Search Results for
"Vocational education"

THE TRANSITION FROM SCHOOL to work should be part of a lifelong process of learning for every student and all curricula should provide educational experiences to pave the way for this process. School-to-work (STW) is an umbrella term for activities, experiences, and opportunities that prepare students for the world of work and includes youth apprenticeships, mentoring, internships, job shadowing, career exploration, and integration of academic and vocational curriculum. This chapter provides background on STW, laws shaping requirements for STW programs, and research supporting STW components that can help shape the STW curriculum. Recommendations are provided for curricular elements of an STW program, and trends in STW are forecast./// Two significant developments in federal legislation have implications for facilitating the STW process for deaf students. The first is the well-known education for All Handicapped Children Act and its subsequent reauthorizations as the Individuals With Disabilities education Act (IDEA). The second impetus has come from the School-to-Work Opportunities Act (STWOA) of 1994 (Public Law 103-239), which allows access to funds to establish statewide STW opportunity systems. STWOA is a federal law executed by both the U.S. Department of education and the U.S. Department of Labor./// In 1994, as part of the national movement for educational reform, Congress passed the STWOA, which recognized the importance of including every student from kindergarten through grade 12, with special focus on the needs of women, minorities, and disabled individuals. Linked with IDEA, STWOA requires that educational programs have STW transition plans for all disabled students 16 years of age and older. STWOA also stipulates that trade school or college, as well as work, is to be considered employment and as part of a transition. Thus, transition plans can ensure better preparation for both college and work. If a student enters the world of work, transition opportunities are state- and locally based and are seen as incorporated into school, family, business, and community partnerships. These partnerships, along with effective staff development for teachers, professionals, and industry participants, and willing and motivated students, promote successful transitions into the world of work./// IDEA has helped to promote academic and career development of students who are deaf or hard of hearing. Individualized education programs (IEP) are required under this act for all students with disabilities who are receiving services in school. An IEP outlines all the academic services a student will receive, including the transition plan for students age 16 years or older. Transition plans detail specific programs, activities, and services that address the obstacles that youth with disabilities face as they make the transition to work. © 2006 by Gallaudet University Press. All rights reserved.

Provision of Further education (FE) colleges is becoming more important to the nation’s education strategy. Much of this provision is in National vocational Qualifications (NVQ); in 2003/04 almost half a million of these qualifications were awarded. However, in contrast to the situation in Higher education (HE), there has been comparatively little research into the impact of ethnicity and gender on retention in FE. This study is an attempt to address these issues and, in doing so, to provide statistical evidence for one FE college to assist in their strategic planning. Here, statistical analyses of the effects on student withdrawal rates of the factors: age, gender, ethnicity, studying for a qualification with an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) element and Widening Participation (WP) category are carried out. Our statistical analyses show that, in general, gender is a highly significant factor in withdrawal rates as are ethnic group and WP category. Studying for an ESOL-related qualification, which is used here as a proxy for language issues, was found to be a significant factor for Entry-level students only. Age was found not to be a significant factor at any level. This led us to the tentative conclusion that, while external factors such as financial hardship are likely to play a part in influencing the decision of students to withdraw, the different ways that genders and ethnic groups at particular levels of study respond to the college environment, apparently independently of external factors, may be an issue that could be addressed through a review of internal college factors including teaching and assessment. © 2006 The vocational Aspect of education Ltd.

This paper explores the implications for assessment of embedding qualifications from the vocational education and training (VET) sector within university qualifications. As VET qualifications are now all competency based, assessment in the two sectors is quite different, since universities have generally eschewed competency-based training and assessment. A general discussion of the issues is followed by the results of a small-scale research study carried out in the VET discipline area itself, with participants drawn from the AVTEC list of VET teacher-educators. Telephone interviews were conducted with nine Australian university academics involved with such qualifications; and data were extracted from a broader study of students who had undertaken the Certificate IV in Assessment and Workplace Training embedded within degrees and graduate diplomas in VET at one of these universities. It is clear that there are many assessment challenges involved with the practice of embedding, which have not yet been systematically addressed. © 2006, HERDSA.

In the United Kingdom there has been a considerable increase in the academic recognition of workplace learning, and a number of new awards drawing on workplace learning have been introduced. These include apprenticeships and Advanced Apprenticeships, both of which contain National vocational Qualifications, and the Foundation Degree. In addition, academic practice based on a credit framework has allowed recognition of workplace learning at higher levels of achievement, including postgraduate level. The facility to recognise a broader range of learning across the range of workplace awards has been welcomed as an aspect of widening both participation in and access to formal learning. This article will consider these developments across the spectrum of educational awards from apprenticeships to work-based Master’s programmes in the context of existing arrangements in the labour market. There is evidence from Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) reports that work experience placements (the main component of work experience at school) are segregated by gender. Statistics relating to some of the new awards also indicate the type of gender divisions which reflect established workplaces. Additionally, the effect of employment factors (such as the glass ceiling and full-time versus part-time working) constrains the extent to which women can take advantage of recognition of workplace learning at higher academic levels, where learners must be in a workplace position which supports the development and exercise of sophisticated skills. Consideration across the range of qualifications and employment supports the EOC’s case that, given the lack of explicit recognition of equal opportunities and gender segregation in national developments and policies, the new opportunities for workplace learning are likely to reinforce the status quo. © 2006 The vocational Aspect of education Ltd.

