Collecting and saving meaningful experience: The bakers' and chefs' stories

While all their performances at school are evaluated by the teachers, apprentices’ accomplishments in the host enterprise are discussed each semester with their VET trainer on the basis of the learner’s actual performance and behaviour at work as well as the quality of their ‘learning documentation’. The learning documentation is a compulsory production to be elaborated on by the learner throughout their training in which they describe and document the important accomplishments they achieved for the enterprise as well as the competence and the experience acquired so far. At the time we started our project, this learning documentation was generally done by hand and presented mainly as short texts written on independent paper sheets. The professionals and apprentices were unanimous: this was more an incentive to judge the learners’ spelling competence than a basis for a real discussion of their competence in progress. In the three professions we were in close contact with – bakers and chocolate makers, chefs and clothing designers – the required learning documentation even interfered with another traditional written production apprentices were supposed to elaborate on during their training as a reminder – their recipe book or production catalogue. Such handwritten documents had really nothing to do with the nice looking and highly attractive recipe books flourishing in bookstores and no apprentice would be proud of their documents, neither their learning documentation nor their recipe book. After discussions with the professionals and with their professional association, it became clear that technologies could make their documentation more compelling by use of text processing and photos inserted directly in the text, be their photos taken on the spot or downloaded from the Internet. We also decided to use appropriate and systematic templates, both for the recipe book and for the learning documentation, convinced that the filling of these documents would be more convenient than having to start over from scratch as was the situation before. Finally, we also rapidly agreed that technology would make it easy to combine learning documentation and recipe books in a unique electronic documentation, showing on one page the target recipe and on the reverse side, the apprentice’s current level of mastery and struggles in completing it, with the possibility of alternatively hiding or displaying one or the other, depending on who might access the pages.