The aim of this paper is to consider the role played by vocational education and training (VET) for young people in Australia.
Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to consider the role played by vocational education and training (VET) for young people in Australia.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based on an analysis and synthesis of the existing research and literature, including the author's own body of research in the field, regarding VET delivered in schools and in adult sector institutions.
Findings
This research presents evidence that VET in Schools (VETiS) constitutes an important and significant curriculum reform in upper secondary schooling, but that it is usually offered at the most basic qualification levels within the subject model paradigm of senior secondary certificates. Its heavy use by young people from disadvantaged backgrounds raises concerns regarding social selection and it suffers from problems of low esteem and variable quality, with its place often questioned within the traditional academic culture of secondary schooling. With respect to adult VET providers, the article argues that the role of TAFE across Australia for 15‐19 year‐olds is relatively limited, with questions raised regarding the quality of programs for younger clients, and that low SES students are more likely to enter post‐school VET destinations.
Practical implications
This article argues that an integrated approach to VET provision, both during and after school, is needed to create quality pathways for students of all backgrounds.
Originality/value
The article presents an integrated view of the role played by VET across different sectors for young people. It is designed to be of value to policy makers and practitioners seeking coordinated policy responses designed to offer curriculum, diversity, and strong pathways into further education and quality full‐time employment.
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Visual representations of teachers and teachers’ work over the past century and a half, in both professional literature and popular media, commonly construct teachers’ work as…
Abstract
Visual representations of teachers and teachers’ work over the past century and a half, in both professional literature and popular media, commonly construct teachers’ work as teacher‐centred, and built around specific technologies that privilege the teacher as the active, dominant and legitimate principal agent in the educational process. This article analyses a set of photographs that represent an ‘alternative’ educational approach to normalised mainstream schooling, to explore the ways such practices might enact pedagogy within different social relations. Butler’s discussions of performativity and Foucault’s concept of technologies of self, offer a theoretical framework for understanding the educative and political work such visual representations of teachers work might perform, in the construction of capacities to imagine what teachers’ work looks like, with implications for capacities to enact teaching. The photographs analysed present a pedagogy in which the teacher is less visibly central and less overtly directive in relation to children’s learning than in normalised pedagogy. Thus, in important respects, they offer material from which to construct a different vision of what teachers’ work looks like, and, consequently, to enact teachers’ work differently. In this article I explore a set of photographs of Montessori methods at Blackfriars School in Sydney in the early twentieth century. I do so in order to establish whether such photographs offer a representation of teaching that differs significantly from conventional ‘normalised’ understandings of teachers’ work. This in turn is intended to inform one part of a transformative agenda to address problematic aspects of contemporary schooling.
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Melissa Jane Hardie and Kieryn McKay
In 2012, the Department of English at the University of Sydney, Australia, established The LINK Project, a faculty-driven outreach program that builds sustainable partnerships…
Abstract
In 2012, the Department of English at the University of Sydney, Australia, established The LINK Project, a faculty-driven outreach program that builds sustainable partnerships with low socioeconomic status (SES) secondary schools across the state of New South Wales. Focused on discipline-centered engagement, LINK positions pedagogic work as a vital site for the advancement of a social inclusion agenda. However, the operative logic of such programs present a distinct set of pedagogical challenges if they are to negotiate the established scholarly frameworks that resist principles of inclusion and threaten to displace and exclude the cultural knowledges, skills, and capitals of students of low SES backgrounds.
This chapter postulates a framework for productive disciplinary engagement that generates new spaces for “relational equity” (Boaler, 2008) between post-secondary institutions and outreach high schools and within diverse tertiary classrooms. It draws on three LINK learning modules designed to foster new ways of forming attachments and enhancing achievement in outreach contexts. In doing so, it describes an approach that seeks to open higher education institutions to multiple knowledges and ways of knowing (Gale & Mills, 2013) in the pursuit of what Jacques Rancière (1987, p. 2) calls “the minimal link of a thing in common.”
