The Wiley Handbook of Vocational Education and Training

David Guile, Lorna Unwin

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781119098638, 9781119098591
• eBook ISBN: 9781119098720
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Formazione professionale

A collection of the theories, practices, and policies of vocational education and training written by international experts

The Wiley Handbook of Vocational Education and Training offers an in-depth guide to the theories, practices, and policies of vocational education and training (VET). With contributions from a panel of leading international scholars, the Handbook contains 27 authoritative essays from a wide range of disciplines. The contributors present an integrated analysis of the complex and dynamic field of VET.

Drawing on the most recent research, thinking, and practice in the field, the book explores the key debates about the role of VET in the education and training systems of various nations. The Handbook reveals how expertise is developed in an age of considerable transformation in work processes, work organization, and occupational identities. The authors also examine many of the challenges of vocational education and training such as the impact of digital technologies on employment, the demand for (re)training in the context of extended working lives, the emergence of learning regions and skill ecosystems, and the professional development of vocational teachers and trainers.

This important text:

• Offers an original view of VET's role in both the initial and continuing development of expertise
• Examines the theories and concepts that underpin international perspectives and explores the differences about the purposes of VET
• Presents various models of learning used in VET, including apprenticeship, and their relationship with general education
• Explores how VET is shaped in different ways by the political economy of different countries
• Reviews how developments in digital technologies are changing VET practice
• Discusses the challenges for universities offering higher vocational education programs
• Draws on both recent research as well as historical accounts

Written for students, researchers, and scholars in the fields of educational studies, human resource development, social policy, political economy, labor market economics, industrial relations, sociology, The Wiley Handbook of Vocational Education and Training offers an international perspective on the topic of VET.

1
Introduction to the Handbook: Vocational Education and Training (VET) Theory, Practice, and Policy for a Complex Field of Inquiry

David Guile^1,2 and Lorna Unwin^1,2

¹ UCL Institute of Education

² Centre for Learning and Life Chances in Knowledge Economies and Societies (LLAKES)

From creating and repairing the first artifacts for personal and communal use through to the Internet of Things, the capacity of human beings to transform the world around them, for better or worse, continues to be shaped by their participation in social practices and learning, collectively and individually. Developing the expertise required to participate in work‐related activities engages people in diverse forms of learning in a wide range of spaces throughout their lives. These spaces include workplaces, workshops, classrooms, community and domestic spaces (including forms of transport), and the natural environment, and increasingly through interaction with digital technologies, including the Internet. For some people, the expertise they deploy for what they term work (whether paid or unpaid) may be very different from the expertise they deploy in their leisure time, whereas for others there may be a close connection.

Regardless of what drives an individual or a group of people to develop expertise, they will at some point participate in vocational education and training (VET). This participation will range across a wide spectrum: from programs providing an initial introduction for school pupils, to what is sometimes naively referred to as “the world of work,” through to bespoke training organized by or for employers and self‐taught activity. In this way, VET embraces programs using work as their pretext, although treating it as a largely generic or abstract construct; programs that have a specific occupational focus and may lead to a license to practice; apprenticeships that combine education and training both in and away from the workplace; and work‐based learning of various types and duration triggered by changes and innovation in work processes. As a result, the relationship between VET and actual work practice varies considerably. VET is a complex and challenging field of inquiry precisely because it cannot be easily defined.

By starting our introduction to this book with a deliberately unbounded perspective on VET, we want to signal the importance of viewing this field of inquiry through a lens that is wide enough to capture both the “systems” approach and the theories, practices, and ideas that lie outside it. Indeed, the very acronym VET is problematic because it immediately suggests this Handbook is confined to analyses of different national systems for organizing formalized, regulated, and often government‐funded VET programs. Even more limiting, the acronym is often exclusively applied to education and training for young people as they make the transition from school to the labor market. In this way, VET becomes situated in a policy silo separated from, and sometimes deemed inferior to, so‐called academic education. Understanding the differences between the ways that countries have conceptualized VET over time and created the institutions, curricula, and pedagogies they regard as appropriate sheds valuable critical light on how VET is evolving (see, inter alia, Michelsen & Stenström, 2018). It can also identify effective practices and processes that can be shared across countries and occupational fields. In addition, as an instrument of government policy or an institution within a national system of education, VET becomes answerable to important questions about social justice (e.g., unequal patterns of access and outcomes according to gender, ethnicity, and social class). Heikkinen (2001) offers two compelling arguments for the continued importance of national case studies in VET research. First, they “may challenge the dominant a‐historical discourse in vocational education, which only advocates permanent change, its inevitability and progressivity”; and, second, historical, state‐based perspectives can paradoxically contribute a “progressive conservatism” in relation to defending, respecting, and caring for longstanding practices (Heikkinen, 2001, p. 228).

