Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Sino NZ TVET educational research forum - proceedings

Proceedings, edited by John Clayton, from this year's Sino NZ Vocational Education and Training (TVET) conference are now available via this link to my paper which provides access to the entire document as well. The conference was held in Tianjin at the Hai He educational Park, visited last year.

I was unable to join the contingent this year but paper on using video to improve learning of skills and dispositions was presented by Debby Taylor, the hospitality tutor who has worked on honing the process over the last 3 years. Debby presented a 'demonstration workshop' of how the process worked, using videos of hospitality students learning how to check-in guests, the app coachs' eye and the feedback cycle.

The papers in the proceedings provide a good overview of adult educators' and vocational educators' work, with representation from across the NZ institutes of  technology and polytechnics (ITP) sector.

Papers cover a range of pedagogical approaches applying learning centred teaching across a range of discipline areas. Of note are:
- Project / problem based learning (PLB)(Mary-Jane Duffy and Richard Finn; James MacKay and Clifton McKenna)
- related to PLB are papers on role play (Richard Finn), using videos (Selena Chan et al.), self-review (Kaye Jujnovich et al.), learning contracts in the form of 'living consensus' (Julia Bruce) and reflective frameworks (John Clayton and Sarah-Jane Saravani).
- On-job training had papers from Jenny Gibbs and Competenz (William Wang et al).
- technology enhanced learning featured in papers by Competenz on case study of elearning programme design with engineering apprentices, using videos (Selena Chan et al.), and reflective frameworks (John Clayton and Sarah-Jane Saravani)

Cath Fraser provided an overview of the excellent Ako Aotearoa resources Signposts and Goalposts pitched at beginning ITP tutors and also the posters produced by the South Island Educational Developers group.

Important topics on cross cultural education (with Brenda Saris and Deb Donnelly) and sustainability (Mary Panko and Rashika Sharma) round off the selection of papers.

In all, a worthy collection of papers, showcasing some of the best of NZ VET practice.

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