| Summary: | Recent literature in the field of workplace learning has stressed the importance of guidance in the process of learning in and through professional practice. Workers do not learn just by performing specific tasks on their own ; they learn when they are afforded adequate resources and when more experienced workers are able to share their knowledge and skills and assist them in their work. In line with this body of research, the paper addresses the topic of guidance at work in a specific context : that of early childhood educators and their vocational training. By adopting an interactional and multimodal perspective on guidance, the paper investigates how training opportunities are provided by vocational trainers in the context of internships. What constitutes the “practice of mentoring” in early childhood institutions ? Through what sorts of “action” is guidance provided and accomplished in naturally occurring educational practices ? How do mentors provide students with participation opportunities in naturally occurring educational practices ? How do students engage with these participation opportunities and make use of the resources afforded to them ? In this paper, three distinct interactional participatory configurations are identified, defined and empirically illustrated : i) observation, ii) joint-action, and iii) display. These configurations stress both the complexity and the dynamic nature of training practices as they occur under working conditions
|
|---|