Research week - Ara Institute of Canterbury - DAY 2

Sessions on day 2 held at Manawa, the Ara Institute of Canterbury campus for health focused studies. Manawa is situated about 10 minutes walk from the city campus, and is situated next to Christchurch Hospital. It was opened just over a year ago and features state of the art teaching spaces, including specialised facilities for running learning through simulations and VR. Programmes located at Manawa include nursing, midwifery and medical imaging.

Kelly Kara – (3 min thesis) Water immersion with complex pregnancy and birth. Kelly presents on work undertaken towards a Master in Midwifery, through Otago Polytechnic. Overview of research question and the supporting rationale, including little research in the area. Qualitative inquiry with descriptive interpretive approaches. Water births seen to be less stressful on mother and baby. People who select this usually have strong views around their choice. Endeavours understand choice and relationship to actual experiences.

 Kylie Short – (3 min thesis) Do patients understand? A review of health education provided to adult patients following a cardiac event or new cardiac diagnosis before discharge home. Overview of PhD study. Overviewed rational and research question. Seeks to correlate individuals’ and health professionals’ perspectives of the information and whether these are congruent. Convergent mixed method design used to analyse the data.

Kate Norris – registered nurse prescribing, examined through the lens of Bourdieu. Another PhD study in progress, a professional doctorate through Auckland University of Technology (AUT). Summarised background, rationale and methodology. Registered nurses may now have a prescribing role but there is not much literature. Selected Bourdieu’s theory of practice as framework – habitus / capital and field = practice. Using semi-structured interviews and observation of team meetings.

Dr. Rae Daellenbach, Mary Kensington & Dr. Lorna Davis – sustainable rural midwifery in NZ / Aotearoa. Presenting on collaborative work with AUT and the University of The West of Scotland. Explores realities of midwifery provision for rural communities. To apply knowledge gained to inform the optimisation of equitable and sustainable rural maternity care. Outline methodology. Reported on themes including joys and challenges; courage and fortitude; and securing the future of rural midwifery. Summarised recommendations include preparation of all midwifes for rural practice to increase empathy; and learning the unique skill sets required for rural midwifery.

Research week - Ara Institute of Canterbury - 2019 DAY 1

The annual Ara Institute of Canterbury has rolled around for another year. Programme offers short snapshots of work undertaken by colleagues through short 6 minute overviews. There are about 5 – 6 presentations each day. 

Day one presentations summarised below:

Dr. Allen Hill – The role of education outside the classroom (EOTC) in environment and sustainability education. This is a Ministry of Education funded project. EOTC encompasses any learning outside of school ground and related to all subjects across the NZ school curriculum. Multi-phase project began with 500 schools out of 2500 responding to National survey. Then focus groups with teacher professional groups. Then school specific case studies and focus group interviews with teachers and students. Provided overview of findings. Survey identified key themes from perspective of schools. Majority (96%) indicated EOTC as being extremely important to their school. Student engagement, authentic learning, curriculum enrichment and capability were the most important factors.

Dr. Tony McCaffrey – Resistance and care: the shifting but necessary place of disability performance in the city as site of disaster and recovery. Used contemporary challenges faced by Christchurch residents, earthquakes, shootings, climate change etc. as base and rationale for the need to support the artistic and performing opportunities, across all sectors of society. Hospitality and inclusion are hallmarks of an excepting community. Work with ‘different light’ the actors with intellectual challenges used as a way to bring the themes together.

Lynette Winter – Tutors’ characteristics of embedded numeracy teaching as practice at an ITP. A brief overview of her M Ed thesis. Briefly summarised embedded numeracy premise as practiced in Aotearoa/NZ – i.e. subject teachers will embed numeracy. However, works better is vocational tutor and specialist maths teacher work together. Sought to find out how embedded practice was actually enacted through interviews with 6 tutors, each teaching in a different programme. Used the know the learner, demands and what to do as framework. Collectively, tutors good at know the learner and what to do in their context. However, depth was perhaps not achieved, especially with programmes that do not have natural opportunities for numeracy practice.

Dr. Selena Chan – I guidelines for developing e-assessments for learning. Summarised e-assessments, the pedagogical concepts underpinning the project, the research process and the guidelines. Report now avaiable at the Ako Aotearoa site.

Dr. James Murray – death and digital assets. Collaborative project with Deakin University to explore what happens to digital assets when death occurs! Defined digital assets and challenges. Currently, unless individual has registered company, videos made by individual are difficult to be accessed by dependants. Current law not keeping up. Lawyers also not up to date, as survey of law websites, indicates poor and contradicting advice. Account access varies with different platforms, apps and social networks.

Armit Sarkar – Information systems resilience in time of crisis: lessons from NZ. Collaborative research with Ara, University of Canterbury and Jade (software development company). Provided overview of difficulties in defining resilience and the need to create framework relevant to the IT industry. Current theories checked to see how these fit with the actual need for resilience, i.e. through experiences through the Christchurch earthquakes. Software for gauging IT resilience also part of the potential from the study. Summarised briefly the Q method quantitative method used to analyse the data.

As always, an ecletic selection and always interesting to find out what researchers at Ara Institute of Canterbury are involved with.

