Joint HSCI/On-the-Edge Workshop on

The theory-practice gap: building a sociological bridge

Discussion workshop suggested by Ana Paula Marques and Joel Felizes (Department of Sociology, University of Minho)

Schools and universities are key-actors who, nowadays, face an increasing difficulty in the regulation and shaping of students’ careers. The education universe is therefore quite heterogeneous, regarding the social origins, trajectories, vocations and professional careers that are involved in it. Schools and universities must care not only about their curricula and pedagogic practices, but also about the professionalization, specialization and researching paths within their activity. Nevertheless, Portuguese students, especially when preparing their entry in university, face a scenario of fragmentation: many of the current degrees or courses hold ambiguous, over-specialized, incoherent or even illogic designations. It is then suggested that the ongoing reorganization of these degrees should connect their place and importance with the students’ experience as builders of a professional insertion. Across Europe in its diversity different situations co-exist. In countries and regions in the periphery (on the edge) of the EU particular constraints may raise. However this problem and discussion is of general and broad interest as it may significantly condition the development of our societies.

The organization and the structuring of the educative system ranks presuppose the access, by schools and universities, to relevant information regarding teaching practices and the professional future of their students. Such will allow them to identify cognitive, procedural, relational and other competences, considered nuclear in the conception of the proposed courses and respective curricula. This knowledge, necessary in all the disciplinary fields, should give clear directions and have in consideration not only the changes occurred in traditional jobs but also the mapping of new professions, whose frontiers seem more and more imprecise and broadening.

We intend to promote a small debate on these subjects, using as a starting example the representation of the theory-practice gap. Being a well-known issue among teachers, it is also a domain where it is possible to envisage a legitimacy quarrel, dividing those who promote teaching based on fundamental scientific knowledge, and those who stress the importance of the more practical applied knowledge.

To help us to understand the existence of this difference between “theoreticians” and “appliers”, it is possible to look into some of the social sciences’ debates and to find some well-known examples of this duality.