Vocational Curriculum and Pedagogy: an activity theory perspective (original) (raw)
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Beyond competence: an essay on a process approach to organising and enacting vocational education
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The competency-based approach to vocational education is premised on narrow and dated conceptions of human functioning, performance and development. Its adoption is more driven by administrative concerns about measurable outcomes than educational processes and outcomes. Informed by educational science, and earlier debates, this article discusses the goals for and approaches to realise the outcomes that governments and supragovernmental agencies want. It emphasises the centrality of (a) experiences promoting students' learning, (b) understanding the goals to be achieved by vocational education, and (c) aligning these with educational processes. Common to individuals, their communities, workplaces, professional associations and government needs are the development of applicable and adaptable occupational capacities. Yet these cannot be secured or assessed through competency-based education. The capacities required for current and emerging occupational practice, necessitate a focus upon processes, not measurable outcomes. Hence, there is need to focus on learners' personal practices and educational processes.
This contribution to the symposium on Michael Young’s article ‘Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory: a knowledge based approach’, supports his contention that curriculum theory has lost sight of its object – ‘what is taught and learned in schools’, and argues that this has particularly deleterious consequences for vocational education and training (VET). VET is unproblematically positioned as applied, experiential and work-focused learning and it is seen as a solution for those who are alienated from or unsuccessful in more traditional forms of academic education. This paper argues that rather than being a mechanism for social inclusion, VET is instead a key way in which social inequality is mediated and reproduced because it excludes students from accessing the theoretical knowledge they need to participate in debates and controversies in society and in their occupational field of practice. It presents a social realist analysis to argue why VET students need access to theoretical knowledge, how a focus on experiential and applied learning constitutes a mechanism for social exclusion, and what a ‘knowledge rich’ VET curriculum would look like.
Working Knowledge in Vocational Education; Hands-on Activities as the Rotation Point for Learning
2016
The conceptions of Vocational pedagogy and Vocational didactics are new concepts in educational theory. They have developed in relation to an understanding of teaching/learning processes where workshop learning in schools and learning in working life is at the core. Vocational education contains a variety of different traditions and educational roads, but they are all based on learning through practical activities. Vocational pedagogy is a learner-centred approach to teaching and learning, where the relation between the student and the task is at the core. The central aspect of Vocational Pedagogy is that the work activity itself is the rotation point for learning. In this work I start to explore ways of seeing the unity and variations in curriculum development in vocational didactics brought about by the changes in technology and the development on the manual labour market and in vocational education during the last decades. I also discuss the central problematic of moving from "learning in praxis" to "general knowledge" in a variety of vocational fields in the point of tensions between learning in schools and learning in work life. .
Vocational Pedagogy: what it is and why it matters
2015
One of the original aims of A Curriculum for Excellence was to place more emphasis on employability and skills required to meet market demand. The final report of the Commission for Developing Scotland's Young Workforce has made a series of recommendations in the same vein. In Sir Ian Wood's own words, "There should be a continuum from primary school right through into employment". Developing a young workforce demands a culture change from all parts of the education and training system. In particular, there needs to be a focus on high-quality vocational teaching and learning, wherever and whenever it takes place. This paper challenges some popular myths-for example, that "clever people don't get their hands dirty"-before proposing six desirable outcomes from vocational learning. Having set out the aims, Professor Lucas goes on to outline the major features of successful vocational pedagogy, or the science, art and craft of teaching and learning vocational education.
International journal for research in vocational education and training, 2024
Purpose: This paper presents a qualitative systematic review of Swedish research on vocational education and training (VET) at the upper secondary school level over the past 20 years. The review is based on a theoretical model on curriculum making as social practice that may serve as model for comparative studies between countries. By introducing the model, the ambition is to open for new perspectives on VET curriculum in policy and practice. Questions regarding key themes and the interplay of discourses and processes across multiple sites in the education system have not been addressed in previous systematic reviews of Swedish VET research. The methodological approach in the present paper is a qualitative systematic research review with an integrative and interpretative purpose and research design. The qualitative review is based on the conceptual model of curriculum making as social practice, seeking to capture the inherent complexity and porous boundaries of education systems and movements of ideas, discourses and actors between sites of activity. The model is used for mapping the research, and a content analysis for identifying main themes and emphases and exploring and discussing the potential gaps that may inform future international research studies.
Journal of Technical education and training, 2012
The study seeks to understand the issues and challenges related to the implementations of activity-based instructions on vocational and technical education student in Nigeria. A survey was carried out involving vocational and technical education teachers in all six government owned technical colleges in Lagos State of Nigeria. A total of 150 teachers were selected randomly as respondents for the study. A four point scale items were designed to elicit information from the respondents. The findings of the study indicated that the techniques and the strategies adopted by the teachers of vocational education include: demonstration, field trips, projects, experiments and assignments. Various methods to evaluate students outcome include: process-product through systematic observation. It was evident from the study that constantly focusing on activity to make learning fun can actually hamper those students who make good progress without it. Based on the findings the researcher therefore co...
Practical subjects in the vocational curriculum: A critical review of the literature
Journal of Education, 2021
There is a growing number of studies in the field of vocational education and training, but not many focus on the practical subjects that prepare students for transition to workplaces. This critical review of the literature on practical subjects in vocational colleges set out to contribute to debates on the relationship between theory and practice in vocational education through a particular focus on the knowledge forms that are evident in curricular and pedagogical practices in practical subjects. The critical review identified the conceptual, procedural, technical, and contextual forms of knowledge in practical tasks and activities. Based on these findings and drawing on the concept of semantic gravity in Legitimation Code Theory, we found stronger and weaker forms of semantic gravity in practical knowledge and propose that strengthening and weakening semantic gravity through the purposeful selection and sequencing of tasks and activities enables cumulative knowledge building towa...