The value of an acronym comes from it accurately representing the meaning of its component words when they are joined together and then expanded in context. There’s an old saying about the need for “truth in advertising.” For some time now there’s one I’ve thought is not as accurate as it could be, and that’s VET (Vocational Education and Training), as it applies to Business/Management/Leadership learning. In this blog I’m going to discuss why I think it’s time to redefine what this means in the Te Pūkenga context.
Revermann (n.d.) cites the U.S. Department of Education whose definition is “…technical schools teach the theory and science behind the occupation, while vocational schools take a more hands-on approach to teaching the skills needed to do the job successfully.” That’s probably an adequate definition if you are operating in an environment where the two are completely separate entities and there is little to no crossover between the expectations held for each. It’s not too much of a stretch to see that ākonga (learners) enrolled in traditional trades-type courses (the likes of building or culinary arts, for example) would have more opportunities to create things that didn’t exist previously than ākonga enrolled in business/management courses where such opportunities might exist only in a final capstone course.
The formal mandate of Te Pūkenga is to deliver knowledge and skills relevant to ākonga, employers, and communities (Te Pūkenga, 2022). In the context of Business/Management/Leadership learning, this puts an expectation on me as a practitioner to become involved in conversations at strategic, tactical and operational levels about how this mandate translates to actions.
Let me share some thoughts about what this could mean for how we facilitate the learning of knowledge and development of practical skills.
We are training ākonga to do, not just to know, and it makes sense that doing is built around practical opportunities to collaborate on real tasks (rather than textbook exercises or simulations) – and wicked tasks are really good for this because their solutions don’t come “off the shelf.” Ākonga actually have to think about them, to argue their positions – and that’s a great opportunity for deep learning to take place, where solutions are crafted and implemented through collaboration.
Collaboration doesn’t mean that there’s no place for individual work or individual excellence – those things have just as much place as they do in a learning environment and assessment regime built mostly, or even entirely, around individual effort. Instead, collaboration is adding an additional and valuable skillset to what the learning environment is already set up to deliver.
You only have to look at the number of job ads that specifically mention something about applicants being a “team player” to understand how important this obviously is to employers – yet much current programme and individual course design revolves around developing knowledge and skills at the individual level.
We know, through the relationships we as practitioners have with employers and industry bodies, not to mention the feedback we get from ākonga about what is happening for them in the workplace (both pre- and post-graduation), about:
- the importance of collaboration; and
- the differences between what formal learning has prepared them for and what is actually expected of them.
With the right support ākonga can do more than they might think at the start of their journey – and our role is to guide them more than it is to teach them. Let’s start from the basis that maybe not having a lot of specific knowledge and experience to start with doesn’t mean they’re unlikely to come up with relevant and viable solutions. In fact, what they don’t have could turn out to be real advantages for them, because they don’t have to unlearn so much pre-conditioning about what’s possible and what’s not before they start coming up with solutions. Real world application should be a significant part of the overall learner experience. We should not be starting from a premise (spoken or otherwise) of what ākonga don’t know enough (yet) to do successfully, and sheltering them from opportunities to try.
If we are content to leave any significant application until the collaborative capstone project at the end of a qualification – assuming there is a capstone – that’s not giving ākonga much time as a percentage of their overall qualification journey to learn what collaboration is all about in practice, and what it can make possible in real life. The deep learning assumed and encapsulated in a Graduate Profile is likely to be deeper and longer lasting in its impact with more opportunity to practice collaboration rather than simply learning about the theory of it.
For a qualification that doesn’t have a collaborative capstone project, does that mean we are assuming that graduates will somehow know how to translate theory to actions working collaboratively when they go to work, even though we haven’t provided them with any significant opportunities to do that? Assuming that a capstone project is not deemed possible – and the reasoning behind that decision deserves to be challenged – at the very least we should be looking to include collaborative work with actual consequences as part of at least some of the assessment tasks within each of the component courses.
An important issue here is what ākonga need to be able to work collaboratively effectively. Assuming that they will be able to do this simply because they are chronological adults doesn’t reflect the reality many of us experience as practitioners. This assumption, where we do make it, probably helps to explain some of the experiences we’ve either observed or been a part of when people do things that we might think of as” selfish”, or “destructive” rather than “constructive.”
When we think about those things, we are doing so through our own lenses, largely because we have set the parameters and the acceptable ways of working within them, not to mention the sorts of projects that `fit` the Learning Outcomes most easily. That’s not honouring ākonga, or us as practitioners/facilitators.
Perhaps it’s time to change the acronym we started with in the context I’ve been discussing. How about “Verily Experiencing Application in Training”? Seriously, though, the acronym is way less important than the decisions we make and the actions we do, when it comes to facilitating collaborative and meaningful learning experiences. Those experiences are where the magic happens, and we should be taking advantage of the opportunity to incorporate collaborative learning through wicked and holistic projects (projects that span the complete qualification rather than existing in discrete silos) as the standard approach to Business/Management/Leadership learning.
The opportunity is here for us to change up what we understand VET to mean in the Te Pūkenga context for Business/Management/Leadership learning. How we respond to this opportunity will set the tone for an exciting future for collaborative learning practice in Aotearoa/New Zealand. I’m interested in your thinking on this topic, because it’s through collaborative conversations that we can create even more valuable learning and development experiences.
In my next blog on 1 December – blogs will appear every second Thursday from now on – I will share my thinking about what holistic projects might look like in practice, and their value in the Te Pūkenga context.
References
Revermann, S. (n.d.). What is the difference between vocational & technical courses? https://education.seattlepi.com/difference-between-vocational-technical-courses-3063.html
Te Pūkenga. (2022). Welcome to Te Pūkenga. https://www.xn--tepkenga-szb.ac.nz/
Rob Nelson Education 