Review of Vocational Education (RoVE) - Minister's address and op ed from ed central

Discussions continue following the Minister of Education's announcements last week as to the outcomes of RoVE.

Yesterday, the Minister, Chris Hipkins, gave a short keynote which was broadcasted live via the Tertiary Education Union's facebook site. He was at a 'voices of the sector 19' hui (meeting). The presentation was short and time was set aside for questions, with answers providing more detail. The advantages of RoVE were reiterated, especially the return of students and educators to have representatives on the 'one entity' council; guarantees of provision in the regions; and the longer transition period to ensure the shift of workplace learning support from the ITOs to the 'one entity' does not disadvantage current apprentices / trainees, their employers and industries.

This morning, I caught up with two op eds written by Roger Smyth and published on the Education Central site.

The first,  summarises the outcomes as announced and overviews the ways work-based education are supported in NZ presently and what will happen next. There is discussion on Workforce Development Councils and weights up the pros and cons of returning the support of work-based training back into the polytechic system.

The second, details the significant challenges and risks in bringing all the polytechnics into one large entity. There will be economies of scale but this will come with a great deal of complexity. Both Southern Institute of Technology and Otago Polytechnic are mentioned as examples of viable polytechics who have been innovative. However, they have developed work cultures and systems to support their diverse portfolio. How to balance diversity and niche provisions for VET with a system seeking to consolidate into common systems will be a major challenge.

Plans for sabbatical / academic study leave

Things are coming together with plans for my sabbatical which began last week and runs to the end of the year. The main objective will be to complete work towards completion of a book with the interim title of: Processes, pedagogy and technology-enhanced: Learning and teaching a trade. The book will be published by Springer.

Another goal is to assist several co-researchers from the eassessment project to publish the findings from their sub-projects.

Additionally, I have a book chapter on ‘tacit knowledge’ with an apprenticeship learning context, sue end of September.

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If time allows, it will be good to start up a few articles to be completed into 2020 and beyond.

I will be presenting at the upcoming NZVET research forum in mid-October in Wellington. Also the yearly Ako Aotearoa academy conference, at the end of November.

Apart from the above, there will be travel to Queensland in at the end of August to briefly escape the Christchurch winter for a couple of weeks and to catch up with Professor Stephen Billet at Griffith. We will work through the final draft of the book and I will then return to do the final polishing before submitting the book at the end of September.

All in, if last week has been something to go by - the opportunity to concentrate on writing  will be productive. I can maintain focus on the main objective - completing the writing for the book, have some time to catch up on reading the backlog of relevant, accumulated articles and some clear thinking time to plot proposed articles. 

Reform of Vocational Education (RoVE) - initial reactions and updates

 A flurry of news items from the various stakeholders on Thursday's announcement on RoVE. Overview at the official NZ government site.

Announced on Friday 2/8 the members of the establishment board for the new entity – provisionally named – NZ Technology and skills Institute. The board will be based in Christchurch. The board is made up of a range of industry, ITP / ITO board members and tertiary union representative.

The Tertiary Education union is positive, especially with one of the establishment board members being ex-TEU President, Dr. Sandra Grey. The focus is on maintaining staff and student consultation to the establishment of and transition into the new entity.

Students union back up the above. In all, signalling a shift away from the market driven neo-liberal policies and into a more consultative approach.

There is a more guarded response from main union representing Service andFood workers, flight attendants and related services and the engineering, printing and manufacturing industries. Tone still supportive.

ITPs responses have been positive with provisos. For example from Ara Institute of Canterbury CE - positive with proviso on the importance of how and who is appointed to the establishment board for the ‘one entity’ ITP and clarification on funding. Eastern Institute of Technology reflect similar views.

ITOs are more mellow as their organisations are the most affected by the reforms. Competenz provides overviews for their stakeholders and a statement from their CE - expressing disappointment but assuring their employers and apprentices / trainees of a planned transition.

Employers’ and manufacturers’ association supports with the need to ensure confidence is maintained in the capabilities of ITPs and the proposed Workforce Development Councils (WDC) – replacing ITOs – to deliver on promises for consultative partnerships.

So overall, no surprises. As always, the devil will be in the detail and how the transition pans out. On the ground, we will expect changes, not all positive but most will hopefully contribute to a more effective VET system for New Zealanders.

Reform of Vocational Education (RoVE) - announcement from Minister

The Minister of Education, Chris Hipkins, announced the outcome of the RoVE at lunchtime today.

Summary provided by Stuff and on NZherald

Detailed documents and summary brochures on the RoVE website.

Main items in the proposal seem to have remained. There will be ONE entity to replace the 16 ITPs - interim name - NZ Institute of Skills and Technology. The new board will decide on the name as a first priority. Industry Training Organisations (ITOs) will be replaced by Workforce development Councils. 

Transition period will be several years. The one entity will come into existence in April next year. Current provisions will as per usual for the beginning of 2020 and then shift as the new entity is established and beds down.

Work force development councils (4 – 7) will be set up by 2022 and these will work with industry, iwi and providers and become replacements for the current ITOs.

The details are still to be worked out but at least we now know the direction of NZ VET for the near future.