Locating and practicing authenticity

in Vocational Education and Training

AVETRA 2017

Jennifer K Miles Jane Court

PhD Candidate & Teaching Teacher
Associate, Monash University Chisholm Institute
Outline
Our ongoing collaboration and inquiry
VET sector industrialised education
Challenges of VET teacher PD within the landscapes of VET
Early findings of a PhD study - Cultivating teachers as learners: creating the
conditions for success
Looking ahead
Contexts of our practice
Diverse learning spaces & cohorts
MEd: lived experience of young adults
returning to study
Anecdotally, constructions of identity
across life matters, understanding stories
of self is foundational
PhD continues story with VET
practitioners in VET diploma program
ACFE and TAFE Sector
Research area
- The effectiveness of teacher training in VET
- Certificate IV Training and Assessment
Diploma of Vocational Education and Training,
Diploma of Training Design and Development,
Graduate Certificate in Management (Learning),
Certificate IV Training and Assessment
Teacher and Staff Development
Working within, but breaking out of, the Ticky
Tacky Boxes

Smith (2000) said a Training Package is both the box itself and a means
of keep people in their boxes
How do we teach VET teachers to question and critique when their own
learning comes in a box?
Personal Metanoia
Our journey from the boxes (Smith, 2000) into transformative learning spaces,
learning to overturn assumptions, opening up to new ways of seeing, being and
doing.
Learning as we were teaching, incorporating concepts of:
Metanoia - a spiritual awakening or conversion, to change ones mind or
purpose (Random House Unabridged Dictionary)
Chronos and Kairos time as schedules vs quiet spaces of cultivation where
one can reflect and allow coming into being of a new state (Oxford English
Dictionary)
Socrates teachers as midwives
Constructivism and Vocational Education and
Training (VET)

The triumvirate of VET is its:

industry focus
competency-based training and assessment (CBT&A)
Training Package products
Competency is defined as the application of specified knowledge, skill
and attitudes needed to undertake a work role or task to the required
standard in the workplace (DEST 2006b, p69, cited in Wheelahan, 2009,
p231).
Critique of instrumentalist approaches in VET

Wheelahan (2009, p227) suggests that, although

based on a constructivist paradigm, VETs
instrumentalist focus plunders constructivism,
undermining critical thinking and knowledge
acquisition about the self and the focus of
learning and that CBT excludes students from
access to disciplinary knowledge because it only
provides students with access to contextually
specific applications of knowledge, and not the
system of meaning in which it is embedded.
Tensions within VET
Industrialised/instrumental education, quantifiable
outcomes to satisfy policy and practice
Directed towards preparation for work or developing
skills for employment
Freires critiqued banking model

Education for democracy/change

Emancipatory learning
Critical pedagogy
Transformative learning and perspective transformation

8
So what do VET teachers do after Cert IV TAA?

Primarily on-the-job and via their BSZ50198

local professional development
activities.
TAE50104 / 21697VIC
Tendency to be operational rather
than pedagogical. TAE50111 / TAE50211

Next formal study pathway is

typically the Diploma of VET in its TAE50116 / TAE50216
various forms
 VET Teacher Training
Certificate IV Training and Assessment is critiqued as inadequate preparation
for teaching in VET (Clayton, 2009)
Perceived lack of rigour around learning and assessment processes, churning
out VET trainers with low level skills and knowledge around Training Package
products, assessment tools and assessment judgements (Improving the Quality
of VET Assessments, 2016)
Why did you become a VET teacher?
To pass on my knowledge and skills

Challenging bucket filling and banking education (Freire 1970)

Encouraging critically reflective practice (Brookfield, S. 1995)
Questioning assumptions
Reviewing vocational and industry career pathways (Symons, et al, 2007)
Cultivating transformation (Mezirow, 2000)

