Action-Based TVET

Wherever experts on technical and vocational education and training (TVET) talk today about learning processes, you can hear the terms `action-based learning’, `action-oriented learning’ or `self-reliant learning’. It seems to be a very successful new way of learning to cope with all of the problems we presently have to face in TVET. But the pedagogical demand for this kind of learning has a long tradition. In Europe it reaches back at least to the seventeenth century and the famous educator Comenius. One will find in his book `The Great Didactic’ (Comenius, 1896) many statements such as the following: `Apprentices […] learn to forge metal by forging’. He wrote about the importance of doing within the teaching and learning process. Learning by doing was his motto. (This educational motto has almost been forgotten during the intervening centuries.)