This essay takes up the issue of the impact of technology on jobs in modern workplaces, and the curricular challenges thereby engendered for vocational educators. Conceptions of the nature of workplaces are examined, along with conceptions of the types of skill needed. It is proposed that distinction be made between vocational education at the secondary school, and that beyond. At the secondary school, vocational education would be education about work, and the goal would be vocational literacy. This would constitute a (...) liberal vocational education. Beyond that, vocational education would be for jobs, but would include liberal features, such as general education course work, and training in job families. (shrink)

Theodore Lewis; Difficulties Attending the New Vocationalism in the USA, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 25, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 95–108, http.

The main point of this article is that more credence should be given in teacher education to performative dimensions of teaching. I agree with David Carr that the requisite capabilities are probably best learned in actual schools. I employ Turnbull’s conception of performativity, which speaks of tacit cultural learning. Following Wilfred Carr I go back to Aristotle, and to debate between Gadamer and Habermas, before arriving at the view that expert teaching practice should be in the spirit of phronesis. The (...) article then proposes that school-university collaboration should be the standard motif of teacher preparation, the context within which the spirit of phronesis can be realized and modeled. (shrink)

The current emphasis that organisations are placing upon knowledge and the corresponding attention that workplace epistemological values are receiving within the educational community has resulted in an interesting convergence of discourses—school-based and work-based. Even as workplaces are tending toward abstraction over practice—based knowing, schools are being nudged into doing the reverse. The result of this ferment is that traditional barriers between these kinds of knowledge are being removed. As can be seen from workplace examples, it is possible for liberal learning (...) to be in the service of instrumental ends. So too schools may come to see more clearly the value of situatedness and team-work in the transaction of liberal learning. More generally, we see also new possibilities for retreat from received views about the worth of practical knowledge. (shrink)