AVETRA 2021 - Day 3

 The theme for day 3 is practice and pedagogy.

The keynote is from Dr. Sai Loo from the University College London. Sai presents on ‘VET/Occupational teachers’ knowledge, practice and pedagogy.

The presentation draws on work now recorded in the book 2018 – teachers and teaching in vocational professional education, published by Routledge. The presentation focuses on the projects’ further education (FE) participants. Provided a summary of the range and breadth of FE provision in the UK. 

Sai begins with an overview of the English context and the work of Brian Simon (1981) on ‘occupational education’. 

The presentation covers definitions of teachers’ knowledge, practices, and pedagogy. Discussed the concept of ‘teaching know-how, various learning theories and typologies of teacher knowledge. Defined teacher know-how and how this begins with the dual professional approach. Acquisition and application of knowledge is founded on the work of Bernstein (1996), Eraut (2004) and Winch (2014). Bernstein classified knowledge as horizontal and vertical discourses. 

Horizontal refers to forms of knowledge which is everyday and commonsense. Vertical is explicit, coherent, systematic, hierarchical. He characterises vocational education through ‘crafts’, where mastery of tacit achievement is the goal rather than a consequence of explicit pedagogy (e.g. as with apprenticeship). Therefore, crafts could be ‘tacit horizontal knowledge structures’. 

Moved to the concepts of ‘teaching knowledge’. Used Shulman’s typology of the 7 types of general pedagogical knowledge as a framework. Also introduced concepts from Polanyi’s (1966) work, Collins (2010) on tacit knowledge and Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) study. There is also a volume of work on teachers’ ‘practical knowledge’. Connected these to processes including relationship between occupational practice and knowledge acquisition (Eraut/ Winch); application of teaching and vocational/occupational knowledge (Bernstein) and the process of recontextualization involving vertical knowledge (Bernstein). 

In additional to the above, there are other ways to describe and understand learning through practice. Examples include Kemmis and Green (2013) concept of practice architecture; Evans (2016) on ‘knowledgable practice’; Kahneman (2012) on decision making involving fast or slow forms.

All the above applied to his theoretical framework on VET/Occupational pedagogy of teachers and explained this framework.

Then discussed 'acquistion' of teaching knowledge through examples from his project - 2 participants, one teaching aviation services and the other gas services. Deconstructed the knowledge required to teach these including specific discipline knowledge, knowledge to support pedagogical understanding, application of these various knowledge streams to practice and the importance of contextualisation of knowledge towards individual practice. Work knowledge is also important. This includes the institutional knowledge wrapped around VET and specialised occupational practices. All of these flow into 'occupational pedagogic knowledge (OPK) or occupational teachers' capacitites (OTC)

All in a comprehensive and clear explanation of 'teacher pedagogical knowledge, its origins and frameworks. 

A panel discussion follows including Dr. Keiko Yasukawa, Dr. John Pardy, Associate Professor Melinda Waters and myself. We work through three questions - (1) your interest and experience in researching VET pedagogy and practice (2) how Dr Loo's findings and arguments resonate (or not) with your own or others' research/ observations and what you found particularly interesting? (3) what can we take away from Dr Loo's research for our own research and practice? An interesting discussion ensued :) 

Then there are 3 streamed presentations followed by 2 in sequence. . 

Associate Professor Melinda Waters from William Angliss presents ‘lessons from international approaches to 21st century skills development’. I attend the beginning of this before moving across to prepare for my presentation. Melinda begins with setting up the context for the future of work - routine tasks over taken by digital technology, automation, virtualisation. Workers required to take on more complex roles requiring higher social and intellectual skills, trainining products focus too much on specific technical skills, call for 21st century skills

I then present ‘supporting the contributions from the sociomatierial in learning occupational practice’ with a ‘informed by covid-19’slant. Call for the need to recognise practice-based learning and to concentrate on supporting practice-based learning recoomendations. This includes providing opportunities to engage with pedagogically rich learning activities, having practice modelled to them, allowing thinking to be made visible, and guided learning / relational learning. 

Then a presentation on ‘Action research in project management curricula: refining authentic problem-base learning(PBL) in blended and online contexts', with Lee Buckley, Senior Learning facilitator from Torrens University. Began with some background and context, then challenges and reported on 2 action research cycles and future possibilities for study.

Introduced the subject learning outcomes, student demographic - mostly international students between age of 19 to 24. Students unused to constructivist learning approaches and struggled with the pedagogical approach. Detailed introduction of PBL in 2019. Used f2f project 'building a tower' as a learning activity. When shifted totally to distance, engagement became very challenging. 

Emulated the tower project online using 3d modelling software. Implementation plan evaluated in first action cycle. Checked constructive alignment befoe second cycle. Worked through SAM-R - substitution, augmentation, modification and redefinition to shift the learning activities to meet learning ouctomes.