Asia- Pacific Journal of Cooperative Education An Investigation Into the Possibility of a Growing Trend in Cooperative Education: ‘Reverse Cooperative Education’

Cooperative education as a strategy for combining classroom learning with workplace training is becoming well known internationally. So too are the concepts of life-long learning and continuous education and in the minds of many authors learning is not confined to what happens in a classroom, neither is it a ‘one-off ’ experience. Cooperative education typically occurs when a learner is placed into the actual working environment. The question arises, what about a working adult entering the academic arena? If this process is formalized could there be a new slant to cooperative education- one of life-long learning and reversal of cooperative education where the world of work sends its adult learner into the education sector? There is some recent research, including that from a small South African case study presented here, that suggests that there is now a growing trend worldwide- a trend of ‘reverse cooperative education’. The author considers that practitioners of cooperative education globally need to consider what implications such a trend has for the practice of cooperative education. This issue is discussed in this paper along with suggestions for further research into ‘revers