The Professional Practice Laboratory: Report of an innovative training experience in professional postgraduate studies

Abstract

The backlog in graduation rates is one of the structural problems of Mexican graduate programs, particularly those where thesis is the sole graduation requirement. This report documents the implementation of the Professional Practice Laboratory in the Master's Program in Urban Planning and Territory (MAUT) at the University Center for Art, Architecture, and Design (CUAAD) of the University of Guadalajara. This professional program has been operating since 2016 as an institutional response to the closure of a previous graduate program that was unable to maintain its graduation rate. The report aims to document the design, implementation, and lessons learned from the Laboratory as an epistemic tool for the production of situated knowledge and the completion of the graduation process. The strategy integrates the mandatory professional practice internship required by CONACYT (now SECIHTI) for professional programs with the graduation process, grounded theoretically in Situated Learning and the Logical Framework Approach as tools for epistemic translation between field experience and academic knowledge. Monitoring three cases with varying degrees of implementation reveals that the effectiveness of the program depends less on its formal curriculum design than on a shared understanding of its purpose among all stakeholders: coordinators, thesis advisors, receiving tutors, and students. The program is still being developed, so the reported results are qualitative and process-oriented. Its contribution lies in identifying critical operating conditions and proposing a model transferable to other professional postgraduate programs facing the same structural challenges.