Teaching and Learning Trends in the UK, EU and Australia
VET RESEARCH TRENDS | Kerry Barlow, Curriculum Projects Coordinator for the Community Services, Health, Tourism & Recreation Curriculum Centre
One way of checking the trends in research relating to VET teaching and learning is to monitor the recurrent themes of papers delivered at a range of VET conferences, both in Australia and in similar overseas countries. Another way is to monitor the types of research being funded by governmental education departments in the same countries.
TAFE Curriculum Projects Coordinator Wins the Eric Pearson Award.
Kerry Barlow, Curriculum Projects Coordinator for the Community Services, Health, Tourism & Recreation Curriculum Centre of TAFE NSW has won this year’s Eric Pearson Award.
Kerry intends to use the grant to do a comparative case study of the professional development of VET teachers in TAFE NSW and in Further Education colleges in the UK. Her study will consider both the content of professional development activities, especially as it relates to VET pedagogy, and the equality of access to professional development for part-time casual teachers. She is planning to travel to the UK in August as part of the project.
The competitive Eric Pearson Award has been granted every year since 1980 by the NSW Teachers’ Federation, having been set up in memory of Dr Eric Pearson. Eric was President of the union in 1974 and 1975, also serving as a Councillor, as member of the Executive and as a Trustee. He had also been President of the Teachers’ College Lecturers’ Association and President of the Australian Teachers Federation. Eric was active in campaigns relating to education policy, particularly as an advocate for the recognition of teaching as a full profession. Even though he had seen active service in WWII in New Guinea and Borneo, Eric was an outspoken critic of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
Kerry says she is thrilled to receive an Award set up to remember the commitment of people like Eric, and honoured to be one of the union members given the opportunity to conduct some research of direct relevance to members of the NSW TAFE Teachers’ Association. It seems that very few TAFE members of the Federation ever apply for the Award, and Kerry encourages more to hone their ‘Action Research’ skills and think about applying in the future.
An analysis of both these sources over the past few months from the United Kingdom (UK), European Union (EU) and Australia, indicates some recurrent themes of interest to VET practitioners. These recurrent themes appear to be:
- Issues relating to workplace and work-based learning
- Uses of information and communications technology (ICT) for teaching and learning and the pedagogical and other issues that arise
- Notions of life-long learning
- Partnerships with industry
- The professional development (PD) of VET practitioners
- Funding and industrial relations issues
In the UK, there has been major restructuring of several educational research and specialist units to ‘clarify roles and develop conformity of approach’ by all the units, including the inspectorate system.
A recent UK visitor to NSW, Prof Ewart Keep, Deputy Director of SKOPE, claimed the VET institutional structures in the UK were in a state of permanent revolution, in an effort to deal with so-called skills shortages. However, he warned that boosting supply of skills is largely futile without attention to employee relations, work organisation and job design. In both the UK and parts of the EU (eg in France) there appear to be partnership, eco-skills type projects, similar to the skillecosystem program in Australia.
The emphasis in the UK appears to be on meeting workforce skills needs, and a lot of research is directed toward building a stronger evidence base for policy and practice, so that research can be translated into useful teaching tools. The ICT Test Bed Project for example, builds on several earlier projects and aims to fund an extensive number of projects that will build holistic approaches to ICT implementation and collect evidence of effectiveness at the same time.
While the EU focuses on the importance of the VET system for economic performance, it appears to also emphasise the notion of social inclusion. The Lisbon (2000) and Copenhagen (2002) Declarations and the Maastricht Communique (2004) all called for enhanced cooperation between the member countries on VET issues and for each country to move national policy toward the adopted European Commission policy, for example on national qualification frameworks and on pathway issues to improve skills mobility across the EU. (See link to report from CEDEFOP - Vocational education and training - key to the future below).
At the EU level there appear few attempts to tackle Europe-wide PD issues, although many individual country’s research projects are dealing with a range of PD issues like the implications of ICT literacy amongst teaching staff.
There are also discussions about the low status of VET teachers, the ageing profile and teacher shortages in some industry areas in some countries of the EU.
The Leonardo da Vinci Life-long Learning program has funded, since 2000, over 1700 European projects aimed at meeting the key education and training initiatives of the European Commission.
In Australia the main research themes appear to be around
- life-long learning,
- workplace and work-based learning,
- industry and community partnerships,
- skills shortages,
- ICT
- approaches to learning for a range of learners, as well as
- VET practitioners’ skills currency
The main direct funding for research into VET issues is funnelled through the NCVER although many university researchers (looking at VET) obtain funding from other sources, and there is national funding for action learning PD type projects Reframing the Future and Australian Flexible Learning Framework. Some state governments and individual institutions allocate small amounts of funding for VET related research.
Why have the same types of VET issues arise in Australia and these similar countries?
Some writers explain this phenomenon by pointing out that these countries have strong corporatist states that use their VET systems, in the main, to meet the needs of corporations (Feingold, Sako, Crouch, 2001 Are Skills the Answer?). Others talk of the trend to neo-liberal governance that dominates policy-making (Seddon, Billett & Clemans, 2003, Politics of social partnerships: a framework for theorising).
Links
TESSARING, M & Wannan, J 2004, Vocational education and training - key to the future, Lisbon-Copenhagen-Maastrict: mobilising for 2010, CEDEFOP, Luxemburg.