Recent reform in the Hong Kong senior secondary education has awakened the need for a balanced and comprehensive learning experience in the academic, vocational, organizational, social service, arts and sports domains to prepare students for employment, for learning and for life. Following on from its recommendation, the education and Manpower Bureau (EMB) launched a programme—the Career-Oriented Diversified Curriculum (CODC) in 2003, renamed the Career-Oriented Curriculum (COC) in early 2004, with the purpose of providing students with the opportunity to explore their possible directions for further study, and to fulfil their career aspirations. This study attempts to examine the effectiveness of, and the issues involved in, the first phase of implementing a CODC programme in a class of 32 senior Secondary 4 1 students from 19 different schools. The results suggest that providing a diversified career-oriented curriculum is an alternative way to widen a student’s learning horizon. Course providers and students agreed that the participants enjoyed the CODC pilot programme more than they did mainstream subjects. They also found that the programme was useful and relevant for future employment. © 2006 The vocational Aspects of education Ltd.

This paper explores how vocational, occupational, practical or indeed experiential education can assist in the development of phronesis or practical wisdom within the responsible learner. It proposes that formalized, institutionalized education might inhibit the development of phronesis in the quest for knowledge. We propose that should we desire a society which flourishes as a community based on relatedness not transaction and on transcendence not immanence, then we will need to restore the centrality of the workplace as a site for democratic learning rather than instrumentality. We explore this proposal through the lens of Heidegger's development of the notion of techne from the being of a craftsman to technical skills. © 2006 UCU.

Women’s care work sits on the boundary between unpaid work in the private domain and poorly paid, low-status work in the public sphere. It continues to be a site for the expression of complex, high-level knowledge and skills, and of ongoing gender oppression. The aged-care industry is a particularly salient example of such work. It is a low-status, female-dominated industry, in which entry-level workers who do the majority of the care work are the lowest paid of any workers in our society. It relies on a continuing supply of women of low socio-economic status who bring complex care skills from the private sphere into the workplace, with little recognition of this prior learning and little learning support for the ongoing challenges of working in such a complex workplace. This article explores the issues of learning care work in the aged-care industry. It is based on long-term collaborative research with an aged-care educator, and a research study of vocational learning in an aged-care organisation in regional Australia. The research aimed to explore the provision of new vocational education and training courses in this highly gender-segregated workplace. It was found that it was important to consider the different sorts of learning in the two parts of the curriculum: learning in preparatory training and learning in the workplace. New knowledge acquired in vocational education and training was often in conflict with what was learned in the workplace because experienced workers had acquired a different set of knowledge and practices in their predominantly workplace learning. The study revealed the ways in which care workers’ subjectivities were formed within complex negotiations around knowledge and care work. It raised issues about the gendered nature of care work and the reproduction of patterns of gendered subjectivity through institutional practices. © 2006 The vocational Aspect of education Ltd.

The requirement that teachers in the learning and skills sector are appropriately qualified and the setting of national standards for teacher training qualifications have led to an increased focus on teacher education within the sector. However, this does not appear to have been reflected in commentary or published research about the teacher educators who deliver the training. This article reports on research into the characteristics of a consortium network of 130 teacher educators based in the North of England and considers issues arising from an examination of their routes into teacher education. The learning and skills workforce is predominantly female, white and ageing. The teacher educator workforce, to which attention is drawn here, is more female, more white and yet older. The article provides a brief review of some of the current pressures in further education (FE), from where the teacher educators are drawn, and suggests that, however understandable, a failure to employ formal and transparent recruitment and selection procedures, as identified during the course of the research, is unlikely to enhance diversity. © 2006 The vocational Aspect of education Ltd.

The Irish economy has grown at an unprecedented rate over the last decade and the demand for skilled workers has increased dramatically. The Irish Standards-Based Apprenticeship (SBA) system has been one of the cornerstones of intermediate skills development with the capacity to produce high-quality craft workers and in sufficient numbers to meet demand. Introduced in 1993 on a phased basis, it now extends to all designated trades. Several aspects of the Irish system are striking. This paper provides empirical evidence of the success of the system for training workers for the construction industry and it also identifies a number of structural weaknesses. Its initial success is attributable to social partnership and its continued success has been facilitated by the capacity of the training agencies to respond to the national need by providing additional places for the educational release element of the system. The success of the Irish model is demonstrated in this paper in a number of ways, including a very high completion rate, high-quality training and satisfaction among all the stakeholders that it is a successful system of apprenticeship. © 2006 The vocational Aspects of education Ltd.

This study focused on determining the facets of assessment authenticity by exploring the perceptions of both students and teachers of vocational education and training. It elaborates on a theoretical five-dimensional framework (5DF) that differentiates between five dimensions and several sub-elements of authenticity. This framework led to the development of a questionnaire for examining if the facets of the 5DF are recognised by students and teachers in practice. Reliability and factor analysis as well as readability scores were used. Teachers recognised both the dimensions and the sub-elements as facets that determine assessment authenticity. In the eyes of the students, four of the five dimensions (task, physical context, form and result/criteria) determine authenticity, while students do not perceive the social context as a characteristic of assessment authenticity, nor do they differentiate the several sub-elements. Implications for using the 5DF to develop or evaluate authentic assessments are discussed. © 2006 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.