AVETRA day 2 morning

Day two opens with a welcome from the chairperson, Professor Michelle Simons.
The keynote is from Professor Erica Smith on 'apprenticeship: not just a learning experience'. Although apprenticeships seem to be old fashioned, there has been a revival of interest in the way apprenticeships work. New economies need trained workers, mature economies need more highly skilled workforce and struggling economies need to engage youth in work. Apprenticeship seen as a way to meet economic workforce skill development needs. However, apprenticeships are country specific to aspects of culture, social, politics and economics. Presented some of the different ways apprenticehips are enacted. Presented a summary of a 2012 project for the ILO on finding out how different apprenticeship systems work and a synthesis to meet the Indian context.

Then provided an overview of the Australian apprenticeship system. Research in apprenticeship involves economic, labour process, learning and political theories, providing a fertile ground for study. Some of the people research include: Sociologists - Volker Wedekind, Marius Busemeyer. education - Felix Rauner, Thomas Deissinger, Lorna Unwin, Alison Fuller, Roger Harris. The 'dark side' of apprenticeships also discussed included exploitation / bullying, paternalism / infantilisation, conservatism and resistance to change of the system, new colonialism through the adoption of the 'German' dual system in Africa and Asia and exclusion across gender, ethnicities, age, disabiliites. Can apprenticeship meet social and economic expectations? Future questions include effects of globalisation; avoid widening have / have not gap; reconcile stakeholder interests; flexibility in careers. INAP 6th conference at Ballarat in 2015.

in the first series of concurrent sessions today, I attend Professor Stephen Billett's session 'constituting VET professional development in contemporary ties'. Summarising an evaluation of the VET development centre's professional development programme. Used online survey garnering 532 responses and supplemented by f2f and telephone interviews. Finding that VET PD is becoming a hybrid provision. VET PD used to advance knowledge; support novice practitioners. Demand from RTOs as they often have small staffing bases, distributed workforces and limits of internal professional support requires external provision. PD participants use the sessions to engage with other practitioners for guidance, support and affirmation. Literature informing what works is if VET practitioners influence, design and conducts kinds of learning experiences supporting their immediate teaching skill development; institutional support availed and theories used aligned to practice.

Then, Susanne Francisco's session on 'novice VET teacher learning through mentoring'. Presented on her work towards a PhD thesis. Based on a qualitative study framed by Kemmis et al 2014) work on practice architectures. The cultural discursive architecture included shared understanding of discipline knowledge, development of a shared language related to the teaching role and teacher support, expectations of supporting teacher learning. Material economic architectures include employment arrangements, time unavailable for support, 'informal' support during 'smoko', physical shared spaces need to be organized and mentoring needs to be formalized. The social political architectures include shared teaching areas, reciprocal sharing and valuing (recent industry experience) and mentoring structures.

Lunch followed and summaries of afternoon sessions in the next blog.