Both vocational education as well as apprenticeship (one of the shapes it takes in several countries), are undergoing a process of review and update. National differences show up in terms of upper secondary education, vocational education, transitions from education into employment and from youth into adulthood as well as different welfare systems providing a variety of structures to become adults, workers and citizens. Despite the literature tends to deal with apprenticeship as a synonym to alternance, our view is that the latter is a pedagogical device that builds upon work-based learning, a form of experiential learning itself, in order to set up bridges upon several crossroads: Theory and practice, school and work, democracy and productivity and, more importantly, individual and shared knowledge. Learning on the workplace, in its different arrangements, gives place to different understandings of vocational and professional knowledge. These are the topics discussed in this chapter, in an attempt to frame developments in apprenticeship schemes portrayed in this volume. © Peter Lang Group AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2021. All rights reserved.
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