A pedagogical poor relation: The neglect of vocational educators’ qualifications (original) (raw)
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Our paper seeks to explore whether (or not) it is important to learners in Australia that vocational education and training (VET) becomes a universal part of the adult learning 'service' transaction. The idea for the paper's rhetorical title, 'Do you want VET with that?' comes from a service catchcry in a fast food chain that seeks to 'add value' to the sales transaction by adding the option of 'French fries'. In exploring the question and its presuppositions about the value of VET, it critically examines a range of Australian and international policy and research literature. The paper addresses several AVETRA conference themes, including the work of VET and its workforce, learner success and skilling for Australia's future. Our paper critically examines the extent to which 'value adding with VET' has permeated contemporary education and training discourses in all sectors. It seeks to deconstruct some of the prevailing presuppositions about the specific vocational utility of learning. We use some of our previous research around community learning contexts to examine the link between learning and a range of non-vocational outcomes, such as benefits to health and wellbeing. Our paper provides evidence from the literature examined to challenge the notion of learning for vocational outcomes alone. In doing this it draws on critical insights from recent research from Europe and its component states that confirms how learning can produce outcomes that benefit people's lives and self-esteem beyond work. We argue that there is room in contemporary VET discourse/s for an expanded discursive field where health and wellbeing can be acknowledged and valued as important 'outcomes' of learning alongside skills development.
Vocational Education and Training (VET) Teachers have usually had a characterized by complex and diversified learning process. A large number of VET teachers have mixed professional pathways – both teaching and working outside the educational system. This mixed experience is considered in the VET centres as a guarantee of better teaching, because the teachers are more familiar with working life. The socioeconomic networking activities of VET centres highlight the as social networking capacity. For this reason the recognition of competences acquired non-formally or informally by VET teachers takes a central place in the careers of VET teachers. Would it be useful to incorporate this mechanism of recognition in the "trans-national standards of teachers' education for VET?" For several decades now there has been in the EU context a debate on the mechanisms for recognition of competences acquired non-formally or informally. The speaker intends to discuss the recognition of...
Wheelahan, Leesa (2013), Towards a model for professionalising VET teaching
in Marginson, Simon (ed.), Tertiary Education Policy in Australia
The qualification needed to be a vocational education and training (VET) teacher in Australia is a Certificate IV in Training and Education. This qualification does not equip teachers with the knowledge and skills they need to be autonomous practitioners who can support students’ learning. In drawing from a 2010 research project on the quality of VET teaching in Australia, this chapter argues that VET teaching needs to be professionalised, and that VET teaching qualifications need to be differentiated to reflect the different types of students, industries, fields and levels in which teachers teach. The current approach to VET teaching is based on low trust and high levels of regulation and compliance. VET teachers have been demonised as being inadequate, and attempts made to teacherproof the curriculum through competency-based training models of curriculum. We need a high-trust model of VET teaching based on teachers’ professionalisation through developing a qualifications framework and model of continuing professional development that will support high quality teaching, and a professional body to take responsibility for developing the profession.
Pressure for schools to adopt a more vocationally oriented approach to the education of young people is by no means new, especially in times of economic dislocation. White has demonstrated considerable similarities in public policy responses to periods of youth unemployment in the 1890s, 1930s and 1990s (White 1995). In each case, demands for increasing vocational relevance were placed on education systems, at least until the peak of the crisis was perceived to have passed. Australian education systems at the beginning of the twenty-first century are once more in a period in which great hope is placed on an expanded vocational dimension to school students' learning. Some of these initiatives are purely school-based and rely on school-oriented certification and recognition, such as the various State Higher School Certificates (HSC), School Certificates (SC) and Senior Certificates. Others attempt to utilise recognition arrangements under the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF), which is intended to apply to programs in the national vocational education and training (VET) sector, primarily oriented to vocational preparation of adults. My work in this paper builds on recent research on the Australian and overseas experience of VET in Schools and Work Based Education. I argue that not all innovations under the VET in Schools rubric are equally valuable. I suggest that programs and policies which depart from the traditional educative role of schools in favour of an unduly narrow concept of 'training' or work-relevance are likely to be self-defeating; that work itself may be a rich source of student learning and development; and that VET in Schools initiatives too frequently represent an evasion of a pressing need for more deep-seated reform of schools and schooling.
VET in higher education: rethought pathways, pedagogy or pragmatism?
This paper reports on the preliminary findings from a project funded by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research to investigate the provision of vocational education and training by higher education institutions. The project involved a review of the literature, an analysis of the sketchy statistics available on enrolments in Australian mixed sector tertiary institutions and interviews with 61 people. The study found that higher education institutions offer vocational education for a variety of reasons: as a historical legacy, as a result of a merger or acquisition, to broaden the institution's role and source of students, and as a part of vertical integrationincorporating the sources of baccalaureate students such as preparatory colleges and senior secondary colleges as well as vocational education colleges. The study also found that while sectoral designation was very important for TAFE institutes offering higher education programs, it was of far less importance to mainly higher education institutions offering vocational programs. Of far greater importance for public and private providers of vocational education were the different funding arrangements from governments. The findings from the study seem to indicate that Australian mixed sector institutes of tertiary education are developing partly for pragmatic reasons and partly to improve student pathways from vocational to higher education and to desirable occupations. Distinctions in pedagogy develop from differences in curriculum, field, industry orientation and teachers' response to students, which seem to be indirectly related to sector.
Review of vocational education and training research in the United Kingdom
2000
Background to UK VET research 0.1 Introduction: audience, purpose and guide to reading 0.2 Our approach to the field of inquiry 0.3 VET research in the UK-institutional and intellectual foci, funding and organisation 0.4 Research commissioning and funding 0.5 The national policy backdrop 0.6 The relationship between policy and research 0.7 Ideology 0.8 Link to subsequent sections 111 3. Complex teaching and learning environments 52 3.1 Multi-media and open and distance learning 3.2 Computer-supported learning 53 3.3 Business/Education partnerships 3.4 Workplace learning 3.5 The knowledge worker 3.6 The learning organisation 3.7 Knowledge management 4. Initial conditions 4.1 Policy emphasis upon increasing demand for skills, knowledge and understanding 4.2 Development of learning within companies 4.3 The role of experience at work in educational programmes 4.4 Lifelong learning 4.5 Relationship between initial VET and continuing VET 4.6 Facilitating self-directed learning 4.7 Education and training of VET teachers and trainers 5. Assessment and evaluation 5.1 Assessment 5.2 Evaluation 5.3 History and analysis of VET policy 5.4 Implementation of NVQs 5.5 VET for young low achievers and the 'disaffected' 5.6 Inadequate basic skills: adult literacy and numeracy 5.7 Comparative research 5.8 Educational biographies, longitudinal surveys and cohort studies 91 6. UK VET research that does not fit easily within the subheadings of the COST framework 96 6.1 Flexibility as a target of VET 97 6.1.1 Flexibility of VET system as a whole 97 6.1.2 Credit frameworks 6.1.3 Can a credit accumulation system help overcome divisions between academic and vocational qualifications ? 101 6.1.4 Credit for 'learning while working' 102 6.1.5 Flexibility of a VET system in terms of opportunities for progression 6.1.6 Flexibility of VET in particular localities: operation of post-16 education and training markets 6.1.7 Policy analyses of the introduction of market-based reforms in education and training IV 6.1.8 Employers search for flexibility through the employment of graduates 6.1.9 Flexibility in the light of changing business processes in dynamic companies 6.2 Mobility as a target of VET