Integrating Industry-Education Integration to Foster a Strong Sense of Community for the Chinese Nation in Higher Vocational Colleges: Pathways and Practices

Abstract

Industry-education integration represents the core educational model of vocational education, and situated learning theory offers a fresh analytical perspective for higher vocational colleges in cultivating a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation. Currently, these institutions face a triple predicament in this educational endeavour: a gap between cognitive depth and the quality of identification, a misalignment between teaching content and student demographic characteristics, and the superficialisation of practical activities. The root causes lie in the interplay of weak stakeholder capacity, fragmented educational provision, and disruptive environmental-ecological factors. From the perspective of industry-education integration, this paper proposes pathways including strengthening the institutional safeguards for school-enterprise collaborative education, restructuring curricula suited to higher vocational student profiles, constructing an immersive practical education system through industry-education integration, and expanding all-time, all-space educational fields both online and offline. These pathways aim to transform authentic production scenarios, industry cultural resources, and cross-ethnic collaborative tasks into effective resources for cultivating a sense of community, thereby facilitating the substantive transformation from cognition to identification.