Meeting our TVET lecturers where they are at: Imagining continued professional development across diversity in the TVET

sector (Case 8)

DHET Online Webinar9 September 2021

Dr Sara Black

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d Sara Black is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centrefor Education Rights and Transformation at the Universityof Johannesburg, and also a research fellow at the Centrefor Innovation in Learning and Teaching at UCT.

She trains pre-service teachers and works in post-graduatecritical education sociology, with a focus on equity andjustice in education policy. She has lectured variousMasters courses, including Education Policy, EducationLeadership and Change, Advanced Research Design, aswell as Ethics in Education for PGCE students at theUniversity of Cape Town.

Prior to entering academia, Sara was a high school mathsteacher in a township school in Cape Town, and alsotaught mathematics in the UK. As a former softwareprogrammer, she also brings a critical social justiceperspective to technology in education.

Idea underlying study

Who we imagine TVET lecturers to be will shape the interventions we

design for their development

LSS has gone through some

changes, to try and better meet the

needs of lecturers

The original CoP system

wasn’t used as hoped

Every attempt at change is driven by an ideal—by what we think is ‘better’

This is true for continued professional development

programmes which are necessarily shaped by our

ideas of what is the ‘best’ or ‘ideal’ lecturer/teacher

This opens up interesting questions about how we think about change, and who we are thinking of when

we design interventions for lecturers and what we want to achieveThis doesn’t just apply to the LSS. It

applies to any CPD, including the NOLS

Research Question

How are TVET lecturers ‘imagined’ (that is, mentally envisaged

with all concomitant assumptions) by different decision makers

involved in TVET lecturer CPD?

● How does this imagining relate to the design of a continued

professional development intervention (the LSS) for lecturers

past, present… and anticipated?

● How does this imagining relate to open learning?

● How does this imagining relate to social justice?

Different stakeholders have

varying ideas about who TVET

lecturers are, with some overlap

Imagined

TVET

lecturer

Imagined ideal

TVET lecturer

Person A

Imagined

TVET

lecturerPerson B

The ideal TVET lecturer as

imagined in policy

Context

Conceptual framework

These different imaginaries produce different

plans and pathways of change for lecturer

development towards an ideal

The people we are imagining—and

who we think they should be—can

be evidenced in how we talk about

them, as well as how we talk

about the types of plans,

programmes, incentives etc. that

we should put in place to change

them

Note: even this ideal is not agreed on. Different people will interpret the

policy differently

CF cont. …

It gets even more complex!

Who lecturers are is not fixed: they will react to different contexts, pressures and influences—particularly from those who wield power over them

How lecturers view themselves, portray themselves, and express themselves has many facets, which can be contradictory

So this study was interested in how

impressions of lecturers are shaping CPD interventions by decision makers:

Who are lecturers thought to be as pedagogues /

teachers?

Who are lecturers thought to be as artisans /

vocational practitioners?

Who are lecturers thought to be as citizens /

employees?

How do these impressions relate to who decision makers

think lecturers should be?

What ideas inform this ‘ideal’?

Policies and prior research

Open learning policy framework

Policy on professional

qualifications for lecturers in TVET

Used discourse analysis which is about looking at how we construct our world through how we think and speak

Very little done in TVET sector on this

Approach is more established in education policy studies

Still drew on literature about TVET lecturers, their

development and their challenges

Methodology1. Interview key decision makers who shape CPD systems for TVET lecturers:

• LSS predecessor (the CoP system)• The LSS as it is now• The NOLS

2. Undertake a discourse analysis for how TVET lecturers are ‘imagined’ and how people think about the ‘ideal’ TVET lecturer

3. Desktop research on:• Historical development of lecturers across different colleges and departments• Surveys and empirical work on existing challenges with lecturer CPD• Policy analysis (OLPF and TVET lecturer qualifications framework)

Wanted to talk to some lecturers themselves, particularly those who had been involved in the CoP system (only 5 colleges). Covid made it

impossible to get hold of any one to interview in the study’s timeframe

Findings

Imagined TVET

lecturer

Imagined ideal

TVET lecturer

CoP

Imagined TVET

lecturer

LSS

Imagined TVET

lecturerNOLS

Significant overlap

Highly structured, asynchronous non-formal education at scale premised on perceived and reported needs. Standardized against curricula outcomes, but not NQF-aligned

Self-driven, modular, accredited learning aligned with NQF

Personalized learning

Who lecturers were assumed to be was not borne out in practice

Social justice?