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

William Butler Yeats
Team teaching Diploma of VET Practice
our emerging pedagogy
Opportunity to:
Explore authentic learning experiences
Encourage personal narratives to open lines of communication and develop
sense of identity as a learner and VET teacher
Foster Critical friends / break down knowledge silos / develop communities of
practice
Choose electives based entirely on our perceptions of cohort needs
Question assumptions and hegemonic paradigms
Contest conceptions of what it means to be a good teacher - unlearning
Develop our own understanding, and theirs, of critical pedagogy and its benefits
PhD inquiry - Cultivating teachers as learners:
creating the conditions for success
Graduates of a diploma in VET, completed between 2006 and 2013
Case study of learning spaces designed to foster transformative learning and a
teacher who designs programs with specific intent of creating transformation
Survey, in-depth interviews and focus groups
What conditions were catalysts to changes in thinking about
- Self as learner?
- Learning?
- Teaching practice?
Were changes in thinking catalysts to changed practices and learner outcomes?
What recommendations for VET practitioners PD?
Learning about self
Teachers are not encouraged in their pedagogy to make connections between
learning, identity and agency (action taking) (Pruyn 1999, p5)

Hermeneutic phenomenological case study examining the lived experience of five

VET diploma graduates, using participant narratives (stories) as data
Revisiting their transformative journey to self as learner and teacher in learning
spaces described by Nonaka and Konno (1998) as Originating Ba an emergent
foundation for relationships and knowledge creation.
Exploring learning spaces founded in critical pedagogy, transformative learning,
intentionally designed to cultivate the emancipatory exploration of the self and the
focus of learning through deeply critical reflection on assumptions and knowing.
Education as gardening promoting growth
and authenticity
My garden provides the same intriguing questions I have been trying to meet in all
my life. What are the effective conditions for growth? Carl Rogers (1995, p68)
your job is to walk around with a can of water in one hand and a can of fertilizer
in the other hand try to build a garden. - Jack Welch, cited in (Joss, 2007)
Conceived as the frame, made up of the borders of space and time, in which
knowledge is activated as a resource for creation. Nonaka & Konno (1989) about
Spaces of Ba
Cultivating teachers as learners
Death Valley is not dead, it is dormant. Right beneath the surface are these seeds of
possibility waiting for the right conditions to come about - Sir Ken Robinson

Capability model, not deficit nurturing and celebrating strengths and unique,
authentic self
Waking up, trying on new roles, seeing with new eyes, finding new ways of being
Cultivating authentic learning and teaching
Data analysis - looking for conditions that
differentiate
spaces of reproduction &
reproduction of spaces
from
spaces of transformation &
transformation of spaces
Sir Ken Robinson human flourishing
The point is that education is not a mechanical system. It's a human system. It's about
people
Three principles on which human life flourishes:

Diversity, not conformity

Curiosity, not compliance
Creativity, not standardisation
We all create our own lives through this restless process of imagining alternatives and
possibilities, and one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of
creativity.
How to escape education's death valley. (Robinson, 2013)
Theoretical lenses

Field Theory (Bourdieu)

Transformative Learning Theory (Mezirow, through Crantons exposition)
Theory of Ba (Nonaka)
Transformative Learning Theory
A disorienting dilemma
Self-examination of feelings of fear, anger, guilt, or shame
A critical assessment of assumptions
Recognition that one's discontent and process of transformation are shared
Exploration of options for new roles, relationships and actions
Planning a course of action
Acquiring knowledge and skills for implementing one's plans
Provisional trying of new roles
Renegotiating relationships and negotiating new relationships
Building competence and self-confidence in new roles and relationships
A reintegration into one's life on the basis of conditions dictated by one's new perspective

Cranton & Taylor (2012)

Finding the self according to Brady (1990)
Remembered self recalls scraps linked to form story, self-portrait
of words, interrelationship between past and memories of
events. Second reading of human experience.
Ordered self - aerial view of ones life - making sense, and
meaning constructing foundation for new story. Restor(y)ing.
Imagined self - cosmology through recalling story, invites
dreaming, new possibilities, creation of new stories
Finding the self teachers personal narratives

