The paper examines Science intern students' perceptions of knowledge transfer from university to work. Compared with research on learning at work, the field of transfer between university and workplaces is less well explored. Students were briefed on transfer at their workplaces then asked to submit an account of their own experiences of knowledge transfer. The briefing sessions and the accounts were then examined for emergent trends that may shed light on the extent to which students perceived transfer to be occurring. In short, students may recognize some transfer of knowledge and procedures with limited learning or they may extend and develop more general learning into specific learning at work, often providing original, innovative contributions to work practice. Contributions to work were seen as ideal transfer tools or boundary objects.
Policy in higher education suggests that curriculum should be more responsive to economist arguments than was the case in the past. Although some guidance has been given to how to develop more work-integrated curricula, little attention has been given to interactions in meetings between workplace and academic representatives in which issues of curriculum development are discussed. As such there appears to be a gap in current curriculum theory. The author suggests that such interactions may be fruitfully examined using concepts derived from studies in the sociology of science and organizational dynamics. Such analyses may contribute to understanding what conditions enable productive interactions, which may be the development of hybrid objects and languages which speak to both groupings.
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