Rôle des situations professionnelles dans la formation en alternance. Cas des ingénieurs de Production de l'Institut Supérieur des Techniques Productiques de Saint-Étienne
VEILLARD Laurent, 20 juin 2000

This work investigates the role of professional situations in the development of student-engineer's knowledge, within a sandwich course. Our study is carried out in a vocational school, at the tertiary level. This school (ISTP de Saint-Etienne France), trains engineers in charge of industrial production. The teaching is organised as a sandwich course, alternating periods at school, an periods in a firm. During this training course, students have to manage a large-scale project to improve the socio-technical organisation of the manufacturing units of the firm. To study the impact of professional situations in developing students' vocational abilities, we have developed a theorical framework on the basis of some aspects of activity and action theories (Rasmussen, Leontiev, Thévenot). This theoritical framework also uses the concept of "milieu" proposed by the french didactician Brousseau. From a methodological point of view, we have chosen the case study. Two complementary levels of analysis are used to study the activity of two students. The first level (the global level of analysis), reconstitutes the students' activity during the 3 years of their training course. Whereas the second level (the local level analysis), focuses more closely upon a 5 days period situated in the middle of the training course. Our results show the consistency and the complementarity of these two levels in studying the students' activity. This study also shows that the students have gained two different types of expertise at the end of that training. We stress some important factors that explain this difference: (1) The socio-technical organisation of the firms, (2) The students' "location" in this organisation (from both hierarchical and functional point of view), (3) The type of project, (4) The two tutors role (school tutor and firm tutor), all of which play an important part in the development of some specific types of professional knowledge.