From experience to reflection and learning: the educative value of university traineeship

Starting from an analysis of the reports written by university students enrolled in education programs on their curricular traineeship, we propose a strategy to re-elaborate experience, aimed to foster and improve reflection processes. The theoretical framework we refer to is John Dewey’s reflective thinking, resumed at a later time by Schön (1983, 1987), which identifies two levels of reflection: reflection in action and reflection on action, from a distance. In our work we used the Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) as a methodological approach to qualitative research where theory is rooted in the data and emerges from it. The projects involved the following steps: 1. analysis of students’ reports on their traineeship experience. The analysis was carried out by groups of researchers; 2. semi – structured interviews to students who had just finished their traineeship and were about to write the final report. The interviews were designed to ensure that the trainees could look critically at themselves and their actions and explain the results of this reflection; 3. data analysis and comparison between the reports produced without any interview and those produced after the interview, to assess whether or not there had been an improvement in terms of ability to think reflectively about experience.