M: It allowed me to write my story, and I loved the idea of learning It was

really about legitimating a journey that I'd begun and learning that I could
express that, and finding like-minded people and starting to understand

I think you could get away with running the diploma program without that at
all, without that piece at all, but I think it's so valuable. It adds so much, that
whole reflection process, getting to understand yourself.
Finding the self teachers personal narratives

C: I brought also with me my reflective essay which shows I think also some
growth thats happened over the time of doing the diploma, you know from
when I first went into teaching where I thought the students were empty
vessels and I will fill them with the knowledge that I have and it really has
influenced a lot of really you know, the last ten years for me just in how
I work with my team as well, and trying to encourage them and mentoring
them
Finding the self teachers personal narratives
J: my way of thinking about a program was validated because you know I
had reasons for everything I did, and it all just came together for me, and
the diploma was... it was a big... you know you put the [sigh] ... whats the
word? ... it makes it set. Its the hardener if you like that just you mix it all
up, and you put the hardener in and stir it up, and the diploma was the
hardener and it brings your way of thinking, the way you do it, all of those
things come together with the learning from the diploma.
Well for me, a lot of it was when I sat down and started writing you know
because Id get in there and Id just keep going and going and I could ... its
kind of the creative thing again where youre creating... youve got all this
information which comes from the diploma and your experiences
Finding meaning
Learning spaces to research ones
own inner space

The storyteller as the human

scientist examining the experiences
and meaning-making of their own
lives (van Manen, 1997)
Early thinking
Early data analysis reveals conditions identified as catalysts to personal and
professional change, specifically around the importance of bringing the
personal the self into the professional.
Providing safe spaces of Nonakas Ba to share and build knowledge of personal
and professional integrity and capability, to undertake Mezirows disorienting
dilemmas and journey of transformative learning.
Traversing Bourdieus fields to explore and uncover new, authentic ways of
understanding ones power and positioning
Exploring, critiquing, overturning assumptions and ultimately owning ones
unique self. Becoming the truest, most authentic expression of self.
 Cultivating authenticity in leadership
Authentic organisations
positive and engaging
people feel valued, show commitment and are creative
characterised by collaboration, teamwork and mutual support1,2,3
Authentic leadership
confidence as well as humility, strength as well as compassion3
self-confidence, genuineness, reliability, worthwhileness, a deep sense of ones
values and beliefs, a focus on building followers strengths, and an ability to create a
positive and engaging organisational context2
1 Goffee &Jones, 2006, 2 Roberts, 2007. 3 Kets de Vries 2006a, p.379. Cited in Mitchell, J. 2008 Authentic, sustainable
leadership in VET: ideas of women leaders in the Australian vocational education and training sector.
Cultivating authenticity in teaching
Brookfield (1990) defines authentic teaching as
making sure our behaviors are congruent with our words
admitting we do not have all the answers and can make mistakes,
building trust with students through revealing personal aspects of ourselves and our
experiences
respecting students as people
Cranton (2003) sees authenticity is at the core of meaningful teaching and contributes
to the spiral-like journey of individuation and transformative learning the expression
of the genuine self in the community
Areas to further unpack in VET teacher education
Changing landscapes of VET
contestable funding
barriers and constraints
the sustainability of change
Employers wanting a broader range of soft skills, including critical thinking
Career changes - how transformed perspectives influenced new contexts
The broader impact of including authentic models of learning in spaces of
teacher professional development
 The work of a transformative teacher
Is first to help students find the edge of their understanding
Second to be company at that edge
And finally help students construct a new, transformed place.
Ultimately, this process will help students find the courage they
need to transform

Jennifer Garvey Berger (2004)

Australian Government, Department of Education and Training. Improving the Training Research, Volume 6, Number 1, 2008, p1-22.
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Australian Government, Department of Education and Training. Quality assessment in
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