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Keywords
- Equity and diversity
- English studies
- widening participation
- social inclusion
- university-school partnerships
- low socioeconomic status (low SES) students
- first-in-family/first-generation students
- socioeducational disadvantage
- discipline-centered outreach
- sociocultural incongruence
- inclusive learning activities
- universal teaching
The field of educational leadership is very much dominated by studies of process. That is, discourses of best practice, effectiveness, efficiency, accountability, and so on…
Abstract
The field of educational leadership is very much dominated by studies of process. That is, discourses of best practice, effectiveness, efficiency, accountability, and so on, dominate the landscape. This then feeds into those working in schools in leadership positions and leadership teams coming to value style over substance. Whether a leader is working according to a particular adjectival leadership model matters little if the purpose of schooling and education is not the priority and shared. In this chapter, I argue that leaders need to have issues of social justice and equity as central to the purpose of their work, for those in disadvantaged areas and schools, and also those working in more privileged sites. Schools have unfortunately often been sites where forms of racism and social injustices have been perpetuated. A key aspect then for leaders is to work redress these practices. However, when working with large diversities in many schools, some leaders feel they are often unprepared for such challenges. In this chapter, I explore the difficulties and challenges of this kind of leadership with a particular focus on the Australian context and examine ways that leaders can think about and act in ways that recognize and acknowledge the diversity in their schools and communities, challenge their own assumptions and beliefs, and also work toward alleviating socially unjust practices.
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Emily Frawley and Larissa McLean Davies
The purpose of this paper is to explore the interface between high-stakes testing, disciplinary knowledge and teachers’ pedagogy in English. The most prevalent standardized…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore the interface between high-stakes testing, disciplinary knowledge and teachers’ pedagogy in English. The most prevalent standardized assessment form in the current Australian context is the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) undertaken each year by students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in all Australian States and Territories. Understood in the context of the Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM) (Sahlberg, 2011, pp. 100-101) – the NAPLAN tests serve as a bi-partisan governmental response to a perceived need to improve the quality of teachers and schools in Australia.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors draw on the key sociological constructs of Pierre Bourdieu (1995) to analyze the ways in which the writing component of the suite of NAPLAN tests serves to legitimize and idealize particular kinds of writing, writers and teachers of writing.
Findings
The authors suggest that in the absence of current literacy policy and curriculum instability, this national test shapes the literacy field, influencing the direction of writing practices and pedagogy, and, therefore, subject English itself, in Australian classrooms.
Originality/value
This assessment intervention is considered in the context of the history of writing, and addresses accordingly fundamental questions concerning the changing nature of the writing/writerly field, the impact of assessment on teachers’ conceptions of disciplinarity and pedagogical content knowledge and students’ experiences of writing and thinking in subject English.
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There has been virtually no explication of poetry-writing pedagogy in historical accounts of Australian distance education during the 1930s. The purpose of this paper is to…
Abstract
Purpose
There has been virtually no explication of poetry-writing pedagogy in historical accounts of Australian distance education during the 1930s. The purpose of this paper is to satisfy this gap in scholarship.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper concerns a particular episode in the cultural history of education; an episode upon which print media of the 1930s sheds a distinctive light. The paper therefore draws extensively on 1930s press reports to: contextualise the key educational debates and prime-movers inspiring verse-writing pedagogy in Australian education, particularly distance education, in order to; concentrate specific attention on the creation and popular reception of Brave Young Singers (1938), the first and only anthology of children's poetry written entirely by students of the correspondence classes of Western Australia.
Findings
Published under the auspices of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) with funds originating from the Carnegie Corporation, two men in particular proved crucial to the development and culmination of Brave Young Singers. As the end result of a longitudinal study conducted by James Albert Miles with the particular support of Frank Tate, the publication attracted acclaim as a research document promoting ACER's success in educational research investigating the “experiment” of poetry-writing instruction through correspondence schooling.
Originality/value
The paper pays due critical attention to a previously overlooked anthology of Australian children's poetry while simultaneously presenting an original account of the emergence and implementation of verse-writing instruction within the Australian correspondence class curriculum of the 1930s.
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Benjamin Zonca and Josh Ambrosy
Government primary schools in Australia increasingly take up the International Baccalaureate's Primary Years Programme (IB-PYP) to supplement government-mandated curriculum and…
Abstract
Purpose
Government primary schools in Australia increasingly take up the International Baccalaureate's Primary Years Programme (IB-PYP) to supplement government-mandated curriculum and governance expectations. The purpose of this paper is to explore how teachers navigate and contest dual policy-practice expectations in the Victorian Government IB-PYP context.
Design/methodology/approach
This study used a narrative inquiry approach. The narratives of two teachers were generated through a narrative interview and then re-storied with participants through a set of conceptual lenses drawn out of the policy assemblage and affect studies theoretical spaces.
Findings
The stories participants told show that competing mandatory local policy expressions are experienced and contested both to stabilize a technocratic rationality and produce alternative critical-political educational futures.
Originality/value
There a few accounts of teachers' policy experience in government school settings implementing the IB-PYP. In addressing this gap, this paper directly responds to prior claims of the IB's failure to promote an emancipatory pedagogy, showing instead that when teachers who bring a more critical understanding of educational purpose to their work take up the IB-PYP policy to support the enactment of that purpose.