After this nothing happened

In response to Michiel van Eijck and Wolff-Michael Roth’s article and Michael Mueller and Deborah Tippin’s rejoinder, we explore traditional ecological knowledges as science education. Adopting a stance of situated partial perspectives, and drawing on selected literature in science and technology studies and feminist postcolonial theories, we reflect on acts of dissociation, localism, utilitarianism and principled pluralism as referent points for epistemological and pedagogical renewal. In conclusion, we return to an opening narrative of cultural loss combined with an invitation to imagine science pedagogy as a site of possibility, vulnerability and fragility. Such an invitation, we suggest, involves troubling manifestations of pedagogical and epistemic desires of normative closures and certitude. What now remains is a series of tensions and open questions for further work.     

The future of Australian vocational education qualifications depends on a new social settlement

This article argues that the current social settlement underpinning vocational education and training (VET) in Australia is fractured. The current settlement is low trust and consists of qualifications based on competency-based training models of curriculum and competitive markets. The result is narrow qualifications that do not prepare people for jobs associated with the qualifications, and the decimation of technical and further education (TAFE) institutes which are the public providers of VET. The article develops a conceptual framework by integrating various literatures that are broadly consistent with institutionalist theories, including the Varieties of Capitalism literature, Raffe’s and colleagues model of intrinsic and institutional logics, and literatures on skills ecosystems and educational and labour market transitions. This analysis shows why VET has such a low status in Anglophone liberal market economies. A new social settlement is needed that recognises the diverse purposes played by VET qualifications, underpinned by a differentiated model of VET qualifications that does not tie the outcomes of learning so tightly to particular occupations. Such a model would recognise that some qualifications will have tighter links to occupations than others.     

How competency‐based training locks the working class out of powerful knowledge: a modified Bernsteinian analysis

This paper argues that competency‐based training in vocational education and training in Australia is one mechanism through which the working class is denied access to powerful knowledge represented by the academic disciplines. The paper presents a modified Bernsteinian analysis to argue that vocational education and training students need access to disciplinary knowledge using Bernstein’s argument that abstract, conceptual knowledge is the means societies use to think ‘the unthinkable’ and ‘the not‐yet‐thought’. I supplement Bernstein’s social argument for democratic access to the disciplines with an epistemic argument that draws on the philosophy of critical realism.     

Finding a new kind of knowledge on the HeartNET website

Background: A website developed by the National Heart Foundation (WA Division) and Edith Cowan University, with the help of an Australian Research Council–Linkage grant, provides insight into the sense of isolation experienced by many heart patients which prompts them to engage in a relentless search to answer the fundamental question: why me? Objective: To discover whether an online community for people with heart conditions may help instil a sense of sharing a journey with others, and to assess the impact of this shared experience. Methods: The qualitative data constituted 50 in‐depth interviews with heart patients using the HeartNET website. This website, with its 600+ membership, also provides Discussion Board data to add depth to the analysis. Results: Patients describe how their unsatisfactory search for information in one ‘place’ (the Internet) led them to discover a new ‘place’ (an online community) where they could ‘ask difficult questions’, and ‘gain support and wisdom’ from others. Conclusion: This paper suggests that, when anxious patients seek health‐related information, for example in a library, they may benefit from being given contact points to communicate with others who find themselves in similar situations. Internet‐based social software (Web 2.0) can provide this kind of communication.     

Why mission matters more for (some) charter principals

Reflecting post-bureaucratic organisation theory, education reformers intended charter schools to empower school-level leaders, most typically principals, with autonomy to pursue clear, student-centred missions. Yet little research explores whether charter school principals have more power than traditional public school counterparts. We summarise the limited literature addressing the issue. Second, we present findings from interviews with nine charter leaders from six US states who have experience in leading both charter and traditional public schools, a unique data set. Both prior research and our findings suggest that generally, leaders feel more likely to be held accountable for results in charter schools than in traditional public schools. Furthermore, without oversight from school boards and central office administrators, charter leaders report having more power over budget and personnel, and more ability to collaborate with teachers. At the same time, standalone charter leaders report needing business support and training, while those from charter management organizations feel free to focus on academic success.     

Not just skills: what a focus on knowledge means for vocational education

This contribution to the symposium on Michael Young’s article ‘Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory: a knowledge based approach’, supports his contention that curriculum theory has lost sight of its object—‘what is taught and learned in schools’, and argues that this has particularly deleterious consequences for vocational education and training (VET). VET is unproblematically positioned as applied, experiential and work-focused learning, and it is seen as a solution for those who are alienated from or unsuccessful in more traditional forms of academic education. This article argues that rather than being a mechanism for social inclusion, VET is instead a key way in which social inequality is mediated and reproduced because it excludes students from accessing the theoretical knowledge they need to participate in debates and controversies in society and in their occupational field of practice. It presents a social realist analysis to argue why VET students need access to theoretical knowledge, how a focus on experiential and applied learning constitutes a mechanism for social exclusion and what a ‘knowledge rich’ VET curriculum would look like.     

The Significance of Australian Vocational Education Institutions in Opening Access to Higher Education

Vocational education provides an educational but not a social ladder of opportunity to Australian higher education. The five dual-sector universities with significant enrolments in both vocational and higher education admit about twice the proportion of students transferring from vocational education as other universities. However, since the students in the upper levels of vocational education have a socio-economic composition similar to higher education students, vocational education does not provide a social ladder of opportunity by increasing access by students from a low socio-economic status background. Nevertheless, the article argues for the extension of dual-sector universities and other measures to articulate vocational and higher education and that more needs to be done to improve the representativeness of the upper levels of vocational education.     

Mapping the typology of transition systems in a liberal market economy: the case of Canada

This research explores links between tertiary education institutions and between tertiary education and the labour market as determinants of provincial and national transition patterns in Canada. The study consists of a provincial analysis that maps the typology of transition systems across Canada’s devolved federated tertiary education structure. The results show that, nationally: the links between education and work are relatively loose aside from regulated occupations; there is an emphasis on general education; and qualifications are used as a screen for entry to the labour market. However, while Canada can be broadly understood as a liberal market economy, there is provincial diversity within the nation; and there are varying logics for the development of skill, deployment of labour, and relations between institutions. The institutional and policy frameworks, structure of jobs, and formation of skill in Canada’s largest provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec reveal diverse characteristics of transition systems. However, despite internal differentiation in the value of vocational education, variations at the provincial level have not been enough to shift the federal pattern as a whole. Instead, in Canada vocational education is generally stigmatised and viewed as signalling low ability and motivation.