Abstract
This report observes several limitations of human capital theory, both as a description of the way qualifications are used in
the labour market, and in severely limiting the potential roles of technical and vocational education and training (TVET).
It proposes as an alternative the human capabilities approach which posits that the goal should be for everyone to have the
capability to be and do what they have reason to value. The paper reports the application of human capabilities to TVET as productive capabilities which are located in and concentrate on an intermediate specialised level, the vocational stream which
links occupations that share common practices, knowledge, skills and personal attributes. The paper reports an application
of the concept of productive capabilities to seven countries: Argentina, Australia, Côte d’Ivoire, England, Ethiopia, Germany,
South Africa and Taiwan. From this the report finds that productive capabilities rest upon broader social, economic, cultural,
and physical resources. These include the capacity for collective action, and the maintenance of physical integrity, physical and
soft infrastructure such as legal and social institutions. The cases also illustrate the substantial role of TVET in supporting workers in the informal economy to transition to formal employment, including in developed economies where informal employment is from 10% to 15% of non-agricultural employment. Another case illustrates how marketisation and privatisation separately and together are undermining TVET provision, institutions, systems, and teachers. The report’s final case illustrates the importance of TVET in educating the whole person.
The report concludes by considering implications for TVET’s development of its students, communities, and of occupations
and industries. The report argues that all qualifications have three roles: in education, in the labour market, and in society.
It argues that to develop productive capabilities TVET should Summary Technical and Vocational Education and Training as a Framework for Social Justice develop individuals in three domains: the knowledge base of practice, the technical base of practice, and the attributes the person needs for their occupation. TVET has important roles anchoring its communities and in developing occupations and industries. To fulfill these roles TVET needs to have strong institutions with expert and well supported staff.
Résumé
Cet article vise à comparer la perception qu’ont les professeurs de Colombie-Britannique, d’Ontario et du Québec des instruments d’action publique fédéraux et provinciaux quant à leur influence sur la production de recherche dans leur province. Les scores moyens, une MANOVA et des analyses post-hoc de Dunnett C réalisées sur les résultats provenant d’un questionnaire distribué à 786 participants révèlent que les instruments fédéraux sont perçus comme ayant une influence plus importante
que les instruments provinciaux, mais aussi qu’il existe une différence significative entre les scores attribués aux instruments provinciaux par les professeurs québécois et par leurs homologues des autres provinces.
Mots-clés : production de recherche universitaire, instruments d’action publique, palier provincial, palier fédéral, fédéralisme,
Colombie-Britannique, Ontario, Québec
Abstract
This article compares how faculty members from British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec perceive the influence of federal and provincial policy instruments on the level of academic research production in their province. Mean scores, and a MANOVA followed by Dunnett C post-hoc tests based on a questionnaire completed by 786 participants reveal that professors perceived federal instruments as being more influential than provincial instruments, but also that there is a significant difference
in the average score given by Quebec professors to provincial instruments, when compared to their counterparts in the other provinces.
Keywords: academic research production, public action instruments, provincial level, federal level, federalism, British Columbia,
Ontario, Quebec
Community colleges are not monolithic. Each has its own culture, its own array of personalities, and its own way of doing things. Yet my experience — more than three decades at five different two-year colleges in four states — suggests that most of them have
a great deal in common, too. With that in mind, if you’re new to full-time teaching in the community-college sector, here’s what you can probably expect as you start work this fall.
While online learning environments are increasingly common, relatively little is known about issues of equity in these settings. We test for the presence of race and gender biases among postsecondary students and instructors in online classes by measuring student and instructor responses to discussion comments we posted in the discussion forums of 124 different online courses. Each comment was randomly assigned a student name connoting a specific race and gender. We find that instructors are 94% more likely to respond to forum posts by White male students. In contrast, we do not find general evidence of biases in student responses. However, we do find that comments placed by White females are more likely to receive a response from White female peers. We discuss the implications of our findings for our understanding of social identity dynamics in classrooms and the design of equitable online
learning environments.
As a result of the new coronavirus epidemic most universities in China have encouraged their professors to apply online teaching instead of in-class teaching and this is likely to continue for the indefinite future. Some professors and students have complained about problems with online teaching and lack confidence in its effectiveness, but many are still new to the whole online experience. Here are some of the problems and some potential solutions.
This paper examines the policies to achieve universal participation in postsecondary education of 3 governments: those of Ontario, the UK (for England) and Australia. All 3 jurisdictions have high tuition fees and already have high access yet seek to further increase participation and attainment. But they do so in very different ways. The paper compares the governments’ policies on financing, relations between institutions, the involvement of community colleges and the role of private institutions in progressing towards universal postsecondary education. The paper finds two different approaches to achieving government goals in higher education – by formal planning and by constructing a market – and suggests that each is likely to achieve the goals government set for them.
Your students have questions, but they rarely ask them—especially at the beginning of the semester. They feel awkward or embarrassed, or maybe it’s just inertia. Whatever the cause, the vast majority of student questions go unasked. For teachers, this is wildly frustrating because we can’t answer the questions they don’t ask (though some questions can be anticipated). In many cases, the unasked questions represent anxieties and uncertainties that negatively affect students’ performance in class and inhibits their learning. This is a particular problem in the sophomore composition class I teach. It has a reputation as a difficult class, so many students arrive intimidated and nervous.
Study finds gender of instructors influences evaluations they receive, even if they have fooled students (in an online course) about whether they are men or women.
The first thing I thought, once I got the good news that I’d received tenure, was how ill-prepared I’d been for the process. Now that I am approaching my one-year "tenure-versary," I realize how equally unprepared I was for being a tenured professor.
