in educational
institutions. Young introduces the concept of connective specialisation to
conceptualise the basis of this new relationship between the priority given to subject
knowledge with the learning that occurs outside of formal settings and the knowledge
that is acquired through participating in ‘communities of practice’.
The idea of connective specialisation provides new principles for thinking about how
work experience can support young people to relate their formal and informal learning,
develop new knowledge and skill and hence support their employability. Traditionally,
work experience has provided access to types of knowledge and modes of learning that
are not tied-in to school, college or university subjects, while schools and colleges have
provided access to fairly stable and insulated curricula (Young 1998). In order to assist
students to connect their formal and informal learning and use these ‘connections’ to
develop new insights, knowledge and skill, work experience has to become part of new
programmes of learning that do not rest either on the assumed separation of or
superiority of modes of knowledge and learning.
This principle of ‘connectivity’, therefore, involves viewing the development of
knowledge and skill as a process of ‘re-situation’ (Guile and Griffiths (forthcoming).
Instead of seeing the acquisition of codified knowledge as a process in which young
people are taught to decontextualise their actions and thoughts and the development of
skill as a process which is, at best, tenuously related to abstract thought, educators and
policymakers, therefore, will have to work together to ensure that new learning goals
and new learning processes are introduced to help young people ‘progressively
recontextualise’ their knowledge and skill.
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