Vocational training and occupational health: An ergonomics approach to gender and disabilities for social sustainability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Work-Oriented Training Path (WOTP) in Quebec, Canada, is a dual vocational training program that offers students with learning difficulties supervised traineeships. Teachers play a pivotal role in managing students' occupational health and safety (OHS), yet must do so under tight time constraints, limited institutional guidance and highly diverse student profiles. Building on an activity-centered ergonomics and capabilities framework, this multiple-case study explores how gender, disabilities, and work determinants shape OHS management within the WOTP, emphasizing their implications for social sustainability. Twenty-seven semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 WOTP teachers; 497 narrated anecdotes, which are units of speech when teachers' talk about students, were thematically analyzed to capture everyday mechanisms that expand or restrict safe participation in traineeship. The findings highlight challenges stemming from power dynamics between teachers, parents, and employers, which influence the operational leeway available for teachers to implement OHS prevention. Their work organization, conditions and tools also expand or restrict their capability to have an equitable approach. Additionally, the analysis reveals disparities in traineeship placement opportunities and OHS prevention, particularly concerning students’ gender identity and disabilities. Key factors influencing traineeship placements and OHS practices included students' communication skills, perceived autonomy, and suitability of behavior compared to social norms. Students with disabilities are frequently assigned repetitive tasks, increasing exposure to hazards that remain under-recognized. These results underscore the critical need for inclusive OHS prevention, fostering a more socially sustainable approach within vocational training programs. • Teachers' OHS prevention practices are shaped by knowledge, social norms, experience, and resource access. • Power relations between teachers, employers and families influence OHS prevention practices. • Gender norms and expectations for students with disabilities mediate their skill development. • Limited or non-normative social and communication skills in students complicate OHS management.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".