For many months, I was so focused on the details of achieving tenure that I didn’t think enough about what the promotion would mean — specifically, how it would change my daily workload, my job expectations, my work-life balancing act.
Every March, as faculty interview season gets underway at two-year colleges, I find myself thinking back on some of the memorable train wrecks I’ve witnessed.
There was the extremely promising — not to mention sharply dressed — candidate who, when asked why he was interested in this particular job, replied, "If you’re implying that I don’t really want to teach at a community college, I assure you, you’re mistaken. I’m not wearing this Brooks Brothers suit for nothing."
Writing and teaching are the two great common denominators of academic life (OK, the departmental meeting is a third). With few exceptions, no matter your discipline, you have to teach, and you have to write.
I co-teach a writing course for graduate students at the University of Iowa, and I’ve been surprised at how often discussions of writing evolve into discussions of teaching. It makes sense: Both involve translating ideas so they can be understood by other people. As we ease out of one semester and start planning for the next, I’ve been thinking about how we might apply writing strategies to our course planning.
Particularly now, when you have several weeks until the next semester starts, it’s worth thinking of your courses like you think about your writing — as the result of a series of drafts. You don’t expect to sit down and write a journal article in one go. Why would creating a course be any different? Acknowledge that drafting and revision are essential to any creative project and give yourself plenty of time.
There is currently increasing pressure on universities to demonstrate how they contribute to their host societies. In the 21st century knowledge society, universities are seen as providing the key raw materials for economic growth, creating knowledge through research activities.
A new ideal-type of university has emerged, the 'world-class university' bringing together the best talents, researchers and facilities to drive national economic development. A wide range of countries – from France to China, from Germany to Saudi Arabia – have embraced this model and selectively rewarded universities conforming to that ideal.
But alongside pressure to be 'world class', universities are also under pressure from increasing student numbers unmatched by resource growth. Universities have responded by increasing efficiency of student delivery, reducing drop-out rates, increasing class sizes and standardising teaching activities.
Branding is the exercise of summarizing an organization’s culture to attract a particular type of employee, collaborator or funder.
Like it or not, branding and self-promotion are an integral part of science. Our training might focus primarily on how to do science, but that isn’t enough; we also need to promote ourselves and our findings in order to persuade others to fund and collaborate on our research, and to highlight the value of our discoveries so we can broaden their reach.
It’s always been this way. The financial support of scientific discovery was historically provided by wealthy patrons who typically backed an individual or a handful of scientists who had to market themselves to get attention (The financial cost of doing science). These days, the role of individual patron has been assumed by diverse government, philanthropic, and private sources of grant funding, and it’s our peers who we have to impress, via the peer review process.
The quick transition to remote and hybrid learning in higher ed has highlighted needs that only technology can address.
When face-to-face learning and teaching screeched to a halt back in March, educators did their best to cobble together digital tools to get them through the spring’s online teaching sprint. Now, with the pandemic’s end nowhere in sight, that educational mad dash has Custom content sponsored by Microsoft turned into a marathon. And just like endurance runners, educators are discovering they need top-notch equipment to help them stay the course.
One of the oldest — and most tired — debates in the education world is about skills versus content. For years, especially in K-12 circles, teachers, administrators, and education researchers have debated whether skills or content are more important for students to learn.
The apparent dichotomy has proven surprisingly sturdy. In an April 2016 report on skills as “the new canon,” The Chronicle detailed an effort at Emory University to shift faculty focus toward teaching the skill of using and evaluating evidence. The story quoted Emory lecturer Robert Goddard, who worried that the move to skills-focused courses was “doing a disservice to the students by not having a more coherent, uniform body of content to deliver.” Such a conception suggests a zero-sum game: More time spent on skills necessarily means less time spent on content.
But if a consensus has emerged in this long-standing debate, it’s one that pushes against an either/or approach.
Conventional wisdom suggests that teaching students how to be creative is a task best left to the arts and design. But faculty members from other fields are increasingly seeing the benefits of cultivating in their students the kinds of integrative and lateral thinking that creativity can foster. Two examples from psychology came to us in response to our recent request for your thoughts on this topic.
Round numbers and new decades invite us to take stock of things. The last decade was a big one for career diversity and doctoral reform in academe. The organizers of the Modern Language Association and other professional organizations are clearly "woke" to the need for changes in graduate education.
But what about the membership? At this year’s MLA convention in Seattle, I decided to look more closely at the audiences that show up to listen, and have their say, at sessions about doctoral reform.
Businesses driven by data strategies are nothing new. The commercial sectors have been leveraging high volumes of information for decades. Amazon’s monumental growth is largely down to its personalised recommendations, directly complementing its novel business strategy.
Any university or college worth its salt is tracking and recording huge amounts of data per cycle. Applications, firm choices, insurance choices, acceptances, and open day figures are poised for interpretation, awaiting synthesis with other information – which schools drive the most students, how do different groups engage with communications, and why do first -year students choose that university?
It's never easy seeing a student experience distress, but well-meaning adults (myself included) too quickly and too often rush to the rescue. There are times to intervene, but we must be more judicious in knowing when to let students cope with failure on their own. Otherwise, we will raise a risk-averse generation whose members lack resilience and the crucial ability to rebound from failure. To prevent that outcome, teachers and educational leaders alike must be mindful of several situations where helping hurts.
Many of us have stress dreams that surface over and over in our lives. Here is one of mine: I’m driving. It gets dark suddenly. I turn on my lights, but I still can’t see. I turn on my bright lights, but that does not help. I say to myself, "This is too dangerous," as I pull over to the side of the road. Because the dream happens only when I am faced with a situation that has no obvious answer, I do not need an expert interpreter to tell me that my subconscious is warning me to pause until I have better information about the path forward.