Copenhagen

Second Semester: February -June

• Work-based and Organisational Learning (15 ECTS)
• Comparative and Transnational Education (15 ECTS)

Work-based and Organisational Learning (15 ECTS)

The content of this module should be viewed as a continuation and elaboration of issues from the module on "The learning individual in a lifelong perspective".

While revisiting some of the issues with regard to learning, innovation and the concept of knowledge as well as facilitating processes of knowing, we also move into an understanding of learning as social processes.

Moving into the realm of the social is a prerequisite for understanding how learning, innovation and processes of knowing unfold in workplaces as work-based and organisational learning.

In a pursuit to understand that, we need a concept of organisation, of organising and meaning creation and recreation in contexts of collectivities.

Thus, the content of the module is centred on providing students with introductions to different theoretical contributions to work-based and organisational learning with the point of departure in the following questions: What is work-based and organisational learning, how may it be studied and initiated?

This includes an introduction to an individual and cognitive approach as well as a practice-based and pragmatist approach to organisational and workplace learning, creativity and innovation as well as processes of knowing.

Comparative and Transnational Education (15 ECTS)

This module will introduce students to the field of Comparative Education through the exploration of issues and theoretical paradigms as well as through the investigation of contemporary educational developments taking place in national and transnational contexts.

The main theoretical premise of the module is that education systems across the world are deeply rooted in national histories and conditions. However, contemporary developments in education systems are not any more exclusively national nor simply 'borrowed' and 'lent' between nation-states. States no longer function as components of an inter-national system in which national relations are clearly distinguished. They are parts of a trans-national structure which contains nation-state policies, whereas nation-states are the contexts in which transnational policies are processed. Major transnational institutions, to which most states belong, are now the main settings in which important educational directions are drawn.

Students will have the opportunity in this context to reflect on what it is to think and research comparatively and what can be learned from the comparative investigation of education. They will go through different traditions, systems, policies and practices of education existing in different national and socio-cultural contexts. They will also have the opportunity to present and make analytical remarks on their own education system, as well as to know about those of their colleagues, thus being immersed into a considerable body of knowledge about a diversity of education systems.

Moreover, the module will give students the chance to study the role and function of major International Organisations (e.g. OECD, World Bank/IMF, UNESCO, WTO) and other transnational entities (e.g. the European Union) in education policy and the impact that these institutions have on national education policies.