Bobby Harreveld

Contextualising learning at the education‐training‐work interface

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ways in which learning is contextualised among the intersecting worlds of education, training and work.Design/methodology/approach – A case study methodology is used.Findings – It was found that contextualised learning is integral to industry‐school transition strategies in senior secondary school learning. However, its operational complexities are yet to be articulated in terms of senior secondary students as learners and earners – educational leadership in partnerships for future innovations in curriculum and pedagogy.Research limitations/implications – Initial analysis of first stage fieldwork data is reported.Originality/value – The paper is the first of a series that will report on findings from a three‐year research project (2007‐2010). Its originality stems from conceptualising “contextualised learning” (CL) for the development of individual capabilities through multi‐directional and reciprocal boundary crossing among education, training and...

The ETRF, Robust Hope and Teacher Education: Making practical reforms to the senior phase of learning

Robust hope aims to contribute to educational praxis. In Australia, what counts as teacher education is currently determined at the individual State and Territory level. Yet the demand side of teacher education is determined by responses to the effects of global marketplace forces that impact on changes to local communities. This article investigates the utility of robust hope as a means of analysing one Australian State Governments reforms to the senior phase of education and training; and as a way of conceptualising future teacher education possibilities. Recent research into Queenslands “education and training reforms” (ETRF) for the senior phase of learning (Years 10–12) identifies the positioning of schools as brokers of socio‐economically aligned learning and earning for young people. These changes to young peoples senior phase of learning present significant implications for capacity building of the teaching workforce.

Mobility and Local/International Knowledge Co-Production

Student mobility is impacting on the transformation of educational work of teachers and the internationalisation of schooling. This chapter considers the demands for learners in schools—the rising generation of workers—to be increasingly mobile.

Democracy, critique, and the presupposition of knowledge : teachers as capable, resourceful theorists

Welcome to this Special Issue of Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education exploring ideas of democracy, critique, and the presupposition of knowledge in the context of teaching and teacher education. These ideas are used is this issue to drive the valuing of teachers’ critique as an important resource for understanding education policy discourses. Teachers are capable and resourceful theorists of education and its systems. In recent years, the need for different modes of critique has grown, as governmental and commercially driven measures have changed the work of teachers in an instrumentalist direction. The authors in this issue argue that, increasingly, teachers are expected to spend time adhering to bureaucratic measures at the expense of the freedom to make their own informed decisions regarding curriculum and pedagogy. This change has serious implications for how teachers and teacher education are conceptualised and shaped, and how school education will develop. In this Special Issue, we include authors who engage with this problem in either one of two ways: first by considering pedagogies of and for criticality and, second, through their disputations of discourses that (dis)enable criticality. Teachers’ critiques can be understood as alternative theoretical resources, drawn from the front line of education, that provide understandings of what teachers and students do, what learning is, and through which decisions are taken and institutional initiatives launched. The papers in this issue draw on theoretical ideas from Boltanski (2011), Ranciere (1999, 2010), and Boltanski and Chiapello (2005). These ideas have not been commonly used in teacher education research, instead featuring in the work of management (Boltanski, 2011; Tange, 2012) and social science (Lambert, 2012). There is some leading-edge writing drawing on these theorists that focuses on education with, as yet, only a small body of work on teacher education (including Ng, 2013; Safstrom, 2011; Schostak & Goodson, 2012; Singh, 2011). However, we believe these concepts are useful for teacher education research because they are a counter-voice to neoliberal reforms and provide alternative theoretical resources, which assist research in interrogating what shapes, motivates, and hinders educational contexts as sites of quality learning and opportunity. This edition of the Journal offers international perspectives on critique and teacher education with authors from Asia, Europe, and Australia. The diversity in this issue provides a background to the politics shaping schools and education globally. Each of the articles provides its own perspective and its own challenge, and together they present a global perspective on “alternatives” for teacher education. The issue opens with a contribution from Shostak, who reports on research conducted in UK co-operative schools regarding their use of information technologies. He shows that, while information technologies have been introduced into these schools to improve student learning, the hidden aspect of this curriculum change is that the use of these technologies can lead to surveillance of teachers’ practices by school and education Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 2014 Vol. 42, No. 4, 321–323, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1359866X.2014.956377

A case for scholarly activity in vocational education in Australia

Purpose – As neoliberal reforms take hold in the vocational education and training (VET) sector in Australia, there is renewed interest in the quality of teaching practice. However, despite the value of practitioner inquiry to the quality of teaching in schools, scholarly practice in higher education, and established links between the quality of teaching and outcomes for learners and between practice-based inquiry and pedagogic innovation in VET, the practices has received little attention. The purpose of this paper is to explore the value of a college-wide culture of scholarly activity to learners, enterprises, VET institutions, educators and the national productivity agenda. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on the education literature, empirical examples of scholarly activity drawn from the authors’ experiences of working with VET practitioners, this paper asks what constitutes research and inquiry in VET, why should these practices be integral to educative practice and what value do they bring to ...

