Search Results for
"Vocational education"

Seija Mahlamäki-Kultanen INTRODUCTION Rural municipalities and villages all over the world, including Finland, are losing their younger inhabitants and enterprises at the same time as bigger centres (towns and cities) keep growing (Cecora, 2000). Sustaining the population of rural areas by increasing the number of rural enterprises is a big challenge for vocational education and entrepreneurs. According to Finnish Law, each Finnish vocational curriculum includes entrepreneurship education, and a vocational degree should guarantee the competence for independent business ownership. The restructuring of the Finnish vocational education system meant that at least 20 credit units of work-based learning and everyday contact with entrepreneurs are included in the 120 credit units of the vocational study programme. This study sets out to see what the entrepreneurial culture in Finnish rural areas is like and whether it gives cultural room for the young students from vocational institutes to become entrepreneurs. Basically, vocational education is culture-bound and the cooperation between educational institutes and entrepreneurs depends largely on mutual understanding of each other. The methodology used is qualitative triangulation; cultural narratives, metaphor analysis and theory-based rating of the sectoral business cultures according to the theory of cultural differences by Hofstede (2001) are used. CULTURE AND CULTURAL DIMENSIONS According to Hofstede (2001), culture is the collective programming of the mind. Still, not everyone in a given culture adheres to the same dominant thought pattern. Hofstede found four cultural dimensions originally from an international questionnaire study of IBM employees, which asked people about an imaginary ideal job…. © Alain Fayolle, Paula Kyrö, Jan Ulijn, 2005.

In this article I draw attention to the current legitimising of new forms of identity of vocational and higher education learners. Using identity as a lens for examining pedagogy I focus on one of these new forms–the learner-worker identity. I examine one teaching and learning practice portfolio development, by discussing the program within which this practice is located and then analysing the texts that are written by the learner-workers as they participate in this program. Through this examination I draw attention to the complex set of identities and accountabilities of learners who move between work and learning sites, and in doing so I aim to illustrate the usefulness of understanding these kinds of textual practices as identity work. © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

It is widely accepted that the vocational and professional training system has a major impact on national competitiveness. In this paper a number of German-British studies in manufacturing and services are examined in order to show how skill systems have affected the comparative strengths and weaknesses of the two countries' productivity performances. The studies have been conducted since the end of the 1980s to 2003 and have revealed specific links between vocational training, products and competitiveness on the basis of matched plant comparisons. The comparison between Britain and Germany has been chosen as these countries have very different national VET systems. The findings suggest that higher levels of apprenticeship training in German companies give them an advantage over their British counterparts with respect to flexibility to changes in markets, technology, quality and supply chains. The paper closes with a short discussion.

This paper examines the socio-moralistic justification of vocational education in colonial and contemporary Ghana. In the international arena, vocational education has been justified in various ways (mostly in economic terms), but in Ghana, the primary reason for introducing vocational education has always been the development of socially appropriate character, as a means of halting social problems such as urban migration and unemployment. The consistent sociomoralism of vocational education has been met with persistent public aspirations for academic and longer education. The government has attempted to solve social problems by curricular change, but the causes of the problems are in labor structure and the incentive mechanism of schooling.

The background to the work reported in this chapter is an educational reform which seemed to contain unpromising elements of managerial control and prescription, namely the 'competence-based' format for vocational education initiated in the UK by the National Council for vocational Qualifications (NCVQ)l. The approach to vocational education promoted by NCVQ consists of detailed specifications of the competences 'required in employment', to be demonstrated in portfolios of evidence derived from workplace practice. This can be presented as a (positive, progressive) reform in that it represents an attempt to: 1 derive curriculum aims from practitioners' experiences (rather than merely from academics' theories) through a process of 'functional analysis' of work roles2; 2 expand educational opportunity by ensuring that access to qualifications is not limited by practitioners' inability to afford or attend expensive or distant 'courses' - because educational requirements are entirely embodied in 'outcome' statements describing professional practice; 3 give learners greater control over their education by making explicit in advance the criteria by which their work will be assessed; 4 ensure that vocational curricula and qualifications are directly 'relevant' to the work roles to which they refer. (Jessup, 1991) However, these claims are frequently met by counterclaims, criticizing competencebased curricula as fragmented and reductionist, as a denial of the creativity and autonomy of professional work and the subjection of professional education to crude managerial control (Ashworth and Saxton, 1990; Field, 1991). In particular, such criticisms have been advanced by writers with a commitment to an action research oriented version of professional development (Elliott, 1991; Norris, 1991) and we have much sympathy with their point of view (see Winter, 1992). © S. Hollingsworth, 1997. All rights reserved.