Open learning?

Recommendations

Need to notice when our systems to support/upskill lecturers are antagonistic to who we say we want

them to be

The experts on lecturers… are lecturers themselves!

LSS and NOLS have complementarities that can be seen as a strength. That CoP changed to the LSS is a good thing—it

means the DHET is learning and adapting

Lecturers have a very diverse history and context: chances

are one-size-fits-all approaches will not work

Then we can notice the effects these

assumptions have on our design decisions

We need to notice our assumptions about

who lecturers are as teachers, artisans, and

employees

Involve lecturers to make decision about their own development and needs

If lecturers are thought of as needing to be ‘managed’ and controlled, they will

probably respond accordingly

How to produce the support structures and material

conditions that enable the desired autonomous

professionalism?

(selected) referencesAdendorff, M., & Van Wyk, C. (2016). Offering TVET College Lecturers Increased Access to Professional Qualification Programmes through a National Open Learning System in South Africa. Presentedin 8th Pan-Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning (PCF8), 27-30 November 2016. http://oasis.col.org

Andersson, Per; Köpsén, Susanne (2019): VET teachers between school and working life: boundary processes enabling continuing professional development. Journal of Education and Work 32 (6-7),537–551. DOI: 10.1080/13639080.2019.1673888.

Broad, J. H. (2015). So many worlds, so much to do: Identifying barriers to engagement with continued professional development for teachers in the further education and training sector. LondonReview of Education, 13(1), 16-30.

Buthelezi, Z. (2018). Lecturer experiences of TVET College challenges in the post-apartheid era: a case of unintended consequences of educational reform in South Africa. Journal of VocationalEducation & Training, 70(3), 364-383.

Jacklin, H. (2018). The imagined subject of schooling in the logic of policy. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 50(4), 256-269.

Papier, J. (2010). From policy to curriculum in South African vocational teacher education: A comparative perspective. Journal of Vocational Education and Training, 62(2): 153 162.

Papier, J. (2011). Vocational teacher identity: spanning the divide between the academy and the workplace. Southern African Review of Education 17, pp. 101–119.

Vähäsantanen, Katja; Hämäläinen, Raija (2019). Professional identity in relation to vocational teachers’ work: an identity-centred approach to professional development. In Learning: Research andPractice 5(1) 48–66. DOI: 10.1080/23735082.2018.1487573.

Van der Bijl, A. 2015. Mentoring and the development of educators in South African technical and vocational education. Stellenbosch: US, MEd.

Van der Bijl, A. and Oosthuizen, L. J. (2019). Deficiencies in technical and vocational education and training lecturer involvement qualifications and its implications in the development of work relatedskills. In SAJHE 33(3). DOI: 10.20853/33-3-2886.

van der Bijl, A. & Taylor, V. (2016). Nature and Dynamics of Industry-Based Workplace Learning for South African TVET Lecturers. Industry and Higher Education 30(2), 98–108. DOI:10.5367/ihe.2016.0297.

van der Bijl, A. & Taylor, V. (2018). Work-integrated learning for TVET lecturers: articulating industry and college practices. Journal of Vocational, Adult and Continuing Education and Training 1(1), 126–145.

Wedekind, V. et. al. (2016). SAQA Bulletin 15(1)

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the staff in the DHET TVET directorate who gave their time and insights into this research. Also thanks to Trudi van Wyk in the Inclusive Education directorate for her input. Particular thanks to Mr. Flemming Koch for extensive time and feedback given.

Black, S. (2021). Meeting our TVET lecturers where they are at: imagining continued professional development across diversity in the TVET sector.DHET Online Colloquium. 9th September 2021.

Attribution & Citation