Discursive Manoeuvring in the Borderlands of Career Transition: From Trade to Teacher

Blayney and Harreveld propose three interrelated discourses of constructing a framework for qualitative research: conceptual, methodological, and analytical. They do so while investigating the career transitions of trade-qualified workers to secondary school teachers in their technical vocational areas. The chapter takes readers into the borderlands of research design when being and becoming qualitative researchers. It begins with a brief overview of a doctoral study that investigated the borderland discourses of the research participants who graduated from an initial pre-service teacher education degree through distance education. It presents their borderland discourses constructed while manoeuvring through changing personal epistemologies and ontologies of becoming and being a teacher. Methodological insights are then provided by the rich debates interrogating case study as methodology and/or method.

Networking L’earning Webs Is Not So Radical

The situations today’s young adults confront are complex, uncertain and forever changing. It might be said that not much has changed in this regard, except the degree of complexity, the amount of uncertainty and the rapidity of change. Changes continue to occur in schooling, training and work. Along with this there are marked shifts in unemployment patterns and the locations for jobs growth (Brown et al., 2011; Moretti, 2013). The mechanisms governments use for relating young adults to schooling proliferate. Many seem to be little more than locally expedient improvisations. In the absence of an overarching view, it is difficult for teachers, parents, students and employers to understand the current place of l’earning in the lives of young adults. A better understanding and representation of the education, training and work of young adults is warranted. In this chapter, we explore how successive organisational changes and a little learning over recent decades have gradually reshaped the opportunities and choices young adults have with respect to their l’earning. The implications of our analysis of networking capital-friendly l’earning webs for creative critical policy actions are considered. But first we briefly set out the theoretical framework and methodological approach informing the research reported in this chapter.

Brokering Capital-Friendly L’earning Webs

The idea of brokering capital-friendly l’earning webs rebuffs common-sense views of senior secondary schooling. A concept that links schooling with a money-making career calls for evidence to overturn our sense of schooling as a matter of character and cultural training designed to enhance the social status of students and their families (Hurrelmann and Quenzel, 2013; Leino et al., 2013; Murdock, 1999; Wiener, 1981; Williams, 1965). Principals can be disturbing when talking about young adults doing their school-brokered apprenticeships and traineeships in retail, hospitality, business administration and construction trades starting at 7.30 am. On hearing of graduates from senior secondary schooling being awarded certificates in vocational education and training after completing a university entry programme, the perplexity mounts. There are principals, teachers, students and employers who now take for granted the brokering of capital-friendly l’earning webs for young adults. They believe that this increases their enthusiasm; enhances their prospects for securing a job and serves the common good. Now schools only appear fixed, unchangeable.

Tests of Government Accountability

The central proposition explored in this book is that the deschooling of young adults’ l’earning is an important vehicle for transforming, and not just correcting, senior secondary schooling in ways that respond to and express a new spirit of capitalism. A generation or more of government reforms have been designed to mitigate the effects of inequality on the life/work trajectories of young adults by boosting opportunities for them to make informed life choices. However, government schooling policies and practices remain bedevilled by vexing questions about its capability to use classroom-centric schooling to do so. Our analysis of primary and secondary evidence has indicated that government policies and practices have had minimal traction in redressing the insecurities of young adults (Harreveld and Caldwell, 2010; Harreveld and Singh, 2011; Harreveld et al., 2013;Reid et al., 2014;Singh et al., 2013). The marginalisation of some young adults is still occurring. Those categorised as Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEETs) are of particular concern in terms of securing their commitment to capital accumulation and ensuring their security for the common good.

Concepts and Implications for Deschooling

Over the past five decades, we have worked variously in the hospitality, health, building, retail, disability care and education industries. Over the course of our project-driven careers, the forms of work in industries have changed, markedly so in most cases. Our current employers in the education industry expect new flexible patterns of work from us. Increasingly, we have been engaged in network-driven project-based l’earning in research, teaching and management. This work involves us in high levels of local/global mobility. We fly in and fly out of Australia to economic, geographic and linguistics spaces as diverse as Antofagasta (Chile), Hanoi (Vietnam), Iguassu (Brasil), Mumbai (India), Leshan, Ningbo and Xiamen (China), Nantai (Taiwan) and The Hague (the Netherlands).