There is a balance to be struck so that VET is not solely regarded as an instrument of government policy and/or an institutional component of a country's broader education system. Equal weight needs to be given to the conception of VET as a relational concept, which forms part of a dynamic interplay with the evolving organization and process of work, including the emergence of new occupations. The dominance of the systems‐based approach has meant that in much of the international research literature on education, VET has been separated from and positioned below “higher education” and “professional education,” despite their association with the development of expertise. This segmentation is perpetuated in policy documents issued by national governments and supranational agencies such as the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD), World Bank, and European Commission.

In recent years, a number of studies have acknowledged the related nature of a range of challenges, including the ethical and practical implications of climate change for continued industrialization and economic growth, the impact of digital technologies on employment, the work and health concerns of aging populations, the challenges facing young people entering and making progress in the labor market, and continuing inequality across the global economy (see, inter alia, King, 2017; Olsen, 2009; Piketty, 2013; Standing, 2011). Placing equal emphasis on both continuing and initial forms of VET is being advocated as a necessary strategy to ensure people can adapt and refresh their expertise at different points in their lives in order to respond to changes in the labor market (see, inter alia, Bohlinger, Haake, Jorgensen, Toiviainen, & Wall, 2015; Field, Burke, & Cooper, 2013; Pilz, 2017). The predictions of the hourglass thesis that the growth in employment in advanced economies would increasingly occur at the top and bottom ends of the labor market have materialized to some extent in relation to Goos and Manning's (2007) polarization of employment into “lovely” and “lousy” jobs, with a corresponding squeeze in what are classed as “intermediate” jobs. Yet there is also evidence that this thesis is problematic in relation to its classification of jobs according to (a) definitions of skill based on educational entry requirements, rather than on the actual range of skills required and used in the workplace; and (b) wage distributions. Lerman (2017) asks, “Are the skills required for a master carpenter in some sense lower than those required of elementary school teachers with BA degrees?” (p. 182; emphasis in original). In addition, he explains that the wage measure does not capture the wide distribution and overlapping of wages within occupations. On these grounds, the predicted decline in what are classified as intermediate‐level jobs and the homogeneity of the terms lovely jobs and lousy jobs become less reliable guides to the changing nature of work.

In some occupational fields, including high‐status areas such as medicine and engineering, as well as in some service sectors, a more fluid division of labor is emerging. This has been stimulated partly by increasing project‐based and team‐based forms of working and also by the realization in work‐intensive environments that demarcations based on traditional hierarchies of who is “qualified” to perform certain tasks can and need to be challenged. This has resulted in some countries renaming VET, for example by (re)using the term technical education, and in the opening up of access for VET students to universities through the strengthening of VET qualifications and the creation of so‐called higher apprenticeships. There has also been a continuing debate about the concept and role of so‐called key competences in VET, and in education and training more broadly (alternative terms include generic, core, and transferable skills). Researchers have expressed mixed views as to whether they represent “an ineffective surrogate for general education and culture in vocational programmes” (Green, 1998, p. 23) or work in progress (Canning, 2007).

The European Commission (2018) has declared that lifelong learning should impart eight key competences, which “can be applied in many different contexts and in a variety of combinations” deemed necessary for a “successful life” (p. 14). These competences cover literacy; languages; mathematics, science, technology, and engineering; digital competence; personal, social, and learning competence; civic competence; entrepreneurship competence; and cultural awareness and expression. The latter four categories of competence in this list are sometimes referred to as “soft” skills. Warhurst, Tilly, and Gatta (2017) argue their emergence reflects a longstanding shift toward a “social construction of skill” led by the rise of service sector employment.

The OECD has enshrined the notion that work‐related cognitive and noncognitive competencies can be decontextualized and formally tested at an international level in its Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). PIAAC assesses the proficiency of 16–65‐year‐olds in literacy, numeracy, and problem solving, which the OECD (2016) argues are the “key information‐processing skills” that adults need to participate fully in all aspects of life in the twenty‐first century (p. 22). Scholars who have critiqued PIAAC and other international large‐scale assessments such as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) raise a number of concerns ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction to the Handbook
• Part I: VET as an Evolving Concept
• Part II: The Political Economy of VET
• Part III: Arrangements for VET
• Part IV: VET as a Developing Practice
• Part V: Challenges for VET
• Index
• End User License Agreement